KYOTO -- Some adventurers explore shipwrecks for lost treasure. Jay Gregg makes a living "uncovering" treasure simply by recognizing it before anyone else does.

Gregg, an antique exporter based in Kyoto, began his business when he arrived in Japan in 1980. His sister-in-law had asked him for a kimono. "I got her one for $20, and I thought, 'An all-silk kimono for $20? That's a good deal!' So I started buying up kimono," the Colorado native says.

Nowadays the stakes are higher. "Japanese baskets go for up to $24,000 in the U.S., and you can buy them for about 90,000 yen here. Last year baskets were the thing, the year before that it was bronze okimono [figurines]," he explains. "Things go in waves. Sometimes you can't give something away, and then another time you can't get enough of it."

In the beginning, exporting was just a way for Gregg to stay in touch with some of his college friends. "We lost money for the first few years. We did trunk shows with kimono, but it just didn't come together.

"But it grew into this," he says, indicating the interior of his Sakyo Ward home, furnished top to bottom with beautiful antiques. He and his wife, Kyoko Maeda, send a 12-meter container filled with Japanese items every few months to the U.S. Antique kimono, scrolls, stone lanterns, pottery, furniture, screens, dolls and other items all go to their Seattle shop Lyric, run by partner David Carlson and four employees.

As one might expect, there are endless details that an antique exporter must be familiar with. "You can really get taken to the cleaners if you don't know your stuff. In Korea, for example, they make excellent fake antique tansu (chests of drawers). The Japanese are so good at repairs that it's easy to not notice flaws, but they reduce the value of an item considerably."

Most of Gregg's goods come from gyosha, ground-level wholesalers. "The hard thing is building a good network of suppliers who know what you want," he says.

Though auctions in the U.S. are cheap and open to the public, Gregg says auctions in Japan are expensive, clannish, closed to those without a difficult-to-obtain license and risky. "You only have an instant to decide whether to bid on something; you just have a few seconds to spot if, say, a scroll has been repaired, whether it's done on paper or silk, or is a print."

On the other hand, bargains can be found at big temple markets, and one can examine the goods for as long as one wishes, he explains.

As the popularity of Japanese design and antiques booms and the number of traditional homes remaining in Japan rapidly decreases, one would surmise that opportunities in the Japanese antiques market would have reached a plateau. Not so, Gregg says. "In the old days, the manner of saving was for people to keep a third of their wealth in money, another third in property and the other third in cool stuff. So we have all this cool stuff today."

Don't Japanese people want all this cool stuff? "There's certain Japanese things that only foreigners would be interested in," he says, "and that's where I come in."

What kind of things would that be? For example, things that are too bold for Japanese tastes but for a foreigner sum up a certain Japanese spirit, like a byobu (folding screen) with a boldly painted dragon flying across it. Many religious items in particular are undesirable for Japanese because cultural mores hold that these things should be purified through burning. Even such things as Japanese dolls are unlikely to be bought secondhand by a Japanese because they are believed to have spirits of their own and so should be burned at the end of their "life," or otherwise properly treated.

"These lacquered tables are almost identical," he says, pointing at two attractive low tables for incense. "This one is from a home and therefore much more expensive than that one, which is from a temple. No Japanese person wants to buy the one from the temple, but in the U.S., people will pay much more for it than the other."

Speculating by buying what no one else seems to want can backfire. "I found this nice, round lacquered box, and I couldn't figure out why no one was interested in it; I thought it might be just right to put things in. Another Japanese dealer looked at it and said, 'Only a foreigner would be interested in a head box.' It was made to carry severed heads!" he laughs.

On several occasions he has found gold or diamond rings, and even a pearl necklace, in the secret drawers of tansu. The occasional major oversight seems to be just a part of the trade: "Once we overlooked what was written on the side of a piece of pottery's wooden packing box. We sold the piece for $20 and found out later it read 'Made by Living Nationald Treasure . . . '!

"But that was better than the best advertisement we ever did, as everyone heard that story," he laughs. The trick is to minimize such mishaps through knowledge, and Gregg says that he is studying constantly.

"There's a specialized vocabulary that goes on forever, and every piece has a million stories -- that's one of the greatest parts of the business. I study by talking to old people: 'What's this? Why's it so expensive?' They know everything. It's amazing how much people used to know, and scary when you think how little people know now."

While he believes that antique Japanese decorative arts, particularly the mingei (folk art), are the best in the world, he also thinks modern Japanese arts and crafts lack the breadth and depth of quality that art here was once expected to have.

Success in the antique business notwithstanding, Gregg's real passion is music. He leads a dual life: Aside from collecting antiques, he travels the country playing banjo and fiddle in a folk music duo with singer/guitarist Tomoyuki Takaishi, and with a local Irish band.

Japan and Gregg are a good fit. "It's fun here. I haven't had a boring moment since I arrived."