Walter_Pall

livingart,

very good trees cost more in Japan because there is a well established body of knowledge to appreciate the substantial difference in quality. This quality is very rare and there is a demand against it which is backed by money, big money. The top Japense masters are rich people while the ones in the West are beggars usually. Even at a comparable state of quality.

It is impossible to import any living plant into Japan. Therefore they have to rely on what they have got. On very rare instances trees are smuggled into Japan, but then it is a non-Japanese species and it wil never be possible to exhibit such a tree.

In the West there are only a few people who really know the difference. They DO NOT usually have big money, they are a poor and starving lot. There are more really good trees (as material) than good people to work on them. Altogether there are probably about ten to one hundred times more trees with outstanding potential in the West than in Japan.

Visiting Japanese say that in my garden there is almost as much of quality material than is left for still to be styled in the whole of Japan. I don't know what exactly this means, but it must mean that they have a scarcity and we an overabundance.

This is why real quality material is a bargain in the West.

On the other hand there are much more serious bonsai enthusiasts outside of Japan than in all of Japan together. This is most interesting, because one would not have guessed this. It only recently has become a hobby for Japanese to do what we have always done: make bonsai from shrubs. Japanese people would buy a finished tree and try to further refine it or pay someone for this traditionally or live with the fact that it deteriorates and dies eventually and then buy a new one.

So this explains why there is a strong demand for low to medium priced decent material in the West where 99% of bonsai enthusaistss want to do their own. This costs about 3 to 10 times as much in the West as in Japan.

best regards
Walter Pall