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Is The Tosogu Market Crashing


lonely panet

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Hi guys,

 

well after trying to sell some tsuba on this board and on ebay for good prices (I think), iv come to the conclusion that the market is falling on its arse! I know the nihonto arena is falling out of interest with the younger generation for many reasons, (price's I think )

 

does any one share this idea?

 

I have a akasaka tsuba, papered NTHK  kanteisho and the only offer is a shameful $600 AUD

 

please comment

regards H

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I think sword and fittings prices are soft, but maybe it is a function of supply/demand. Some years ago it was hard to find decent swords and fittings. Now, with the internet, it seems dealers in other countries can easily market their items and the prices reflect the supply. It seems really top end items do well and low end "starter" items do move but medium priced items are stagnant.   Only my opinion.

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I think it is time based. In other words, one month you can list bargains all you like, and they don't go anywhere. And the next month everything you have is selling.

Look at Mariusz stuff. For a while, just about every bargain he lists will sell instantly. And then the next time, nothing sells no matter what price. It is just unpredictable and spontaneous. If something doesn't sell, try it again in a month.

The way photos are taken is a huge influence too. Put a tsuba against a nice blue silk or textured background, and it looks stunning. Natural light with a scene behind it..maybe not. The psychology of sales.

And then lastly, don't forget that when you are selling tsuba for $1000+, buyers have a ton of options. There are no shortage of tsuba at that price on dealer sites. So people are going to be picky. Don't list a nice tsuba at a price where there are 100 other nice tsuba for that price. It has to be a steal basically.

 

Brian

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I think sword and fittings prices are soft, but maybe it is a function of supply/demand. Some years ago it was hard to find decent swords and fittings. Now, with the internet, it seems dealers in other countries can easily market their items and the prices reflect the supply. It seems really top end items do well and low end "starter" items do move but medium priced items are stagnant.   Only my opinion.

 

Kodogu is partially a reflection of what is going on with swords.

Low to medium end iron kodogu seem soft the past 6 months. But seeing prices for good kinko pieces mostly holding or climbing in sort of a slow stop-start fashion.

 

Please find me a Juyo tsuba for sale online.

Also, NBTHK seems to have raised the standard on what they will Tokubetsu Hozon now.

Also:  past 6 months, Currency. If you are thinking in US$, those items in Japan that remain priced in yen are that much more competitive. Many US and Canadian dealers will feel that pinch hard.

Two or three years ago, the USA was the place to buy kodogu and swords.

Now it is the other way., but could flip back in 1 to 2 years.

 

Really think currency & internet availability is a large culprit. For now, if you can find a good piece in Japan- it is a bargain.

If you bought in USD or GBP even 1 year ago, you are underwater on a currency adjusted basis.

 

(edit: saw Brian's post and agree with it too. Sometimes this stuff is incredibly cyclical. Things like there seems to be a lot of Akasaka on the market at present, but no papered Hirata, early Hayashi, Ko-Mino, or a few other schools. I went looking for a papered Kaga kinko tsuba recently and found Zero. Maybe missed something, but still...)

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Yes more and more pieces available around the world in medium price range. Good time for buying in USD or Yen for us European was last october/November, that's what I did. Prices are on a downward slope, even for medium/low Juyo. A signed Kamakura Bizen juyo with a splendid Koshirae at 3,2 m¥ is cheap, even if it won't take another polish. A juyo Kanemitsu at 50 k$ is not expensive. We should ask Darcy's opinion.

 

http://www.aoijapan.com/katana-mei-signature-is-kageyori-2

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agree here,

certainly the "level of pricerange" did fall down.

This is but not only with Tosogu and Nihonto, this is equally with Japanese antiques in general...

the general "prices"  did fall around 40% within the last 2 decades- and i am very certain this will not be the end either...(comparing what we had to pay in the latter 80´s and 90´s)

 

Good! Tosogu is failure on the market- least i have seen not really very much within last years....!!!!!!!!!!

 

Akasaka-"den" Tsuba are out there in mess ( i agree! )- viceversa i but can not find the good ones either! )

 

There are no good Akasaka Tsuba offered- least those few which are good... did still hold their´s Level of the 90´s...

so- rather no falling here in Prices or value at all! ...it´s rather contrary (least i can report mine entourage here in Europe)...

