Hello!
My shamisen arrived from my forwarder today. I noticed that the Tenjin has come away from the neck completely. It looks like the glue has worn away. How would I go about repairing it myself? I’m guessing I need to glue it in place. What kind of glue should I use? Is there any special equipment needed to fix it?
Regular wood glue should do the trick. Just make sure to get some clamps and clamp it down so it doesn’t move while the glue is drying.
Maybe also be sure to scrape/sand all the old glue away, meanwhile keeping the surfaces flat and flush. ie. don’t want to sand little troughs on the surface. Then you’ll be off to the races!
My 2 cents worth! 
I sent it into a local luthier and asked him to do it. I was going to do it myself but I didn’t feel comfortable and preferred to send it to a professional.
So a quick update, the luthier did an excellent job gluing the Tenjin ti the neck however, he decided to glue my mitsuori sao together without consultation! So I have to meet with him Monday to figure out if he can undo what he did or not. Right now I am furious!
w . . . o . . . w or in other words WTF?!?
Yeah, I am furious! I need to find out what the hell went through his mind when he did that. I was like would you glue a clarinet together? It’s even more frustrating as I specified to the person I gave the shamisen to that only the tenjin needed to be glued. It is even written on the order form, so I don’t even know where he got the idea to do that. It’s even more frustrating because a quick text or phone call would have averted this.
whaaaat?? any off chance he used a hide glue? please please say he did! If so, might not be a huge problem fixing that, but you might want to do it yourself. G’d damn…
I’m so sorry
I don’t know if he did, he said that removal mightn’t work so I think he may not have used hide glue. If only I had glued it myself, then this wouldn’t have happened and here I was thinking that it was better to give it to a “professional”!