FIXATIONS : The Guitar Man : * Mac Yasuda has more than 300 of the instruments in his Newport Beach corporate offices and continues to scarf up nearly everything else with frets in his path. His collection is valued at $3 million.

Completion may be the most dreadful thing a fixated person faces, the moment when the passion that has driven him for years hits the wall, goals achieved, pinnacle scaled, Barbie dolls amassed. There is time then to sit back and survey one’s works. And scream, “ Aiieee! I could have had a life!”

My personal fixation is guitars: hunting down obscure ones, meddling with them, doing everything possible to sound better, short of actually practicing. It’s a sick quest. Friends vacationing with me have discovered that cities they thought were full of historical sights and cultural pleasures have only pawn shops and swap meets when I’m driving.

I’ve had nightmares about completion, where I’m suddenly in a room surrounded by every cool, rare guitar I could conceivably want. Due to some character flaw, however, the guitars in my dreams are all neatly sawed in half and being used as dip trays.

There was a nearly vertigo-inducing sensation, then, to actually be going through room upon room of guitars--minus the sawdust and guacamole--that are among the rarest in the world.

Most working musicians will never get closer than a photograph to a ‘50s sunburst Les Paul. It’s the most sought-after instrument of rock and blues players, now going for $30,000 to $50,000. Mac Yasuda has only 10 of them sitting around in his Newport Beach corporate offices, along with about 300 other guitars.

Many of his guitars dwarf the Les Paul in rarity and value. The acoustic guitarist’s Grail is the abalone-laden pre-World War II Martin D-45. Only 91 were made, only 37 are known to still exist, and Yasuda has eight of those, valued at between $75,000 and $100,000 apiece.

He has piles of Leo Fender’s earliest instruments, including a Broadcaster with serial number 0019. His Gretsch White Penguin is one of only a handful known to exist. There are 46 of Gibson’s coveted J-200s in sight, and he’s not sure how many more he owns. Mac’s kinda insatiable.

Yasuda, who lives in Corona del Mar, also collects rare automobiles, Rolexes and ‘30s alligator-skin Louis Vuitton luggage, but he has such a friendly manner and self-deprecating humor that one forgets what good sport it typically is to hate the rich. It also helps that Yasuda wasn’t always moneyed.

Twenty-two years ago he was a college student freshly arrived in the United States from Japan, staring at a vintage J-200 for $450 when all he had in pocket was $25. At that juncture, Yasuda got a look of steely resolution in his eyes and declared, “When I return here, it shall be as King of the Vikings!”

Sorry about that. What he actually said to a friend then was, “If I get the money, I’m going to buy all the J-200s, all of the them available.”

He’s off to a good start, along with scarfing up nearly everything else with frets in his path. All tallied, he estimates he has owned between 4,000 and 5,000 instruments in his life, and his current collection is valued at $3 million.

It’s a form of overcompensation perhaps. When Yasuda was growing up, the only guitars he could find in Japan were cheaply made classical models. Trying to fathom why the guitars of the American folk and country artists he loved sounded so much better, he and his friends at first erroneously thought it might be due to the pick guards--mere pieces of plastic laminate--on American instruments. They took to gluing bits of plastic on their cheap guitars.

“Then we thought, ‘This is it! Elvis Presley! Hank Williams! Hank Snow! Now we have the pick guard they have!’ ”

When Yasuda finally met his musical hero Hank Snow in Japan, he saw the country singer’s scratched, battered old Martin. “I stupidly asked him, ‘Hey, Hank, why don’t you buy a new guitar like this shiny, nice-looking one I have?’ He just looked confused.”

When Yasuda made a pilgrimage to Nashville, Chet Atkins and other musicians set him straight on how those weathered old instruments contained craftsmanship, materials and decades of seasoning that new instruments couldn’t match.

In his teens in Japan, Yasuda had his own radio program playing live country music, and he continued performing when he came to the States in 1970 on a scholarship to the Michigan Technological University. Along with buying guitars for himself when money and circumstances allowed, he began picking up instruments for his friends in Japan. Within a few years, that grew into a business, and he opened Mac’s Guitar Gallery in Kobe. He has since published two books in Japan on rare guitars.

One Japanese stringed-instrument fan he met was Akira Tsumura, a pharmaceuticals magnate and reputedly quite a monster on both the plectrum and tenor banjo. Yasuda now runs one of Tsumura’s companies, and is his instrument buyer. Tsumura has an additional 350 rare American guitars in his Tokyo corporate museum now, along with 1,000 banjos, which might explain why you haven’t heard “Oh Susannah” around here lately.

One of Tsumura and Yasuda’s latest pursuits is a shop in Tokyo called The Best of the World, featuring things like million-dollar pianos whose like can only be found in Versailles Palace. “In other words, if somebody comes and wants to see violins, I want to say, ‘Sorry, we have only one, which is a Stradivarius! Anything else, please go to a regular store,’ ” Yasuda said, with a chuckle.

There has been more than a little resentment brewing lately over Japanese folks buying up the planet and otherwise disporting themselves in a manner Americans previously thought we alone had the right to do.

Musician Stephen Stills has been particularly blunt on the issue of guitars, speaking of Japanese collectors with the sort of invective one usually hears at Serbo-Croatian taffy pulls.

Yasuda says he’s encountered very little of that resentment himself, since after 20 years of collecting in America he’s made many friends. He even won Stills over.

“Some years ago this magazine in Japan interviewed me and Stephen together. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Hey, was it you who took all the D-45s back to Japan and cut them in half to copy them to make Japanese fakes?’ And, of course, I wouldn’t do something like that. We had a big fight over it, and finally he understood. He wound up giving me his phone number, saying, ‘Anything you find that you don’t want, just give me a call.’ So we’re friends since then.”

Yasuda hobnobs with a number of other famous friends, including the likes of Jon Bon Jovi, George Harrison and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. And sometimes he’ll loan a couple of his pieces out to players to use on recording sessions. Yasuda sees himself as more of a singer, and doesn’t play his guitars that much, he says. Some in his collection clearly haven’t been played in years, like one of his handmade D’Angelico arch-top jazz guitars on which the strings are slowly corroding.

Though there are still a few particular guitars Yasuda wants, such as Snow’s old Martin, he says, “I think I have everything now.” But in case you’re wondering what to give the man who has everything, the answer is more of it. Having recently purchased an incredibly rare 1958 Gibson Explorer from Gibbons for $55,000, Yasuda now thinks he’ll go shopping for a second one.

It is his and Tsumura’s intent, he says, to pool their collections in a museum in the United States.

“We want to return everything over here, because we feel this belongs to Americans,” Yasuda says. “Also, it is our job to preserve them, and the temperature and humidity in Japan is bad for that.”

They wanted to put that museum in an $8-million house in Beverly Hills they bought for that purpose. The city has refused to let them modify the house, so they are still looking for a location.

Considering the way some rich rockers abuse their instruments--Cinderella’s Tom Kiefer pretty much trashed a ’59 Les Paul at an Irvine Meadows show a couple of years back--there’s some argument to be made for preserving them. But it also is chilling to see so many mute guitars, denied their life, in a sense, when kept out of players’ hands.

But maybe that’s just the way these times are. There’s a perception that the best things in this world--from cool cars to meaningful work to our forests and air--are all used up or out of reach. One can either be bitter about that, or realize that you can still sing a pretty good song with a pretty cheap guitar.