I refer of course to the recent earthquake which has devastated the Koi business, and the lives of the people living in that region of Japan. There have also been confirmed outbreaks of Koi Herpes Virus amongst some of the Koi farms there. Any event such as these is bound to cast a shadow on a wonderful hobby, and there is no doubt that Koi Keeping is going through a tough time at the moment.
Never the less, having re-read this article for the first time in a few years, the vivid memories of an unforgettable journey are something I hope you will enjoy reading.

The trouble with buying Koi.

What is the trouble with buying Koi? The answer to that may appear in due course.
It is difficult to convey an accurate impression of Japan in a few words. I really did not expect to be able to visit the home of Koi keeping, and it has left me with some wonderful memories of the country and the people we met, including some of those almost legendary beings, "THE BREEDERS". Most of the top breeders are wealthy men, but generally speaking, they don't put it on show. They have modest houses and very often drive small pick up trucks, and look like farmers.
But the Koi.....
I was talking to one of the guys from Tewin Mill in the restaurant one evening and I asked him what he thought of Japan. He told me that whenever he was there, the same two words came to him as a description of what he felt. They were "Wow" and "Mmmm". I have to say that from my very brief encounter with Japan, I cannot disagree with him.
I don't intend to give a blow-by-blow account of our visit to Japan, but just describe some of the more memorable moments.
Our flight was an hour late leaving Heathrow on Saturday afternoon, so that meant that everything else that day was obviously affected. It didn't hold us up; it just meant we had to rush to fit everything in. Once off the plane, 13 hours later, at Narita airport we boarded the express train to make a connection with the famous Bullet Train, or Shinkansen as it's known there. This is a magnificent piece of transport engineering. The proper name for it is the Asahi Max 322 Superexpress. The number stands for 322 kilometres per hour, which is just over 200 mph! This train is so smooth and quiet, it is precisely punctual and spotlessly clean, a really pleasant way to travel. The bullet train takes about 2 ½ hours to get to Niigata, which is generally accepted to be the homeland of Koi. At the end of the journey we had a quick bite to eat before boarding the minibuses that would be our transport for the next five days.
By this time we had been travelling for something like 23 hours since leaving our house.
Did we go to the hotel? No. We went straight to a Koi show! This was the equivalent of a section show here in England, and was held in a roadside car park. There were the familiar blue vats holding larger Koi from about 6 inches up. All the smaller fish were displayed in blue plastic buckets. And these buckets were everywhere. All through the villages in Niigata you can see these blue buckets lying around. I think I'm in the wrong business! There were lots of Koi for sale, displayed in ...wait for it, plastic bags! They had been in these bags all day and appeared none the worse for it, but these were generally hobbyist's own fish, not high grade Koi. Prices started at around 10000 Yen, which is approximately £60, not especially cheap.
It was by now about 4 o'clock on a very hot Sunday afternoon, so we then set off for the hotel by way of Mushigame, which is up in the mountains and has probably the highest concentration of Koi breeders, about 700 in a fifty-mile radius, and thousands of mud ponds.
Everywhere you look in Mushigame there are ponds of one description or another. We stopped briefly for a breathtaking view of the area with its acres of mud ponds and forested mountains.
We eventually got to the hotel in Ojiya, which is about 30 minutes drive through the mountains. After settling in to the room we had time for a shower and an hour's sleep before meeting our party to go out to eat.
So what is the food like? Well I have to say that I enjoyed it. Even the raw fish, which is called Sashimi, (Sushi is raw fish that is prepared with rice or other vegetables). Sashimi is bite-sized pieces of raw fish such as Salmon or Tuna and is eaten after being dipped in soy sauce and mustard mixed together. There were a couple of things I would probably not choose to try again, like raw prawns for example, but generally it's very nice. One thing I would never get used to is sitting on the floor with your legs under a very low table. Any more than an hour or so of this and you can't stand up after dinner, with or without the beer! We returned to the hotel very tired and collapsed in bed at around 10.30.
 This was just the first afternoon! And the pace wasn't going to relax very much during the days ahead.
After visiting seven other breeders on Monday, including Igarashi, Hosakai and Marusaka, we finished the day at the premises of Shinoda. This is where I chose to have my first fish bowled for pricing. Hilary and I spotted two Kohakus about 16 to 18 inches long. These would be a little over 2 years old. On these trips, the dealer who is accompanying you acts as a go-between for his customer and the breeder, in my case this was Keith Phipps of the Nishikigoi Centre. I asked Keith if he would get a price for each of these two fish. He inspected my choices and agreed that they were both very good quality Koi, although once in the bowl, one of the Koi was obviously of much higher grade than the other. After inspecting them both for a while, I lost interest in the inferior Koi. You have to understand that although it was not of such high quality, it was still an absolutely stunning Kohaku and I would gladly give it a home in my pond, but against the other one it only looked half as good. The price for the lesser of the two Koi was given as 203,000 Yen, about £1200. I have to say this did not seem unreasonable considering the high quality of this fish.
I asked for the price of the remaining Kohaku and Keith said "It's not cheap". The price was 1.5 million Yen, £9000. Ouch!
Why didn't I buy the first Koi? Good question. I can only say that at the time it felt as though I was settling for second best, even though there was no possibility that I could afford the better Koi. I chose to wait and see what tomorrow would bring. Of course there is always the chance that tomorrow's fish may not be as good, or may be dearer. Should I buy now, or wait?

