The History of Kawai

Koichi Kawai was born in Hamamatsu in 1886, at the very moment Japan was learning to build the Western instruments it had long imported. As a young man he apprenticed under Torakusu Yamaha, the pioneer of Japanese instrument manufacturing, and joined the team that assembled Japan’s first domestically produced piano. It was rare, exacting work, and Koichi proved to be one of its most inventive minds.

His defining breakthrough came in 1907, when he completed the first entirely Japanese-made piano action — the intricate mechanism of levers, hammers and springs that translates a pianist’s touch into sound. Until then, Japanese piano makers had depended on imported actions. Koichi’s achievement freed a nation’s piano industry from that reliance and marked him, still in his early twenties, as a genuine pioneer of the craft.

For nearly two decades he remained at the heart of early Japanese piano development, refining the mechanism he had helped invent. But a restless conviction was forming: that he could build a better piano his own way, answerable to no standard but his own.

Shigeru Kawai became president in 1955 and brought a scientific, systematic mind to his father’s artisan legacy. Where Koichi had built by feel and instinct, Shigeru added measurement, materials research and manufacturing discipline — never replacing the craft, but giving it a rigorous foundation on which to grow.

Under his leadership Kawai reached beyond Japan. In 1963 the company established Kawai America Corporation in Los Angeles, one of its first international subsidiaries, opening the United States to Kawai instruments. Production scaled to meet the world: Kawai built its one-millionth piano in 1978 and its two-millionth by 1990.

This era also produced two of Kawai’s most consequential decisions. In 1971 the company pioneered the use of ABS composite parts in the piano action — a material more stable than wood, immune to the swelling and shrinking that humidity inflicts on traditional mechanisms. And in 1980 Kawai opened the Ryuyo Grand Piano Facility near Hamamatsu, a plant conceived as a marriage of hand craftsmanship and advanced technology, and still the home of its finest grand pianos.

Shigeru’s own name would ultimately grace the company’s pinnacle instruments. In 1999, after nearly half a century at the helm, he lent his name to the Shigeru Kawai series of luxury grand pianos — hand-built by a small circle of master artisans and voiced to the concert stage.

Today Kawai stands among the most decorated names in piano making — with more than 61 international competition victories, over 50 major industry awards, and more than 2.4 million pianos built since 1927. Its instruments span the full arc of the art, from digital and hybrid pianos to the hand-built Shigeru Kawai concert grands that carry the founder’s name.

In 2024, following the passing of Hirotaka Kawai, Kentaro Kawai became the company’s fourth president — taking the helm three years before Kawai’s centennial in 2027, and carrying its founding conviction into a second century.

What has never changed is the conviction Koichi Kawai carried to his workbench in 1907: that a piano is worth building only if it is built better than it has ever been built before. Four generations later, that standard is still the one every Kawai instrument is measured against.