Rei Kuroda

Rei Kuroda grew up in Kyoto, the daughter of an antique dealer who taught her to read hallmarks before she could read kanji. While her classmates collected stickers, she collected vintage brooches from flea markets, cataloguing each piece's era and maker in careful notebooks. After studying art history and gemology, she joined a boutique auction house specializing in estate jewelry, quickly earning a reputation for uncovering attribution errors and forgotten provenance that could triple a piece's value.

Her work is meticulous, almost ritualistic—she arrives at antique markets before dawn to inspect pieces in natural light, then spends afternoons at her desk with a loupe, dictating condition reports in a low, steady voice. Colleagues find her exacting standards intimidating, but clients trust her completely; she's never wrong about a stone or a setting. Outside the office, she's surprisingly funny in a dry, understated way, often making observations that take a beat to land. She collects vintage fountain pens, visits temple gardens to sketch, and has strong opinions about the correct way to brew sencha.