Ogata Koi Farm: Inside Japan's One-Stop Koi Farm

Ask most Japanese breeders what they are known for and you get one variety, maybe two. Ask Mr. Ogata and the answer is everything. That is not bravado. Ogata Koi Farm, in Kurume, south of Fukuoka on Kyushu, is one of the biggest operations we visit, with a staff to match, and it breeds all the main varieties on one site. Zak's summary on camera: "Everything. One-stop shopping."

The 2026 winter trip ended there. It was Zak's first visit in person, after knowing Mr. Ogata for a while, and it was planned as one day. It took two. "He has so many choices." This is what those two days looked like, plus a conversation with his son Yusuke from a later visit, when he walked us through seven of his own koi.

A farm that does everything

Ogata sits a long way south of Niigata, which means a warmer climate and a longer growing season. It also sells out early: "he sells out pretty fast in October, November, December," so by the time we arrived after the All Japan Koi Show, most of the year's stock was gone.

What was left had already been through senbetsu, the sorting. Every breeder splits a year's fish into tategoi, the ones he keeps to grow on, show or use as parents, and tateshita, the ones that didn't make that cut and are for sale. At Ogata, tateshita is still a high bar. The best of them were pulled into a separate pond for us to go through, and as Zak said of the tategoi we weren't allowed to buy, "you have to really fight for it in order to get it."

A lot of other breeders trained here when they were young. Mr. Ogata was one of the first Japanese breeders to export koi, more than thirty years ago, and younger breeders came to learn how he did it. Some of them went on to specialise in one variety. He never did.

Picking tosai, one at a time

Other customers had arrived before us, so they went first. "They came first, so it's only fair." Once they had chosen from a pond, Zak could go in after them. Then it was a clicker counter and a net, pond by pond.

He chose 50, cut that to 20, and finished with 21. "In October, a lot of this is just going one by one. It's not as exciting. When you watch a video, it's all sped up." Afterwards: "I'm taking a little brain break, 'cause that was a lot. When you just focus on the fish for so long, you kind of have to take a little break and unfocus your eyes."

Some of the calls he made on camera are worth keeping:

• Red under the skin of a Kohaku. He liked the fish and was about to take it, but there was secondary beni showing under the white. "That probably won't go away. In fact, it might actually come out more, and then it'll look really blurry. It never comes out well in a Kohaku." Not chosen.
• Sumi under the head. "The sumi is going to come out on the head right there. There's always a chance I'm wrong, but if it's under, most likely it will." Not chosen.
• Red on the gills. Not great for a show koi, but "if you want a really nice Kohaku and all it has is a little red going over the gill, you're getting a good deal."
• A split head. One Showa with good kage sumi and the pattern split right down the middle of the head: "Very, very cool. The sumi will come out more. There will be someone who likes it for sure." Taken.
• Body over everything. "It's really, really good body, though. It's hard to say no."

How Ogata films koi for auction

Ogata runs an online auction in the middle of February, and the week we were there the team was filming for it. The setup is professional: lights, bowls, one station for video and another for photographs, each fish briefly sedated so it sits still. The day we watched they were doing two-year-olds. The day before had been the best of the tosai. Zak, looking at a nisai in the bowl: "Actually, maybe I should have bought more of those kinds."

The azukari greenhouse

The biggest building on the farm holds fish that don't belong to Ogata at all. Azukari means a koi the farm keeps and looks after on the owner's behalf. Most of the fish in that greenhouse were bought as tosai or two-year-olds, at the auction or in person, and have been growing out there year after year since. Some are huge now.

Two things about how Mr. Ogata runs it. First, the azukari koi stay in the greenhouse rather than going into mud ponds. Mud ponds have their arguments: more natural, more minerals, bugs to eat, colour that comes up well. But a fish that gets sick in a mud pond can't be seen or treated. In the greenhouse it can be pulled and looked after straight away, and for a fish that belongs to a customer, that matters more. Looking at the results, Zak didn't think they were losing much: "these fish look pretty amazing." They are also, in his words, so relaxed that "they just wait for the food to roll into their mouth."

Second, every autumn Ogata holds its own koi show for the azukari owners, the Ogata Cup, and the day after that, an auction. "He has his own koi show just for the people who have koi left here. That's a very good businessman. Very smart." The office walls carry the photos, including a visit two years ago from a princess of Thailand, who had seen Ogata koi in Bangkok and decided to come and see where they came from.