 

the good stuff is holding the line very certainly!

 

(and this is good of course!)

 

Christian

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I think crashing is a strong word, but I think there is growing fatigue on a number of levels. I agree mid range tosogu are most affected, and especially the schools of greatest popular appeal like Higo and Owari. The papering issues; currency fluctuations and economic pressures have all had negative effect. The low end market seems vibrant as always. High end markets are always driven by private sales and in Japan, dealers are having trouble accessing items before friends or family get them. I think collectors are not relying on papers as much as they used to. Speaking specifically about Koshirae markets, there have been some high profile repros entering the market over the last two years, so there is a heightened vigilance.

 

Overall not a rosy time for tosogu or nihonto in general...

 

Maybe I will find a hidden treasure at the Chicago show this weekend?! The eternal optimist.....

 

Boris

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For top quality items the market is very strong in my opinion. I don't see much weakening at all, unlike swords.  For US collectors that surge of the dollar against the Yen has resulted (at least for me) in some great buys lately. Finding the best quality items though are very difficult to find and illustrates Curran's comment. 

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 I agree mid range tosogu are most affected, and especially the schools of greatest popular appeal like Higo and Owari. The papering issues; currency fluctuations and economic pressures have all had negative effect.

 

Boris, at danger of having to define 'mid range', I agree with mid to later Higo (4th gen through kodai) taking a clear hit.

Owari on the other hand, must disagree. Some of the 'mid end' papered stuff is going for more than it did a number of years ago.

 

Even the 'not quite high end' $2000 Kanayama and earlier Owari are going off rather fast and not many decent papered ones out there.

A decent Kanayama with Hozon and some rust issues had a number of buyers line up to the dealer for it.

Also noticed a shortage of decent ones at the DTI. Thought it strange, as they were more common a decade ago.

 

If anythings, seems more collectors are getting into kodogu. It is just the New Wave seems interested in things a bit different than the past generation.

The Sasano Effect has certainly dissipated a bit.

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this is very interesting subject iv started.

why has Akasaka become mid range?? there are plenty of example out there but when I was in Tokyo, all the shops had good examples of them and they were at the 2K mark.

 

I know that to the untrained eye higo, akasaka and nishigaki can have similarities but why have they fallen out of flavour so fast?

 

theres always a kamakura tsuba changing hands for big dollars and frankly I don't know why, there so highly priced. had one and sold it  "MEAH" did do anything for me.

 

I know the market changes but im alittle put out as to why a great tsuba cant sell for a reasonable price.

 

but this aside the topic is very informative, im probably the trainee, in this subject but I feel that all your comment are very helpful.

 

regards H

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Is there not an aspect of "fashion" going on here?

For a while, all we heard about and discussed was Akasaka. Now it seems to be Higo. Maybe next year it it will be Jingo or Goto again...

Not that there is no interest in the others, but as you follow the NMB and world market, there is definitely trends emerging and fashions changing. Top top remains top stuff, but in the mid level, there are definitely fashions and trends that determine what sells, and what becomes lower-middle market and upper-middle market. Upper middle market becomes fashionable, and becomes top level for a while. Just how I see it.

 

Brian

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All ,

 

yes the amount of fittings on the market is HUGE!!....But the amount of great fittings is ZERO , we have had this conversation before with Borris and James the amount of stuff out there is great try to find Juyo fittings ....swords heck take your pick !!

 

Fred Geyer         

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I will firstly admit that i know very little in the way of sword furniture other than its utility; please tell me why your tsuba is valuable. I see the work that went into it by the craftsman; he was probably not well-paid for it when he made it. I can admire it as a metal worker myself, but the artistic theme does not speak to me. Some work does, just personal preference I guess as I am uneducated as I said. I defer to you who are more knowledgeable, but will not spend money on something that does not move me. Sword related expenditures are hard for me to justify as I am on disability and trying to build a house (however I just got an Aizu Kunisada wakizashi dated 1660 and am looking for suitable hardware.)

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Steve,

All I can say is that the value of many tsuba lies in things that are not just aesthetic. Especially with tsuba like Akasaka school. Their appeal  isn't immediately apparent, and takes a lot of study into the school, type of iron, finishing processes etc. I expect they were not cheap when created and were prized. But I am far from a connoisseur of them myself, so sometimes leave it up to those that specialize in them to try and explain to me.

