E-Bay - Price evaluation and markets in general ?

[drbvac]

Scanning E-bay for papered Nihonto from many sellers and with no real way to trust postings or seller authenticity it seems that in general the sales offered are a lot lower than one would expext - even from sellers with very good ratings and with free shipping. Less than 2000 dollars for a papered wakizashi seems ridiculous considering the work and time and cost involved in getting any blade papered in the first place. There was a time even with a very trusted seller the only deals were for mumei blades and / or unpapered offerings.

 

What seems to be the general thoughts on the market in general?

[eternal_newbie]

10 minutes ago, drbvac said:

Scanning E-bay for papered Nihonto from many sellers and with no real way to trust postings or seller authenticity it seems that in general the sales offered are a lot lower than one would expext - even from sellers with very good ratings and with free shipping. Less than 2000 dollars for a papered wakizashi seems ridiculous considering the work and time and cost involved in getting any blade papered in the first place. There was a time even with a very trusted seller the only deals were for mumei blades and / or unpapered offerings.

 

What seems to be the general thoughts on the market in general?

 

Just a few reasons why this might be the case:

• Wakizashi in general are less popular than daito or tanto
• Papers are often out of date even when legit (a Tametsugu Hozon blade may have gotten downgraded to TH Ko-Uda, so the seller conveniently "lost" those papers and sold it as Tametsugu)
• Condition issues (tired, hagire, ware) that aren't listed ("please check the photos for the condition of the sword")
• From the above two items, a blade might be unlikely to go any higher than the papers it already has
• Relatives of a deceased collector consigning items to be sold as quick as possible to sort out financial issues

 

And in general, eBay is much harder to sell nihonto on now unless you're a reputable seller, because the market is flooded with so many fakes, scams, Chinese shinken etc - far more so than it used to be 10, 20 years ago.

[Kantaro]

Also, people in general seem to have less money due to several external factors they do not control.

[Rawa]

Ebay offers yeap

[Bosco]

Its like people in Gold’s subreddit. They bought gold from eBay with a great discount 😆. I mean yeah thats a good deal right.

[Gerry]

For what it's worth, katana prices (I don't pay attention to tanto or wakizashi prices) at Aoi Art and other online dealers who have a Western clientele have been trending up in the last year. This is probably due to the increase in international demand caused by the weaker Yen.

 

A TH katana with koshirae from a regular smith listed on Aoi 2 or more years ago went for somewhere between 700,000 to 950,000 yen, whereas they're being listed for about 1,200,000 yen recently. I was still even able to buy a few TH katana in shirasaya as recently as in early 2024 for 600,000 yen each.

 

However, prices on Yahoo Japan have been fairly consistent because they mostly cater to their domestic collectors.