This is the trouble with buying Koi.

When you are confronted with a selection of some of the best Koi in the world, it is no surprise that you very often cannot afford them. For instance there is a superb Maruten Kohaku for sale at the premises of Miyatora, whom we visited late on Wednesday. It is probably the best Kohaku I have seen in my short Koi keeping life. This Kohaku was in the region of 32" long with superb skin quality and tremendous volume, as near perfect as you could imagine. It is a mere £200,000. It has been this same price for the past three years. Why? Because the breeder doesn't really want to sell it.
Plainly, owning this fish is just a pipe dream, but you will very likely not see a Koi of this extremely high standard and large size in England.
Compare that with a Kohaku that was offered for sale at the very last breeder we visited on this trip, a chap known as Mano. This particular Koi was a 3 to 4 year old, about 24 inches long and absolutely stunning quality. Even Keith Phipps was taken with it, and he has seen many, many high grade Koi during his visits to Japan.
The price of this Kohaku was given as 220.000 Yen, £1300, an absolute bargain considering the very high quality, at least as good as the £9000 Kohaku at Shinoda's.
So why didn't I buy it?
Well, however you look at it, £1300 is a considerable sum of money, for me anyway. If I had not already exceeded my quota of Koi purchases, if I had seen it earlier in the week, if I could justify risking that kind of money on bringing that Koi to England, who knows. I might just have bought it. But where do you draw the line?

This is the trouble with buying Koi.