 

Brian

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  • 4 weeks later...

Nothing is ever quite crashing and the ebb and flow of the market is really small when you stand back and realize this is a thousand year old hobby pretty much. 

 

One has to realize though that there are more $300 to $500 tsubas and such than there are collectors to absorb them all. People who structure their collections based on "wide" instead of "high" are the primary targets for that kind of thing but even they have limits.

 

I call it going horizontal and when you go horizontal too long you end up with an accumulation. 

 

If you go vertical you get a collection. Some mix between the two is interesting. 

 

The number of these items that can be generated is nearly infinite though and it becomes a question in a buyer's head of why buy any particular item X out of a set of { A to Z } ... what does it have going for it that makes it stand out? If they are all basically interchangeable, then it either has to be love at first site or love at first big pricing discount. 

 

Anyone has to be cautious about accumulating too many mid range or lower types of items. You can take for instance a car collector, if he establishes a collection of 10000 Ford Fiestas, Mercury Cougars, Chevrolet Chevettes and so forth, he's building that kind of accumulation which doesn't yield a lot of interest. Sooner or later on that horizontal path he hits the limit. 

 

The collector who is building vertically is acquiring his Ferrari, Bugatti, his 1960s era Cobra and so forth. He is going fewer and he is going straight up. 

 

The vertical collector will never go out and pick up the Chevettes for his collection. The horizontal collector will eventually exhaust himself. Furthermore the horizontal collector as he continues to educate himself tends to shift towards a vertical mode. He looks at things that used to be interesting to him and they are no longer interesting. So he sells. He then lusts after something a little bit less mundane and more exquisite. 

 

So you have these various forces at work, the vertical guy who doesn't take part in the market, and the market players who exhaust what they are doing and either give up or else convert what they have and consolidate into fewer and more precious things. As their knowledge and appreciation go up, naturally they develop a taste for finer things.

 

That could be food, that could be cars, that could be clothes, that could be gems, or swords or kodogu. 

 

Individual items that have to sit there in a box in a crowd of 100 or so on a desk are advertising themselves the same way as ladies of the night working a bar. Not a nice metaphor but there you have it. You, the customer come in and unless one of the grabs your attention due to something special about it, the only other thing that's going to grab your attention is the price. 

 

As people accumulate massive amounts of low and mid grade material and decide they want to move on, this is the problem they're forced to deal with in selling it. 

 

I am no kodogu expert but it is the same in all art fields and in collecting fields. 

 

If you have "the only" of some kind of thing by a high level artisan... it could be an important 1930s era watch, it could be a 1880s painting, it could be a 2,000 year old Roman sculpture, it could be a misprint stamp from 5 years ago, it could be a mint condition coin from 100 years back... you are the one who is dictating terms. The guys who vacuumed up the thousands of nearly identical items, eventually they have to pay the piper on that. There will not be exponential growth in any collecting hobby. 

 

There will always be people buying the worst of anything for the cheapest. Enthusiasts with love, low budget, and like a deal. There will always be people buying the best of anything. Connoisseurs for whom money is the second question, the first question being, how special is this thing and why should I own it? 

 

The vast middle ground is the danger ground. Without something that rides alongside anything, buying into this ground means trying to preserve your cup of water in the face of a firehose of nearly identical "precious" items being blasted onto the market by various sources. What is a nice deal today is maybe not a nice deal 3 years down the road with thousands of others of nearly identical items being thrown on the market without a care. 

 

And therein when you try to sell such a thing you may find no interest... because maybe everyone you know already has something similar bought on the same turns, dipping the cup into the firehose to take some water out. So when you sell, you're just another cup of water in the firehose jet. What makes yours different from all the rest?

 

You my friend must now compete on price.

 

You may feel the market is crashing, but it's not. What has happened is that you bought something that was nearly generic and your perception of it was rare and special but... it wasn't. There is unlimited supply and in competing vs. that unlimited supply you need to adjust the price over time. The longer that firehose blasts from Aoi Art and so forth with the scratch n dent specials, the more the mid range items flood into collections from people buying "bargains" and so the ongoing price adjustment will have to follow. 

