In 2008, I had the lucky experience to be given a tour of the Yanagisawa saxophone factory in Tokyo, Japan. When I came home I wrote about my experience on the saxophone forum SaxOnTheWeb. That article is now duplicated here to make it easier to find. Yanagisawa liked what I wrote and has linked here from their own website.
Yanagisawa themselves also has their own excellent factory tour on their website now, added in 2011.
I was simply blown away by how simple everything was. The factory has a couple of trusty old lathes and mills and drill presses, and almost every other tool in the factory is made on these manual machines. These tools are then used to make the saxophones. No CNC machines, no huge presses, no robots or assembly lines. Just hands, tools, and metal.
