How to Choose a Kujaku Koi: Buy Them Dark

Kujaku means peacock, and a good one earns the name. It is a metallic koi: a white platinum base, a net of dark scales laid over it, and an orange-red pattern on top, all under a metallic shine. It is also one of the easiest koi to buy wrong, because the young fish that look best in the tank are often not the ones that look best in five years.

This is how we choose Kujaku, mostly learned from two breeders who are known for them: Omosako in Hiroshima and Kaneko in Niigata.

What you are looking at

A Kujaku has three things going on at once, and each is judged differently:

• The beni — the orange-red pattern. Judge it like a Kohaku pattern. As Zak puts it, "it's basically like you're looking for a Kohaku pattern… you want the beni to be a balanced pattern."
• The matsuba — the blue-indigo net on each scale. "When it gets huge, you want it to look beautiful and deep."
• The metallic base — the platinum shine everything sits on. It should be even from head to tail.

A clean head is a good sign. A small white gap in the pattern, which we call a window, is a fault: "It can be a little bit distracting… that little hole." It doesn't make a fish ugly, but it is the kind of thing that keeps a beautiful Kujaku out of the show tank.

Choose them dark when they are small

This is the single most useful thing we know about Kujaku, and it runs against instinct. At Omosako, choosing tosai with Mr. Omosako's help, Zak put it this way: "When they're small, you want to choose them when they're dark, 'cause as they get bigger, they become more and more beautiful… You don't want to buy the ones that look the best small. You want to buy the ones that are going to become the best as they get bigger."

The pattern stays roughly where it is as a Kujaku grows. What changes is the darkness and depth of the scales. A dark young Kujaku tends to keep that depth and grow into it. A pale, bright young Kujaku can look stunning in a bag and then fade into something flat. Of the tosai we bought at Omosako, the one Zak called "the riskiest one in here" was a light fish with an excellent, bright pattern. It might darken. It might not. The rest were dark, "and that darkness is going to stay and just become more and more beautiful as they get bigger and older."

Strong beni that lasts: Kaneko's Kujaku

Mr. Kaneko made the same point from the other side. His young Kujaku don't look as pretty as other farms', because the black is so strong in them. But a lot of Kujaku, as they get older, develop light, washed-out patches in the beni. His don't: when they get bigger, the beni is really strong. "When they're small, they might look a little goofy," Zak says, "but you're always trying to buy the future koi, not just the koi you're looking at."

Kaneko is a small farm deep in the mountains, essentially one man with help from his family, and one of the farms that specialises in Kujaku. We buy Platinum Ogon and Ginrin Matsukawabake from him every year, and Kujaku when he has them.

Show fish or pond fish

The best example of all this was a fish we didn't buy for ourselves. At Omosako, one of our customers bought an 82cm, seven-year-old Kujaku. She is not a show fish. She has a window on her right side, and some of her scales aren't as dark as a judge would want. But her body is outstanding and her beni is deep. Mr. Takahiro Omosako described her as a very traditional two-step pattern with beautiful red and beautifully finished scale edges.

Our customer doesn't care about shows; he loves koi for their own sake. That is a perfectly good way to buy a Kujaku, and often a better-value one. A small fault that rules a fish out of competition can make no difference at all in a pond, and it changes the price.

Omosako is best known for Shiro Utsuri, but their Kujaku are excellent: "their Kujaku are very clean." At the 51st All Japan Nishikigoi Show in 2020, an Omosako Kujaku took Superior Champion, the third-highest award in the show, which is about as high as a non-Gosanke koi has ever placed there.

Buying a Kujaku from us

Every older Kujaku on our site is listed individually, with video of that exact fish, its size, sex and year born. If you are buying young, use the rule above: dark over bright, body and clean head over a pretty pattern, and some patience. Doitsu Kujaku have few or no scales, so they show less of the net, and the beni and the metallic base carry more of the fish.

You can see the Omosako visit, the tosai selection and the 82cm Kujaku in our write-up of how buying koi in Japan actually works.

Browse Kujaku koi for sale, or every koi we currently have available. Live koi ship Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anywhere in the USA.