 

Everything is really a pyramid. There is the cap stone, of the ultimate artists of any art form. Painters,sculptors, nihonto artists, you name it. That cap stone represents the ultimate. There will always be people with the funds who want the ultimate and do not bother with anything below. There is the fragments and pebbles around the base, where people with no funds will get what they can get out of the love of it. They don't want to pay much but they don't expect much.

 

And the vast middle area of the pyramid is the danger ground where you need to assess how far up or down it you really exist. The further down, the more generic, the less desirable and the more you need to fight on selling with the argument of price (i.e. losing money to convince someone to buy it from you). That's a losing battle. 

 

The more perfect: the more complete, the more interesting, unusual, and high quality the further up the pyramid you go. This is an exponential curve when you look at the cross section of a pyramid vs. its height. You get into lofty territory fast. In some cases, you may be the only game in town, with that town being the world.

 

There are two Samonji tachi that are signed. One is Kokuho and extremely famous. The other was in stealth mode most of its life and appeared 10 years ago. Have the signature is cut but the rest is there. One of my clients owns that sword. 

 

He is the only game on planet earth, and that was his goal all along. Didn't buy just because he liked something, he wanted a reason for the like to convert to a decision to acquire. 

 

I usually advise people to go vertical if they can, it's something that works at any level. If you have 6 of any kind of thing you can convert that into 3 better things of the same type. Might be trading marbles, but it works. 5,000 generic marbles is not a good marble collection vs. 10 rares. 

 

So this is only what you're seeing. It's not a collapse but the repricing is an ongoing thing and it is accelerated by the firehoses out there dumping nearly generic stuff into the market as rapidly as possible. It is outpacing the market's ability and/or desire to absorb it. Once that happens, price adjustments follow. 

 

The thing is with high end stuff, you can't flood the market with it because not enough exists and the desire to sell it is low. The thing with low end stuff, you can't crush the price enough, it hits a floor and that's that. If you see a kogai you think is pretty and matches a set of tosogu you have and the price is $50 you're not going to give a damn about the gimei on the back you're going to scoop it up. 

 

The middle is the place where you have the danger of the bubble forming when everyone becomes a buyer at the same time and the bubble popping when everyone moves out at the same time. I don't think we have enough people to really make bubbles but I do think there is enough material entering the market at the mid to low end on a daily basis that people have their choices available and *also* (and this is important) they have the belief that tomorrow might bring something better so for today they may want to sit on their hands.

 

This further depresses the middle ground. There's just too much stuff there in general. Sooner or later it just needs to price adjust as a reality of it. The way around that is to be a fierce buyer in the middle ground and negotiate with thunder and lighting and get it at the price you want, or to avoid it. 

 

When I make a decision about acquisition I try to think about how many bells and whistles I can hang on something. This thinking was driven by customers who talk to me and give their feedback. What I think is very interesting on a scholarly basis and something I enjoy owning is not necessarily to their interest. But if I can find the rare and compelling package that gives someone 3 or 4 reasons to be interested and own something then that helps them make the decision to own it instead of admiring it. It elevates it out of the background noise. Stuff that is sitting in the middle of the background noise that cannot be extricated from it, dies a slow death. 

 

We see another example of that in the dating world. Average joe with average life and average creativity and income is a nice guy and could make a nice husband for someone, reliable, not flashy, make a decent life. But his problem is that he is one of an unlimited number that have these properties. He goes online and participates in the dating market and he has nothing with which to distinguish himself from the untold millions of similar people. He finds the most beautiful girl on the dating site and spends hours trying to write her something interesting to get her attention. And... he sits and dreams but she never even reads it. 

 

One of my friends has 200,000 followers on Instagram and she is drowned underneath an incredible and overwhelming amount of noise from people trying to get her attention. None of them can distinguish themselves to get it. There are people with more and they have to hire other people to sort out the attention that they get to see if there is anything useful to them in that noise. 

 

This is the problem of average. It's always the same. There is a lot of it and if you sunk yourself deep and wide into average then at some point you either will be very lucky because the world reassessed, it all became popular and in demand like say chinese porcelain and a rising tide floated all boats. You make out like a bandit because the bubble that begins to form means you can sell your mediocre junk for stunning prices. 

 

Or, the market just kind of stays the same in which case you will be drowned under the never ending stream of average that continues to come out. 

 

It's not a crash.