We went back to Shinoda's twice more during the week. On the third visit, somebody else in the party had my £9000 Kohaku in a bowl as a prospective purchase. When asked of the price, the breeder said 1million Yen, £6000. In 3 days the price had dropped 30%. That Kohaku is still there if you fancy your chances! Why had the price dropped so dramatically? Well if somebody shows interest in their best fish, the breeders naturally try to make a decent (excessive?) profit on the sale. This is after all how they make their living. Apparently, etiquette demands that you should not ask for a cheaper price, you must wait for them to drop the price, to try and bargain with the breeder would cause offence. So it sometimes pays to leave a fish and go back two or three times to the same breeder in the hope that the price will be more reasonable. Of course, you do run the risk that somebody else will pay the higher price and you lose it. But there are plenty more to be found.
During this visit to Shinoda, something happened that we had been waiting for all week. Somebody fell in. This of course is highly comical.
Unfortunately it happened to be me!! I trod on a bamboo mat that appeared to be resting on concrete and my foot went straight through, in up to my ankle. I was a bit concerned that I might have caused some offence to Mr. Shinoda. I had visions of him waving a Samurai sword in my direction, but when I looked round, he was wetting himself!
Bloody inscrutable Japanese, my foot!
One of the more curious things we saw was whilst visiting Marusaka. I was inspecting the contents of one of his indoor ponds when a movement on the poolside caught my eye. There, in a 2-litre pop bottle, was a small snake, about a foot long, sitting in about 2 inches of water. We saw another of these snakes loose at Tanaka's, and they move like greased lightning. Oh yes, one other thing. They are extremely poisonous.
What they do is catch one of these snakes and put it in a bottle as I have described above, where it will stay for at least three months. During this time the water purges all the harmful substances out of the snake. When it is considered safe, the unfortunate animal is then placed in a bottle of Saki, where it eventually dies and rots. The resulting liquid is drunk as a kind of medicinal liqueur, said to give health and long life. Doesn't work too well for poor old Hissing Sid though!
We also got to see (and use!) the most incredibly high-tech toilet you could possibly imagine. This belonged to a breeder called Kase. This toilet had a heated seat, automatic flush, automatic running water into a sink mounted on top of the cistern, a power-operated bidet (proceed with caution), and a panel of buttons to control it all. The mind boggles.
I mentioned earlier that most of the better breeders are wealthy men. It may be because of this that they seem completely indifferent as to whether or not a Westerner buys any of their Koi. They know that a Japanese hobbyist will gladly pay 2 or 3 times what we will for the same Koi. In fact we were turned away from two breeders, courteously of course, because they were selling to some well-heeled Japanese customers.
During our stay in Japan we were leaving the hotel at around 7.30am and visiting an average of seven breeders's premises each day, covering around 100 miles of spectacular mountain roads, and returning to the hotel at approximately 5.00pm.
We did get to see a different side to the English Koi dealers. They are not here for a holiday; it is how they make their livelihood. Although they have a good time when they are not working, driving around the mountains for 10 hours a day, for the better part of a month, is very tiring and they still have to be on the ball when dealing with the Japanese breeders.
Don't mis-understand me, I'm not going soft on them. It's just that I have learned to respect the skills some of them have in picking high grade Koi.
I watched Keith Phipps very closely and he has an extraordinary ability to quickly spot things which escape the untrained eye. These are not skills that are impossible to acquire, but it is an education to see somebody like Keith in action and then hear his explanation of why he made a particular decision on a Koi purchase. It's one thing to listen to a dealer like Keith when he's promoting the good points of a Koi he is selling in his shop. It's quite another when the boot is on the other foot, and he is the customer, buying fish that he must try and sell for a profit. Fancy trying it?
You may have formed the opinion whilst reading this article that the only Koi variety for sale in Japan is Kohaku. That is not the case; all varieties are available if you know where to look for them. Some of the varieties are quite rare, like a Ko-Sui for example, produced by crossing a Kohaku with a Shusui. But most of the well known breeders concentrate on Kohaku, Sanke and Showa because when it comes down to showing Koi, this is where they earn their reputation amongst their peers. If they can win a major award with a Go-Sanke variety, particularly a Kohaku, it gives them great credibility and will give them the chance to sell their high grade Koi at higher prices (of course!).
I mentioned earlier that it is quite possible to make big savings on some Koi when the breeder decides to lower his prices. Conversely, he may equally decide to increase them.
We paid a quick visit to Hirasawa late on Tuesday afternoon, quick because the light was beginning to fade. This breeder produces the largest volume of high grade Koi in the whole of Niigata, and whilst they are not quite in the same league as the likes of Matsunosuke and Ishihara, the fish he produces are still very good quality, and some of them are enormous, how about a 40" Chagoi for instance?.
We returned to Hirasawa on Thursday because of the limited visit earlier in the week. We were advised by the dealers accompanying us that we should not consider buying Koi here on this occasion because the prices had shot up since the previous visit. So we left.
There was a further instance of price fluctuation when one of the dealers in our party returned to a breeder to collect a fish he had reserved the previous week for the sum of 240,000 Yen.
He was astonished to be told that the price was now 180,000 Yen. The reason for the reduction? The breeder had simply forgotten the original price agreed.

This is the trouble with buying Koi.

So what are my lasting impressions of buying Koi in Japan? Primarily just the sheer numbers of high grade Koi available. Secondly, the beautiful scenery. Thirdly, the huge vacant emptiness of my wallet!!
You may well ask what is the point of going to Japan to buy Koi.
When you visit a Koi dealer's premises in England, I think most people look at the expensive fish first, just out of curiosity, with not much serious intention of buying them.
Well, it's no different in Japan. The difference is that at the best breeder's premises, you are seeing some of the very finest Koi that money can (and sometimes cannot) buy. Even the lower grade Koi at these places are very often a long way ahead, in terms of quality, of what is commonly offered for sale here. Because of this, they are no cheaper than buying here, but hopefully, if you choose wisely, they will be better quality Koi.
And we can all appreciate the finer things in life, even if they are beyond our reach.

That is definitely the trouble with buying Koi.

Would I do it all again?
Mmmm, you bet I would.

Steve Brown