$50 Bekkou Bachi...

General
#1

…but not for you!

HA!

There’s a recycle shop near my home, that I’ve found has a number of bekkou bachi for a little of 5,000 yen, or around $50 U.S. I just last week purchased a bekkou bachi from Katoh-san while visiting Tokyo, and the added flexibility has improved my play considerably. So my question is, would these cheap bachi be worth investing in as back-ups? A good number of them look like they’ve been around the block a few times, have obviously chipped and been sanded down, but a couple look good and seem sized reasonably well for my hand. Should I take the risk with these mystery bachi!?

#2

Dude, that sounds like an amazing chance. I’d say bring your shamisen to the shop and ask if you can try 'em out before you buy.

#3

Curse your subject line, what a tease!

Investing in backup bachi sounds like a bad idea.
In my professional opinion, I believe your best course of action would be to send them to me.

#4

I read that as “buy those bachi, you handsome, clever, and witty man.” That about right?

I guess my real question is this: is there anything I should watch out for when buying secondhand bachi, especially from a place that isn’t knowledgeable about them?

#5

sigh, I still heard it as “send them to Santa Cruz”…

Seriously though (not meaning that the above statement isn’t true!), given the incredibly low price for them, I would say it’s worth the risk. Some friends of mine have gotten crazy deals on amazing guitars because the dealer didn’t know it’s actual worth. Likewise, the owner of these bachi might not actually know how good they are (or bad they are), so I would see no problem. If you find a bachi there that you like the feeling of, that’s all that matters.

You can also use the rule of thumb of bachi with lighter colored shell tends to be better quality (not always true, of course, but what I was told)

#6

Out of random curiosity, shouldn’t it be possible to create a koma from the bekkou of a bachi?

#7

Hmm, possibly! Actually, if it was a mostly-bamboo koma with a thing strip on top (like mine, shown below), it could work very well! :slight_smile:

http://imgur.com/ANgrkii.jpg

#8

Well, I suppose you’re right. I’ll go down there this weekend and pick up a couple.

That’s an interesting looking koma, Kyle. Make it yourself?

#9

Why do I live in Canada? I wish I could get one at this price in order to compare with my wooden bachi…

Couldn’t we make an kind of arrangement so one of them could be sent to me over here? And if someones tries it beforehead, I would trust it a little more than just buying anything online. Plus, buying one online just to try it is not worth it as I just have one option in the end.

You can message me on FB if you are willing to help me.

#10

So I made my way back to that shop yesterday (it’s actually like a 30 minute bus ride), and purchased two of the bachi, one for 5000 yen, the other for 6000, but it came with a silk sheath that snaps closed. They could use a little polishing, but they’re the real deal. The corners are a little worn, but not chipped, and they’re both around the same size as the one I purchased from Katoh, which is a longer than average handle length, I think. I’m not sure they’re quite as well made, but I don’t know enough to actually evaluate that. One is the darker bekkou and doesn’t snap as much as my other two when playing. That said, they both seem to have been a bargain, and will be good for practicing with.

There was another I looked at very hard, you can see it above with the wooden handle. The tips were in good shape, but the bekkou was very thick and didn’t seem to have much flex. What worried me though was the piece that was removed from the handle to add the weight wasn’t sitting flush with the rest of it, like it hadn’t been stored properly and the wood had expanded and contracted some. Otherwise it was very beautiful, anyone have experience with wooden handles?

I’d rather not get tangled up in shipping bachi overseas, but if anyone wanted to meet up in-country at some point and wanted one, I would be open to picking one up. For everyone’s reference, the store I found these at was called Hard Off, which is a chain in the same family of stores as Book Off, only less common and with a more unfortunate name. There might be more cheap bachi sitting in Hard Offs around Japan, I don’t know how uniform their prices are.

#11

One of my bachi has a wood handle. If you’ve got a shamisen shop anywhere near you, you could probably take that one in and they could fix it for you. Recently the two pieces of mine started to come apart a bit, and while I was at the shop recently looking for a new bachi the guy was just like “I can fix that!” and did it for free.

#12

Let me know if you’re kind enough do get a fellow Bachido member one and ship it overseas :slight_smile: if not, could u let me know the shop information? Name, adress, phone number…?

#13

Anderson Guimaraes, if you read carefuly Eric Johnson’s reply to my message, you’ll see that he prefers not to ship bachi overseas as the rules are different in some countries and it can be illegal to send it because it is tortoise shell. Same thing with Ivory.

Personally, I understand this very well, I’m just trying to figure out a way to get another type of bachi than wood. At first, I thought that Eric was in the US so this is why I asked but it seems that he lives in Japan so it doesn’t change the rules… But I just noticed that the area is written up in the posts.

#14

Everything that Jacinthe stated is correct. The best way to buy a bachi is to do so while visiting Japan, even though that’s not something most people can do without long-term planning.

My faux-bekkou bachi served me well for quite a while, but as things are currently, the material has serious limitations, it’s not as flexible as most true bekkou bachi, and therefore makes some intermediate level techniques harder than they ought to be, and only comes in one size, which may not be optimal for your hands.

I was told when I bought it, and asked if it came a little longer, that if I bought a bekkou one, I could get just about any handle length, width, weight, and spread on the bekkou plectrum itself that I wanted, but otherwise that was it.

If you go somewhere that has a selection of bachi, new or used, you can select one that is optimal for your hands.

That said, I’ll keep my offer open to deliver one of the recycle shop bachi to anyone in Japan if they wanted to do a meet-up at some point. Right now, I think the best ones left are the wooden handle one that might need some minor repair on the handle, and has quite thick bekkou, so not very flexible, but it is very pretty. The other is smaller than average, maybe designed for a child? If someone has smaller hands it might be good. The bekkou on that one seems quite good going by the lighter=better method. Didn’t test the flex.

© 2020 Kyle Abbott