 

It's just an adjustment as the original perceptions that something was rare and precious are revealed by the unending stream of similar things to be generic. It means that the original price was paid too high based on a flawed perception of what it was. The price then adjusts to something that is based on new information: which is that there are a lot more coming from where that came from.

 

Collectors, it's an educational thing all the time. Guys get burned many times trying to make their big score. And what they end up buying is a boat anchor that's just going down. Not enough special about it to compete at the level it's trying to compete against. 

 

As a buyer, spend your money as you like it in the interests of entertainment if it is for entertainment. Then if it goes to zero it is no matter because you got the value out of enjoying it.

 

If you paid $5k for something you owned a year and then traded for another thing you owned a year and then another on top of that, you got a lot of value out of that $5k. You owned three items each costing you $5k and you're not even out a penny on it. But if you spent that $5k 100 times then probably you would have been better off spending $500k one time as that just elevates you out of the crisis of the middle ground. 

 

Anyway just some late night thoughts as usual. Been under a lot of time pressure on other stuff and unable to contribute as much as I would like. 

 

 

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I will offer one more bit. If you pay too much at the outset the probability you will recoup it is challenged. Mind, it is not impossible, but you will have to find your twin somewhere out there.

 

PS: For those of you who've been around a 'few' decades, do you remember White Wine? Single Malt Whiskey? Cigars? 'Hummers'? 'Beatlemania'??? (lol) More recently, Vegan? Gluten Free? This is called 'Heard Mentality', and it's a great way to sell a product. Get a few people (celebrity status is helpful - they are easily paid for) announcing their belief in something and it's off to the races. When you see magazines being published with titles about the latest scam, you'll know what's going on. No one wants to be thought of as being outside of the 'In Crowd' (great old song btw), that is unless you already did what they are doing now five years earlier which means you 'ARE' the in crowd. My point in this rambling is that markets work this way all the time. '$3000 GOLD'! It's already topped. Everyone has 'XXX' in their shop? Market is topped. This is where Darcy's observations really hit home. You cannot go by marketing. You can only go by observation, diligent study, and experience if you want to tread water in any collecting field. Even those who do get stuck from time to time. No one is prescient. S**t happens. Patience is helpful but stubbornness is deadly. If you buy from the most expensive shop on the most expensive street you'd better buy in the most expensive price category in that shop or you'll just be subsidizing their rent. In a restaurant a $100 bottle of wine is a better choice than a $40 bottle as the $40 bottle actually costs $6 and the $100 costs $60.

 

And around and around and around it goes. Where it stops, nobody knows.

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Wow!

This has been a very intereting thread. I have learned a great deal and thought deeply about this thing we call "sword collecting."

In fact, I think there are several levels and kinds of acrivities that make up "sword collecting." These levels are loosely inter-connected altho they may seem almost invisible to one another.

At the upper end are serious collectors who know the field and trust the services of experts. This level goes thru the kinds of ups and downs described by Darcy, Curran and others have described.  Basically, tho, I think it is doing rather well.

I think what is actually the low end of the hobby is in deep and serious decline. Across the US - and the world -  there are fellows who have been "lateral collectors" of "samurai swords." These collectors helped dealers and collector's group. They bought some books and loved their swords and formed pools of "nice" stuff. As those collections are dispersed prices for plane janes and ho-hum swords will have to fall. Maybe the middle will fall out of the market. The bottom of the field will be turned into scrap. 

In that case, the price of swords will look like the emerging distribution of incomes.

Where is Eugene V. Debs when we need him?

Peter

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Peter Bleed wrote " emerging distribution of incomes."

 

Over the past year I've had a number of higher end fittings for sale. Typically, the most frequent comment being received is "I would love to buy your fitting, but just can't afford it right now."  So, in response to Peter's comment ..... the following video surely expresses at least part of what's going on .......

 

 

 

 

 

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I agree with Darcy that the middle is in a perpetual state of squeeze. However for a lot of people spending even $10k on a sword is an unrealistic proposition so the top end for them to own even one is the middle to which they may supplement it with a couple from the bottom. Not to mention the difference between an $8k sword and a $20k sword is not so great as to bring up the question, is it worth the large additional cost for a slightly better piece?

