BossAreaForum

it says October 1988

i thought they didnt move production to Taiwan (black label) until 1990, with silver labels starting in 1994

I had a 1989 MIT DS1 (can’t remember the month) . It was pretty much identical to my Oct 86 MIJ.

Didn't Boss have some sporatic Taiwan batches back in the early 80s too? (Maybe to keep up with the demand?)

- I think they may have had black labels, but said Roland Japan, instead of Roland Made in Japan.
- Some had very dark PCB boards with Taiwan on them.
- The battery compartment sticker sometimes had Taiwan stamped on them too...

I think that they are all original vintage pedals, and they were all assembled (or reassembled) in Japan, due to the amount of them being found in Japan nowadays and very few out of Japan.

A note about this: Around 2008-2010 when the Yen/USD exchange rate reached historic lows (if memory serves, ~80 yen to the dollar, whereas in the early 80s it was ~380 yen to the dollar), a Japanese buying group began visiting major US cities 2-6 times a year, buying up tons of vintage gear. While a big part of their focus was vintage USA and UK-made gear, they bought up almost anything MIJ they could get their hands on. It was kind of crazy. A couple of my local stores that specialize in vintage gear told me about those happenings, where someone from Japan would come in and spend like $250,000 per visit, without trying to haggle on prices at all. They would fill shipping containers with gear and send it back to Japan via sea freight.

The amount of gear they moved from the US to Japan ended up exceeding the demand they had for it in Japan. With this in mind, there's a high probability that a lot of the pedals being sold from Japan were brought there from the USA. This ended up driving up US prices quite a bit.

Oddly, the other movement that drove up prices heavily had to do with brokerage firms that were tasked with diversifying investment portfolios of rich people into hard goods in the years following the real estate market collapse and recession of that same era, which pulled another load of gear out of circulation.