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Really hard to tell what's going on from the pictures. Looks like it's just a smaller radius near the edges? I don't have a radius gauge to double-check but my RLC-60 is definitely not 7 ¼".

Hello Hirokazu, glad to have you around! For all of us "otaku" being particularly interested in the MIJ guitar history, we often feel the lack of contacts to Japanese guitar aficionados who could help us understand the wonderful and often confusing world of Japanese guitars better. :)

Just to add what I've learned so far: 1977-'81 they seemed to have used a die-cast "inertia bar" (block) of unknown material, a weird amalgamation of the shape of the vintage Strat block and the "mazak" cast metal blocks CBS introduced in 1971. Complete with the 3 circles used on the Fender...

I love it when someone finds a piece to connect some of the many loose ends in MIJ guitar folklore. Great find! :)(y)

Besides the improvised looking decal, the headstock shape is not quite right, slab fingerboard, that doesn't look right. For more forensics the guitar needs to be dissected. 🪛

Stating the obvious: - ATE headstock -"Noline" tuners (I think they came up in the 90s at the earliest) - Bridge pickup is not original either, or the guitar was not equipped with TEBs. - Electronics parts seems to be a mix of things not common in 80s Tokais. Really hard to tell what this is...

The switch is a Matsushita from December '83 (or '93) but since it comes from some other guitar (could be the same as the pickups) that information is of very little value. :)

That body and neck may or may not belong together and do look like Fender, the serial doesn't fit anything Fender or Tokai, the pickups are Tokai but the rest of the electronics - the pots look like Noble (which would be very unusual for a Tokai TE I think) and the switch looks like Matsushita...

I've seen that BS a few times, as if CNC is a bad thing and what's not CNC must be handmade by nude elves and supervised by wizard unicorns giving each part the magic pixie dust. Zero clue what CNC means but C =computer =soulless robot overlords =deytookourjooobs =baaaad mkay? :)

Wow...as late as 1986... I think by now it's safe to assume the (Matsushita) code is what it looked like last year. :)(y)

OK that changes the suspicion I had here a bit, the guitar in question (also shown in this thread post #3) was likely not some private labeling job. That implies that Tokai may have distributed this one particular model to some extent. I say distributed because Tokai had their own history of...

Actually the article says that the last "signs of life" the author saw were from 2003, so that doesn't necessarily mean they ceased to exist at that point (or at all, maybe they are into kitchen appliances or nuclear plant equipment and whatnot now). :)

So to return this thread to the OP, welcome catseye! Your guitar was likely made in the same Korean factory that made Tokais and (sorry for the lame pun) I'm sure it's a Fine guitar! 🤪 Hey, I got a Chinese Tokai... ... hat today! I'm pretty sure it's not legit (so don't ask me where I got...

Yup, I was just studying those a little, the list you made seems to check out just fine. The weird 8-digit numbers are mysterious for sure (and if the article linked in the other thread is right 1995 would be more likely for those) but that doesn't change the big image, given the seemingly...

Yeah, having read the other threads now/again it seems almost plausible how they moved to China post 2003. Too bad we'll probably never know for sure if that was an "official" Tokai maker all the time even after the Korea factory was closed, some other thread brought up the Chinese "Saein"...

Article in German magazine states (no source) that Fine Corporation started production in Korea in 1994 and ended around 2003, there was a website but it's gone. It could be speculated that they shut down the factory in Incheon, Korea and continued in China after that.

Fine Corporation, Korea/China? (that's a name I found floating around repeatedly in context with Epiphone, but never saw any evidence/factory website/pics, but I didn't look very hard)

Not sure what you mean by "angled fretboard"? The Maxon pickups date to December 1975, the pot codes seem to be 751 which could mean early May 1977, both could've been transplanted from another guitar tho.

Hard to tell without close-up pictures and some of the bottom and DC-R readings. They look like Hofner 512 pickups but I guess they are Japanese "Shin-Ei" copies of them (the only Japanese 512 copy to be found on the internet I guess).

I'm seeing this since I check the various platforms on a regular basis (or just see what Sigmania digs up on YJ) - some models often seem to surface in bunches for some (probably weird) reason, sometimes even on YJ. For example, when I started looking for a spaghetti TE70 Custom there were zero...