 

As for tosugu specifically, who wants to own just one Tsuba? I think part of it is if you have $5k's worth of Tsuba then a lot of people would rather have that spread as one quite nice one of a couple grand and then 5 or 6 $500 ones rather than one single piece unlike swords where more tend to be happy with a single item. Plus there's all the sword guys like me who may have a passing interest but sometimes find it hard to tell the difference and thus anything extra spent would be wasted if the additional quality can't be recognized.

 

So it seems to be being squeezed but there's less seen forces in the market that keep everything balanced and the biggest factor in any pricing now more than ever seems to be JPY strength.

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Hello Everyone:

 This has been a really interesting thread. Lots of input, issues seen different ways, not just a discussion of market direction but also the structure of the market with mention of particular tastes which might be  moving against the market trends, and different buyer price points: all those things making for interest. It sort of reminded me of a famous ditty sung to Milton Friedman by George Schultz at a Friedman award dinner:  " A fact without a theory is like a ship without a sail ... but if there's one thing worse in the universe, it's a theory without a fact." Anyway, comments of dealers, like Darcy, are very uncommon as they reveal the structure of a thought process and operating rules (dare I say implicit algorithms?) of their business. I wish we would see more like that.

 A rather large can of worms was opened by the YouTube visual shown by Nagamaki. Of course incomes and their distribution are determinants of demand, referred to as income elasticities for all goods and services and economists have long categorized items by how demand is effected by changes in incomes,  and things that can be thought of as dispensable luxuries have very high income elasticity coefficients. A lot of useful things could be said about any market if we bore into issues of wealth and income, along with prevailing market price, the number of demanders, tastes, the prices of substitutes and complements for x, the effects of time, etc., however the clip shown is very misleading. The pictures of the plots of actual, perceived and "ideal" wealth distributions are very unhelpful to the issue raised. The soothing voice over and the mesmerizing images are quite misleading. What they show is a 54 trillion dollar distribution of US wealth, not income, and by what appears to be some notion of net worth. Wealth is a snap shot at a moment of time and can be defined and measured many ways. One way would be to measure by percentiles net worth of priced assets derived from a "T account" of assets and liabilities. That appears to be what was done. Such an accounting would omit unpriced owned assets, all of which would require third party evaluations, particularly if taxing were to be a consequence. That "total wealth" picture would alter the distribution, and I would guess (!) making it less equal yet. Some countries actually tax net worth, though not the US, and that must lead to quite a circus.

 Without warning the viewer the last couple of minutes shift to the issue of income distribution, that not being a momentary measure, but the measure is of a flow such as yearly income. I do agree that both the highly skewed US wealth and income distributions are major political and economic issues that must be addressed sooner or later. If not, the shades of Peter Bleed's Eugene V. Debs will revisit in one way or another. A poor imitation of him is actually here already in the form of Bernie Saunders' bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and this morning's poll shows him with a surprising 15 or so point share.

 Finally to the dollar distribution issue, increasing inequality and the very high income elasiticity of demand that would characterize upper level tosogu, does not seem to have kicked in to any great extent. That might only be a marketing issue with a possible solution for sellers if they would look beyond the preponderance of less than billion dollar income folk who habituate the usual sword shows.

 If I were to analyse the tsuba market I would look beyond most of the discussion in this thread and look instead to the tsuba as a collection object in and of itself. Shortly after the "opening" of Japan, a Parisian art dealer, Philippe Sichel, spent six months in 1874 on an extensive buying trip that brought back to Paris 450 crates containing 5,000 objects. In his very entertaining "Notes d'un bibeloteur au Japon" (1883), he commented on his visit to Osaka, saying "... I could have amassed many sword guards for some swordsmiths offered me case-loads of them. But I was looking for a complete sword. I consider the sword guard a mere fragment and therefore uninteresting in itself. Who would have thought back then that within only a few years sword guards would fetch enormous prices, books would be written on them, ascribe artists' names and even assigning exact dates?" His full story, and that of Raymond Koechlin's "Souvenirs d'un viel amateur 'art l'Extreme-orient" (1930), are found in Max Put. Plunder and Pleasure: Japanese Art in the West 1860-1930 (Hotei, 2000). The book is well worth a read to discover some of the origins of early Western collecting.

