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There is one thing that's true. If you take something reasonably good in the land of naturals and it is consistent, it will bring more money. A good chinese stone will do what just about everything...

I sense wakasa prices will be increasing soon!!

I ate a thuri, too. I think they're not worth the risk because they're not as spectacular as they are said to be. I ate mine because it was a 10x2 yellow green, when I flattened it, it had a stress...

And if you're going to take chances, which is fine (it gives you junk stones to cut to tomonagura, etc, or put in the kitchen or give to someone else to use), you expect the chances to occur at very...

Any reasonable soft stone makes a decent tomonagura. Most of us expect something a little different from the tomo and the base stone. Harder for the base and softer for the tomo. I would agree with...

I don't have any wakasa stones, and have been using an idwall on razors lately (because I hone extremely rarely), but I agree with the sentiment. Don't care about the name, and the "it" mines that...

Ditto that. Even trusted dealers can sell stuff that's not that great. The wholesalers pushing some of these things along may be fairly respected, too. But they are in business.

That's why I've...

Those are beautiful stones. the top one may be irregular, but it's clear to someone who has seen a moderate number of stones that it's not a common stone. The one that I saw was a little more...

I agree. Alex is generally premium price, but the stuff that's super premium is relatively uncommon and you can make requests. Most of the moderately priced stuff is happily unstamped (I see that as...

Well, there's two parts to that:
1) if someone sells you a good stone with a maruka stamp on it for $200, you can't really complain too much (as long as they're not trying to claim obviously fake...

I have been out of buying stones for a while, but in the last couple of days, I've bought about 15 from japan. I see on the yahoo auction site over there, it's pretty common to have poorly applied...