Bonsai as an Alternative Asset
Trees rooted in place Value anchored in the soil Let ownership move
Konnichiwa! Welcome to the Alts Sunday Edition
My name is Hayato Takahashi, and I’m a bonsai builder / producer based in Tokyo.
Today, I’m going to tell you about the world of bonsai trees, and why they can make a great alternative investment.
Let’s go
My bonsai journey
I grew up in a quiet town near the foot of Mount Fuji called Ashigara. The kind of place where mornings arrive slowly and the landscape asks you to pay attention to small things.
My grandfather kept a maple bonsai in the garden. I saw it once as a child and did not think of it as art or investment. It was simply part of the view. That image stayed with me longer than I knew.
In 2020, as COVID began, I enrolled as a first-year student at iU University, My senior thesis was on technology-driven ecosystem building, where I came across the idea that the future branches from daily decisions stacked over years.
Patient, branching, cumulative.
That was the exact logic of bonsai.
I went out and bought books. Then I made my way to Jinbocho, Tokyo’s district of old bookshops, hunting for vintage bonsai texts. The deeper I read, the more I wanted to see the real thing.
It was early summer, not long after bonsai had taken hold of my mind and would not let go, when I landed in Omiya, where the Great Bonsai Festival was happening. The connection landed with unexpected force. I went deep.
It was also the first post-COVID season when the market culture had come back to life, adding an extra layer of magic.
This is where I bought my first four trees.
iU is located in the eastern part of Tokyo, near Skytree, the area where old Edo culture still runs quietly beneath the surface. Narrow streets, small workshops, temples that have stood for centuries. That daily texture stayed with me, and I still live on the east side of the city.
Lately I’ve been studying Keido (the art of displaying bonsai in a Japanese-style room) at Shunkaen Bonsai Art Museum, and on my small Tokyo balcony I raise thirteen trees.
Since then, I have traveled across Japan, met masters, visited gardens, and attended exhibitions season after season.
Along the way I’ve met people like Mr. Kanta of Tojuen who took on one of Japan’s oldest bonsai gardens in his twenties. The deeper I went, the more clearly I saw that bonsai is not one simple market, but many layered worlds.
Bonsai has an existential crisis
Bonsai has a problem: Japan’s population is shrinking, the domestic market is shrinking with it, and the chain of succession is weakening.
At this rate, the environment for practicing bonsai will not exist by the time we grow old.
My solution
I kept asking one question: Why has bonsai not been adopted as an asset class, while real estate, wine, and vintage goods already have structured markets and secondary markets?
There seemed to be enormous room for improvement in this industry:
Sales channels exist only within closed personal networks, so cash flow is unstable
The artists who hold existing techniques are aging, and their business models have not changed in decades
There is almost no incentive for younger people to enter the field
I learned that a business contest was being held in Omiya Bonsai Village, and I entered with a proposal to address these problems.
What I submitted was the prototype of what is now my site, Azukari: A platform which connects bonsai growers with buyers.
My business solves three problems:
First, it improves artist revenue structure, enabling stable cash flow while they focus on their craft.
Second, it eliminates the risk of trees dying in transit or losing traceability when ownership changes hands.
Third, it updates the relationship between owner and artist for the modern world, making bonsai accessible to anyone, anywhere, with a direct connection to the artist.
I met a bonsai artist named Mr. Saeki, and he was unlike any image of a bonsai practitioner I had held before. He is an innovator, someone who holds deep traditional craft while simultaneously creating an international community around it. He documents his daily practice on social media, building a global following in the process.
A warm welcome to the Alts community
Alts changed my direction! I found this issue on investing in rare and exotic plants. When I read through an alternative-asset lens, I was shocked not only that bonsai was included but that a global audience was already paying attention at scale.
My first conversations with Stefan made my mission clear. He mentioned that they were planning a trip to Japan this fall, but there were still very few Japanese voices in the Alts community.
So I decided to introduce myself and become a liaison to Japan for the whole community. Everyone has been so nice so far!
🇯🇵 Altea is going to Japan (and I’ll be there!)
Altea is planning a week-long investor trip to Japan.
This adventure will focus on Japanese whisky, startups, high-quality manufacturing, vinyl records, and yes, bonsai.
If you have not already done so, express interest now!
What makes bonsai so special?
Bonsai is a living art that never completes
Bonsai is not horticulture. It is what the Japanese literary scholar Osamu Kurita called a “super art” in his 1997 book, a living practice that never completes, an art that unfolds through time.
That is how unforgiving it is. Professional artists, together with their apprentices, manage hundreds and sometimes thousands of trees simultaneously, executing a precise seasonal calendar without interruption.
Bonsai is the crossroads of Japanese culture
The deeper dimension of bonsai is not technical.
Bonsai is the entry point into a world where Japanese architecture, garden design, tea ceremony, and the philosophy of hospitality all converge. In the tokonoma (alcove), a bonsai is placed alongside a suiseki (viewing stone) and a kakejiku (scroll) to compose a scene for one specific guest, on one specific day, that will never come again in exactly this form.
Katayama Ichiu (who founded Keido) called this ichiza kenritsu, the building of a once-in-a-lifetime theatrical space. The same spirit that runs through Sen no Rikyu‘s wa kei sei jaku flows through every bonsai display.
Azukarimono: Nothing truly belongs to us
Underlying all of it is the Buddhist, Shinto, and folk understanding that nothing truly belongs to us. Land, family, objects, even the body, are described in Japanese tradition as azukarimonono, things entrusted to us temporarily by ancestors, by nature, by something larger than ourselves.
This is not a metaphor. It is a practical ethic. Farmers in the Edo period were told to pass on the land in better condition than they received it. Temple custodians manage sacred objects not as owners but as stewards. And bonsai artists speak of their trees the same way.