 I think collectors might ponder  "...the sword guard a mere fragment..." observation. I don't know how far I would go with the notion of the tsuba being, as a friend of mine once said, a "hood ornament," but there might be some truth to that. As a collecting area, the sword guard alone, is sort of a cul-de-sac, in the sense that it is sort of disassociated from the objects around it and even the sword. One could say that it is entirely determined by the sword and has no determining effects on anything else. As an object of the koshirae, it is not even necessary, as many fine koshirae of the aicuchi type are found on blades of all lengths. Tsuba have played no role, or hardly any role, in the development of the sword or armor. What accounted for the large increase in interest about tsuba that Sichel mentions is unclear. In both France and Germany there were, at a very early time, dealers who marketed good (and awful) tsuba very successfully, and I would guess the one thing, more than any, that appealed to the European and English, and later, American, collector, were the depiction of stories and legends of exotic Japan on so many tsuba. The dealers were happy to feed that imagination with Soten and similar tsuba in the thousands. Today such pieces are of much less interest, but they seem to have gotten the interest rolling. What was more influential to all of that than the very highly appreciated Legend in Japanese Art written by Henri L. Joly at the turn of the century? Contemporary collectors are interested in other things, thank goodness, but once schools and design themes are sorted out, where does one go? I am not at all sure how valid this notion is, but the tsuba as a collector object seems more isolated as an object, conceptually, than most other fields in Japanese art collection, and that can lead to interest burn out.

 Some rambling thoughts.

 Arnold F.

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 If I were to analyse the tsuba market I would look beyond most of the discussion in this thread and look instead to the tsuba as a collection object in and of itself. Shortly after the "opening" of Japan, a Parisian art dealer, Philippe Sichel, spent six months in 1874 on an extensive buying trip that brought back to Paris 450 crates containing 5,000 objects. 

 

Speaking of ships and sails, the idea that tsuba collecting in Europe or elsewhere is what gave or currently gives tsuba its value is an intriguing notion.  If a vast majority of people who buy tsuba are working in this mindset, then really, what are they collecting but stuff which had no inherent value when it was created and is only given value by the current owner and zeitgeist?

 

But we know that some tsuba, definitely not all tsuba but a fair amount given the number of bushi and nobles and wealth merchants in old Japan, at the time of their creation, were created with much effort and though and skill and resources from both the artists/craftsmen as well as the orderer/buyer.  The study and appreciation of the characteristics that identify these tsubas is what would enable a "right" valuation of a tsuba, which would also be in part a determination of its worth compared to others.   If the economic tides both lift and lower boats, then a connoisseur would welcome low tides since he has already properly valued the tsuba in his mind.

 

That tsuba can be considered an accessory to a sword, and therefore diminished by this position, does not make sense when we consider the historical rise of the tsuba as the ideal object for signaling a bushi's standing and tastes in Japan.  As nihonto became less used, the tsuba probably became even more important, for both avoiding a fight (who would dare attack someone attached to the Shogun) as well as getting business or just being invited to the country club?  A better analogy is the wrist watch. It is worn everyday and everyone, and could also be considered just an accessory to a person's attire.  The one sold at the drug store is just as reliable as the one sold at a high end boutique. Also, one might argue they are unnecessary, having been replaced by the clocks on our smart phones (who still wears one? - I do, and it has both actual hands and a digital read out :glee: ).  But why are there watches worth tens of thousands of dollars or more?  There there is the question whether seiko collectors should be pitied by the omega and tag heuer collectors, who, in turn are pitied rolex collectors.  Not to mention how the Phillip Patek and Cartier collectors feel about the poor Movado saps!  

 

Shaking his head at everyone is probably the old collector who started out with pocket watches or tinkers with repairing the movements.  The first thing he does when a watch, any watch, is place in front of him is to flip it over and open up the case.  Then he carefully looks through his magnifier to examine each gear and sprocket and jewel, then considers the overall layout of the the various complications.  Finally he considers the overall movement and ponders what went through the watchmaker's mind when it was being put together.  When he's finished, he's able to place the watch's value relative to all the others he's seen and played with, and should he be able to afford the asking price, knows that he has parted well with his hard earned cash.

 

Else, my other theory is that the bottom's not falling out, its just that the nicer $ to Yen exchange rate means these things should be at least 20% cheaper now than they were 6 months ago, plus antiques/collectibles are never as liquid as stocks or precious metals....

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