Orchid vendors in Japan?

[OrchidThief79]

I will be taking a trip to Japan next month, and I would love to do a little orchid tourism while I'm there. I'm interested mainly in Cattleya and Phalaenopsis.

I will be staying in the Tokyo and Kyoto areas. I won't be able to travel very far from the city center, so something within a short train ride would be best. Does anyone have any suggestions on stores/markets/nurseries to visit? Thanks!

[Bayard]

Suwada Orchids! Just look them up on the Web. They provide directions on their website. Excellent cattleyas.

[stonedragonfarms]

Not a store or a market, but the botanical garden in Kyoto is a must see if you have the time. You might also see if Wakayama Orchids is still open; they are near Kyoto.
Adam

[OrchidThief79]

Thanks for your suggestions...

I'm not sure if anyone will reply to this, but... Am I missing something or are orchids in Japan really, REALLY expensive? I looked at the prices on the Suwada and Wakayama websites, and the average price for a Cattleya is like $100 USD!!! Do the plants come with a sushi dinner? I can't read Japanese, so maybe I'm mistaken, but even some rather common clones are still astronomically overpriced.

[RandomGemini]

That would not shock me. Japan is an Island. In order for things to get there that are not from there, they have to come via ship. Japan also has an 8% tax on consumption and I believe that may have increased recently. But also, I wonder if these plants aren't being used in arrangements. Flower arranging is an art form in Japan and arrangements can be quite expensive.

[stonedragonfarms]

Also remember if you are growing phals or catts you would need to heat your gh over the winter in Japan; cheap electricity is a thing of the past there (compliments of all those shuttered reactors...)
I lived near Kyoto in the mid 90's; often my host family and I would go to nurseries on the weekends (my host father was as big of an orchid nut as I am), it was not uncommon to pay upwards of $100 for a spiking cymbidium or artfully blossomed phal. I remember being gifted with a very nice B. nodosa x and feeling guilty that I had received it--it was probably in that same price range and was given to me simply because I off-hand mentioned that I liked orchids to a friend at school. On the flip side to this, if you are interested in any of the native orchids (ponerorchids, neofinetias, Jenosa subsection cymbidiums), so long as you are not hell-bent on the fancy forms, can be found quite reasonably priced.

From what I can tell from the Wakayama site, they are mainly a nursery dealing in line bred plants; you are paying a premium for their breeding stock maintenance and the excellence in hybridizing that they are pursuing. The down side is the plants cost a bundle; the up side is that there are very few of the same hybrid available on a commercial scale anywhere in the world. I suspect the same holds true of Suwada (I have it rolling around in my head that they maintain a primo collection of sophronitis stock...)

Adam