An Eye for Antiques

When you first enter the warehouse a half block northwest of Safeco Field on the south edge of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, the vast array of antiques piled high and deep is intimidating. An enormous wooden god of some sort peers down at you; an ancient-looking boat leans against the wall; ink paintings, carvings and ceramic ware are piled willy-nilly. And the tansu — those beautiful heavy wooden chests — seem to crowd you in as you walk through the maze of Japanese antiques and curiosities.

But after awhile, you start to develop buyers’ eyes. Details spring out at you. An elephant carved from a single piece of wood catches your eye. Some of the ink paintings you unroll seem like ancient treasures. And the secret drawers in the far back of some of the tansu conjure up images of someone in 19th century Japan hiding an illicit love letter or a precious family heirloom.

But still, the breadth of the warehouse and the way the antiques are piled high throughout is a bit overwhelming. Jay Gregg, my guide and the man who runs Kyoto Art and Antiques with his wife, Kyoko Maeda, sweeps his arm around and says that everything in the warehouse will be sold in the 10-day market that begins on May 1.

“Pretty much all of it?”

“All of it. Not pretty much.”

Kyoto Art and Antiques is not a shop. The business model is this: bring a fresh batch of Japanese (and a small amount of Chinese) antiques to Seattle twice a year, fill up a warehouse, sell every last item in the warehouse, go back to Japan and start all over.

Whether you’re an expert, a professional buyer or just looking for a nice wooden bench for your garden, the Kyoto Art and Antiques sale has something for you. Or at least, that’s the impression I had as I milled my way through the rows and rows of antiques.

That impression was reinforced after talking to Jay.

“We sold a sea chest from 1625 for $150 last year. We could have gotten a thousand bucks for it easily,” he says. So why not get the thousand bucks? If you don’t have some bargains, some real hidden treasures, for shoppers to find, “it’s sterile and it’s dead,” he explains.

Jay is a pioneer in the antiques business. He arrived in Japan in 1980 (he’s originally from Colorado) and starting “dabbling in the biz,” as he puts it, a year later. He started with textiles. “The textiles were so diverse, so complicated,” he recalls. But the US wasn’t quite ready for what Jay had to offer. “There wasn’t a lot of knowledge” among the collectors and museums, Jay says. “We went to the Met, and they said, ‘You have great textiles,’ but they didn’t have a curator for Japan.”

As he learned more about textiles he would find later that he was unwittingly training himself for the antiques business. “It’s like anything; say you learn Impressionistic art, and you really get it down, then you can jump to something else in the art world,” he says. “So I moved into small things — bronzes, furniture — and I just used the same eyes. There is proportion, color, shape, history, the guild, where it’s from, the material it’s made of — all those things, and the combination has to be perfect.

“When I first started, I’d think, oh, there’s something just a little bit wrong with that, but it’s so cheap I’ll buy it. Now I don’t do that. That’s the biggest mistake you can make, buying something because it’s a bargain. You’re stuck with it forever.”

While Jay has developed an eye for antiques, what makes him a true pioneer in Japan is the way he got himself into the very closed world of antique auctions in Kyoto.

“In Japan, to be in the auctions, you have to have a license, but to have a license, you have to have a business. It’s kind of a Catch-22. That was tricky, but I did that in the early 80s. But then you get to the auction, and … it’s an old boys’ club. It’s a really, really small group of people. It is people who usually dropped out of companies, who didn’t fit. So it’s all these misfits. That’s the people in the antique world in Japan.”

The politics and personal connections in Japan’s antique world are mind-boggling, Jay says. You have to stay on top of who is selling what and remember the relationships among the buyers. “It is complex,” Jay says, “so I had to pay some heavy dues the first couple of years. They really think long-term, and they eventually figured out that I’m not going to go away. I was the only American doing this. So it was nice. A lot of people ended up being very friendly and helpful.”

So how does a novice navigate a 10-day market of Japanese antiques? Where are the bargains? With the idea that a first-timer may have more success going against the grain, I asked Jay about buying patterns.

“Japanese ink paintings do much better in Japan than here,” he says. “They are way undervalued … It’s astounding to see art in the West, where an artist showing for the first time may get $600 or even $1,000, and the paintings we bring over are masterpieces; they’re 200 years old and its all ink and hand-ground mineral paints … it’s astounding how cheap these painting are. More than any investment in stock or anything like that, I’d really like to lock into some paintings.”

Textiles are another area that sometimes gets overlooked and offers very good deals, Jay says.

On the other hand, large furniture sells better in the West, Jay says, just because of the size constraints of Japanese homes.

Also, within the United States, there are stark differences in buying patterns. Jay and Kyoko used to hold markets in the Washington DC area, and they found that porcelain and smaller tansu were in hot demand. On the West Coast, stoneware is big, but porcelain or ceramic ware isn’t as hot of an item.

A Japanese antiques dealer can deal in 40 different categories, and Jay says all 40 — from stoneware to furniture, to lighting to Shinto goods and tea ceremony utensils — are represented at the May market.

The first day off the market is pretty intense because the professional collectors will be on hand (Kyoto Art and Antiques doesn’t allow any buyer early access to the show). It’s a serious atmosphere. “The housewives who show up on the first day become that way too,” he says.

While the market is constantly busy, Jay says those who want to come on the first day should probably get there early (market hours are from 11am to 7pm).

But those who don’t want to go on the first day need not worry that the bargains will all be snapped up. Jay and Kyoko stagger the release of some of the items to make sure the 10-day market has plenty of spice from beginning to end. “People are still opening boxes five days into the show,” Jay says.