Is now the time to buy Japanese tools?

Any time is the time to buy them, as long as you're buying them used and directly from japan's version of ebay. 

Well, if they're going to be used (I don't mean not new, but rather if you're going to use them vs. collecting them). 

I vaguely recall someone sending me that presentation - it's errant. Wilbur Pan was showing the picture of the carbides. 

O1 steel has carbides that are probably about 1 with some being maybe 2 or 3. https://i2.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1000X-O1.jpg?w=750&ssl=1

that is a micrograph of O1 - i've never actually seen carbides that coarse in O1, but it could've been that reducing them wasn't a priority because it's often used for dies where it doesn't matter. 

Japanese white 1 almost certainly has iron carbides up to 4 or 5 microns - the closest thing to white 1 available here is 26c3, (another from knife steel nerds) made by Voestalpine Uddeholm (sister company of the maybe more recognized bohler). 
Note the white bits - iron carbides. 

A2, which suffers from mostly fine carbides but disparate large chromium carbides. 
https://i2.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/A2-cropped-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C582&ssl=1

blue super:
https://i2.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Blue-Super1-resized.jpg?resize=768%2C585&ssl=1

Ghee, see some similarity there? The blue steels often don't have uniform carbides. I paid a lot for a super blue plane years ago and it seemed like the edge always had defects. that large carbide is why.

Blue itself has some of this - it's got a fair bit of tungsten was the carbide of choice in the old days because it dissolves and is broken down at regular forging temperatures, except that it doesn't seem to happen that way in practice. 

So, a couple of points - 26c3 has iron carbides that are there, but they don't really break out. It's a steel intended to be sold for straight razors and then I guess anyone else who will buy it. It's essentially a cleaned up version of the carbon steel that's in nicholson files, and that or something similar can be bought as 125cr1. These steels are never going to go away entirely because they have other uses that have nothing to do with knives, tools or razors. 125cr1 is apparently a good steel for pipe of some sort. 

26c3 is about 1/3rd the cost of hitachi white 1 and is in my experience, at least as good. I think what Hitachi is suffering from is the demand for white steel is intermittent, the market is small and when they make a melt, they can't sell it all quickly. There's hoarded stock among toolmakers in things that they like, so just because some guy is making 4 plane irons a day, it doesn't mean he's buying steel. You, me and everyone else can just go to the internet and buy 26c3 and voestalpine is making it in the US. I doubt it requires any charcoal and it's superb, better than anything else I've had the opportunity to use in a chisel and almost identical characteristics in a chisel or on the stones. It costs me about $50 to get enough of it to make a set of five chisels. It costs me about $180 to get white 1 from NJSB to make chisels - there's a premium attached to it. 

There are some other long touted reasoning traps in this presentation - that "the iron costs a lot more in a japanese plane, and that's the important part of the plane, so you get a better plane if you spend a higher % on the iron". 
Also, Nakano (I have two nakano planes and had a third in the past) sells for about $500, but not in japan, just to us from retailers. At some point, IIda attempted to sell nakano's stuff for about $775 per plane. These figures are almost made up as a retailer goes - nakano is very unlikely to get a large fraction of that $775. I bought the two nakano planes that I have for an average of about $175 from japan, both new. They were being dumped by IIda on a back end ebay page  - iida is out of business now and left customers in the lurch. I think he was making a few bucks selling on ebay and trying to find people who would pay the high prices on a second front - two front war, the people doing battle against the $775 lose money, but if they had a good experience, that's up to them. the tools are essentially unsellable, though, for any sizable fraction of the original purchase. 

Now, the demand thing - the demand for tools has been high among euros and americans. it's becoming a tourist market, so to speak, not one of great demand and diminishing supply of makers - for a long time, the makers have had trouble getting their wares to the market because the key in getting tools to market seems to be distribution, not really seeking the best maker and that person's stuff sells everywhere. The job doesn't pay enough for an apprentice to take on the whole apprentice thing and I know a guy who worked for a japanese master - the pay in that case wasn't much and the master's attitude was that it was a privilege to be an apprentice for the better part of a decade. there will be makers of japanese tools if there is demand, and if an american makes them or someone in japan makes them and both with care, the quality should be similar. 

And finally, the white steel thing with knives. White steel rusts. Fast. There just isn't the taste any longer for a bunch of carbon steel knives, and there are stainless alternatives that work just fine. if you can't get them in a japanese shaped knife, you can get them in another custom. AEB-L and Magnacut both have smaller carbides than any of the pictures above and both can be heat treated up to about 64 hardness, not 55. Even in japan, the most common entry level stainless (VG10) lands above 60. 

Enormous numbers of false dilemmas. the wrought iron is no longer being made, but as stu tierney put it to me, it's everywhere as scrap due to removal from bridges, and so on. 

here's the reality on the ground in japan:
https://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/f1119344875?conversionType=service_page_search

an old stock plane with a high class ledged dai (70mm, not a small plane) and two extra blades for what converts to $144 for all of it. By the time most people see this, the listing will have ended, but nobody has bought it yet at $144. The irons don't specify what they are, but if it's older, they're probably white steel and the backing steel is wrought iron. they're neatly made. 

Compare this to the insistence that we have limited time to buy the $475 planes marketed to americans. In my experience, no difference - if you haunt something like japan yahoo you can find a very supple looking wrought iron backed blade and a matched subblade and a nice dai for about $100. And if you take the time to find one where that hagane (hard layer) is thin and skillfully done instead of thicker (easier), the plane will be easier to sharpen and probably better than the average $500 or whatever plane you'd come across....well, almost certainly. 

these old stock and antique tools aren't going anywhere. I've bought something like 6 or 8 planes this way, with zero that weren't that great. On the high cost or newer side, I've had less good experience for more money. Some of that is just by chance, but what does a person who buys a $500 plane do if the iron is chippy and undertempered. The answer is, you get a thermocouple and measure how stable your oven is and if it's stable, you temper the iron further in your oven. And if you disclose it, the market has no clue what you did and will never buy the plane. 

If you get a $100 NOS plane that nobody managed to buy or that was picked out of inventory of a closing tool store, you have very little risk.

Added later 07 min 36 s:

I will vouch for something, though - people love the ooh and ahh of this original post on the other forum with the errant facts. It really doesn't seem to matter that it's full of holes. 

What they don't like is someone correcting the info in it if they are partial to the whole topic. 

26c3 and white steel feel different in a tool than O1. They land 2 points or so harder after heat treatment, and the alloying is different. That ends up being spun into yarns about how hard they are to heat treat, but none of them are difficult, aside from the warping that 26c3 and white 1 will display in quenching making it infeasible for the current crop of CNC production makers to offer in solid steel. The fact that there's little alloying in them other than iron and carbon and traces of other stuff is what makes them useful for this subtopic - we all can heat treat them fairly easily. And dealing with warping is done mostly by skill and partially by corrective grinding.