In a Tiny Japanese Town, Artisans Are Crafting Some of the Best Turntable Needles on Earth
JICO is a 150-year-old company that's keeping vintage record players alive, one handcrafted stylus at a time.
One day in December, during a tour of the manufacturing company JICO in Hamasaka, Japan, I watched the 77-year-old master craftsman Kotaro Morita carefully carve a piece of hard-to-find black persimmon wood the size of an incense stick into a centimeter-long shaft. He was making a turntable needle called Kurogaki, which he originally designed in his free time before JICO started selling them in 2019. Each turntable needle the company produces is made by hand.
Kazushi Nakagawa and Ray Nakagawa, the father-son duo who serve as JICO’s executive director and chairman, watched Morita work alongside me and explained the production process with reverence. In the next room, another worker affixes the wooden needle with a diamond tip, at which point it becomes a full turntable stylus. Each needle is then tested for imperfections by sound checking them on a record by Sayuri Ishikawa, who’s been recording in the traditional-inspired Japanese style of enka for a half century. Then they’re sent to DJs and audiophiles around the globe.
JICO fills a unique role in the world of audio equipment: They’re essentially turntable needle archaeologists, reproducing discontinued needles so that music listeners can continue using vintage record players. Though the 13 people, including Morita, who work in the company’s turntable needle division also make original models like the Kurogaki, their main job is to reverse-engineer proprietary needles that have long gone out of production. If you’ve ever replaced a needle for an old turntable you found at a garage sale, odds are you purchased one of JICO’s handmade clones.
JICO’s walls are lined with 2,000 different models of needles that they’ve recreated, but the company’s trajectory changed in 2018 thanks to one needle in particular: the Shure N-447, a discontinued favorite of hip-hop DJs, which JICO revived from the dead. This is the needle that transformed the company from a niche parts supplier to a household name in the world of vinyl DJs.
Now, just months before 28 million visitors begin to descend on Osaka for the World Expo 2025, JICO is hoping to attract that newfound audience to the tiny, far-flung town of Hamasaka to experience a listening room where guests are encouraged to bring their own vinyl for a two-and-a-half-hour private session on one of the finest hi-fi systems in the country. The idea is that those visitors will not only listen to recorded music in its purest form, but also do their part to spare the city from the dangers of extinction that is facing so much of small-town Japan.