The most important thing about bonsai is not that it is beautiful, though it is. It’s that it makes this ethic visible every single day.
When I water my 80-year-old black pine each morning, I am joining a chain of hands that was already there before I was born, and that I hope will continue long after I am gone.
You are not a collector. You are a custodian.
Standing in front of a 3,000 year old shimpaku juniper named Hokusai, I understood something I had not been able to put into words before. This tree was growing wild in the mountains of Niigata long before Japan existed as a nation. That material was collected and reworked by master Saburo Kato, one of the founders of Omiya Bonsai Village, and is now cared for by Shinji Suzuki in Nagano.
Bonsai exhibitions
From the mountain to Kato, from Kato to Suzuki, arriving on the stage of the 100th Kokufu Exhibition. A living thread connecting us to something that predates Japanese civilization itself.
For most of bonsai’s modern history, the exhibition hall was the only stage that mattered. Winning at Kokufu or a major prefectural show was how a tree became known, how an artist built a reputation, how provenance accumulated.
That path still exists and still matters. But something is shifting. Japan’s younger generation of bonsai practitioners is now taking the art beyond the exhibition hall and into the streets of Tokyo, galleries, storefronts, hotel lobbies, public spaces.
This is the next stage of bonsai’s story being written right now.
The market: How bonsai changes hands
Official vs invisible market
Global reports place the bonsai market at somewhere between $5-9 billion. That number includes soil, pots, tools, classes, and indoor decorative plants sold at garden centers worldwide.
What Japan actually exports as bonsai, was 917 million yen in 2023 and 906 million yen in 2024. The gap between those two figures is not a rounding error. It reflects two completely different things being called by the same name.
See, the trees that move through official export channels come overwhelmingly from two prefectures, Saitama and Kagawa, which together account for over 90% of export volume by both quantity and value. These are large-scale growing operations producing standardized material at scale.
The trees with artist history, exhibition records, and decades of professional care do not appear in these numbers! They are transacted privately, between individuals, or within closed networks of dealers. They do not enter databases.
Internet auctions
Another thing to understand is that internet auctions carry no stewardship culture. Public internet auctions exist, but they function more like secondhand book shipping than stewardship culture. Trees without care histories, no relationship with an artist, no continuity of custody. The azukari tradition is completely absent.
Bonsai theft
Since late 2023, bonsai theft has surged across Japan. By 2024, reported cases exceeded 260 trees with damages surpassing 12 million yen, with incidents concentrated in traditional growing regions including Tochigi and Takamatsu. These trees are being targeted precisely because they hold real value and move through channels that leave no paper trail. It is a direct symptom of international demand rising far faster than legitimate access can accommodate.
The export wall
Moving a tree is itself a huge risk. Exporting a living bonsai out of Japan is not simply a matter of putting a tree in a box.
Phytosanitary standards in Europe, the United States, and most other importing countries require complete soil removal, years of pre-shipment cultivation under government inspection, and species-specific pest clearance!
For a tree that has lived in the same soil for forty years, the process itself is a biological risk. The result is that the most important trees never enter the export pipeline at all. They stay where the hands that know them are.
And this is what my azukari model aims to solve.
The bonsai stays in Japan. The tree does not move, so there is no risk of death in transit.
The artist can focus on the work of developing the tree over years rather than finding buyers or managing logistics.
A stable income flows from care and cultivation, improving cash flow.
The record of who managed it, when, and how remains unbroken.
And the owner, from anywhere in the world, connects directly with the artist and participates in the growth of their tree.
The premise is simple. Keep the tree where it belongs, in its local growing environment, under the hands of the artist who knows it, and let ownership travel instead. It’s the azukari tradition updated with modern technology.
Why bonsai belongs in your portfolio
What happens to $3,000-$8,000 material after 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years?
In the first year, the tree is still settling into the artist’s care. There is not yet enough shaping or exhibition history to move the needle.
After five years of professional reshaping, seasonal management, and initial exhibition entries, that same tree can reach the $30,000 range. (3.7-10x return)
After ten to thirty years of sustained work, with accumulated exhibition records and the artist’s name attached, the value can enter the $130,000 to $200,000 range.
For reference: At the 2012 World Bonsai Convention in Takamatsu, an over-800-year-old Japanese white pine associated with bonsai master Masahiko Kimura was reportedly traded for approximately $1.3 million, the highest reported transaction in Japan’s bonsai market.
Kimura is also behind Toryu no Mai, a shimpaku juniper he reshaped over 41 years, which has also been assessed at around $1.3 million as of 2023.
Both figures reflect valuations achieved through decades of craftsmanship at the highest level of the art.
As we speak, bonsai gardens across Japan are closing. Masters are retiring without successors. The chain that has carried these trees across centuries is breaking in our generation.
That is why I am writing this. Because the people who might care most about preserving this, the ones who understand long time horizons, patient capital, and assets that carry meaning, are mostly outside Japan. And they do not yet realize this world exists. Now you do!
How to invest in bonsai
Becoming a bonsai owner means entering a custodianship relationship with one of our trees for an agreed period.
Ownership terms are available in three lengths, 1 year, 5 years, or 10 years.
Within that period, you can transfer ownership to the next owner at any time.
If someone wants to buy the tree while you hold it, you can sell, recover your investment, and realize a gain.
When the period ends, renewal is always an option.
If this resonates, join my waitlist. As new trees from young Japanese artists, seasonal bonsai, and fresh material are listed, you will be the first to know.
For more details or questions, email offer@bonsai-azukari.com
Let us share the deep world of bonsai together.
Let’s stay in touch
I look forward to meeting those of you who are joining the Alts trip to Japan this fall.
And if you ever come to Tokyo on your own, please feel free to contact me.
See you next time,
Hayato