How Mr. Ogata got here

Zak asked him how he got into koi. The answer: "I just like koi." It started in high school. After graduating he went straight to Niigata and trained at a koi farm there for five years, then came home to Kyushu and started his own. He was early into exporting, and the business grew with it. Now the sons of the breeders he trained alongside come to Ogata to train.

He is 70. He has retired, officially: his wife is the company president and he is the chairman. He was in the ponds the whole time we were there. "I don't think much has changed since he's retired."

What Yusuke Ogata looks for

On a later visit, in harvest season, Zak sat down with Yusuke Ogata, Mr. Ogata's son, who picked out seven of the farm's koi and explained what makes each one good. The Shiro Utsuri has its own post. The rest, briefly:

Showa. The first fish was the Grand Champion of the Ogata Cup the year before, about 70cm at three years old, from Isa bloodline, and the point Yusuke made with it was about motoguro, the black at the base of the pectoral fins. This fish barely had any. "Some people say motoguro is important, but some people say it's not so important if the fish quality is high. If it has this quality of beni, sumi, skin, I think it's not so important if it has motoguro or not." The beni was clean with no dark spots and no bleeding at the edges, and the sumi was already settled: "We sometimes say it's a finished koi. It's black everywhere. Nothing is coming."

Ginrin Showa. The opposite case: a three-year-old that was not finished. The sumi that had come up was lacquer-black and the kiwa was, in Zak's words, kamisori, "like someone shaved it with a razor." What Yusuke was buying was the future: "When I imagine its future, sumi will come up, and if it comes up with this quality, it's really nice." He also said something you don't often hear from a breeder: "I don't really like heavy sumi. But that's my preference. Heavy sumi is okay, but the sumi has to be good quality."

Benigoi. An all-red koi, and one of Ogata's specialties. Zak admitted that a lot of Americans see "just a big goldfish"; in Asia they are very popular, and everybody asks Yusuke which Benigoi is good. His answer is the same one his father gave Zak the year before. The most important thing is the fins. "Our Benigoi is totally red, all the way through. No white here, no white here." Any fish with a small white patch on a fin is taken out at sorting, and the belly has to be red too, not white. On top of that, no mura, no uneven red anywhere. The fish he showed was five or six years old, somewhere between 80 and 90cm, and the same deep red from nose to tail. The full checklist is in how to judge a Benigoi.

Black Budo Goromo. This is the story of the visit. Ogata's really black Budo Goromo line started with a trip Mr. Ogata made to Indonesia years ago, where he saw a Goromo blacker than anything in Japan. He wanted to breed it, but you can't bring a live fish from Indonesia into Japan. So he asked an Indonesian customer to collect milt from a male and send that instead. He crossed it with his own females, then crossed the offspring again, and again, until the line was as black as the fish he had seen. The Goromo Yusuke showed us went through the auction and was bought by an American customer; Ogata then asked whether they could use her as a parent, and he agreed. "When we started to spawn with this Goromo, the Goromo quality became so high. Just from her." Two of her offspring were in the next bowls: one took Best in Variety at the International Junior Koi Show, the other the Tsubaki prize at the All Japan Koi Show, at around 20 to 25cm.

Zak's reaction was the right one: "I'll buy some of your tosai this year. Of course."

Asked for advice for hobbyists, Yusuke didn't talk about beni or sumi. "I am a koi breeder in Japan. I feel the most important thing to have koi is enjoy." Zak: "People get so stressed about I have to win, I have to win, and where's the best koi. Maybe sometimes they forget to enjoy."

What we buy from Ogata

Our Jumbo Shiro Utsuri tosai come from Ogata, where the southern growing season gives them a head start on size, along with the fish Zak picked out one by one on the trip. Everything older is listed individually with video of that exact fish, its size, sex and year born. Tosai are bought both ways: many we pick out of the pond ourselves, as above, and others come as a mix we chose at the farm, in which case the listing covers a group of young koi rather than one named fish.

Mr. Ogata invited us back in March. The timing is tight, right before the All American Koi Show, but we will be back. If you want to see how the rest of the trip went, start with how buying koi in Japan actually works, and if you are buying young, read our guide to buying tosai first.

Browse our Ogata koi, our Showa and Goromo, or every koi we currently have available. Live koi ship Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anywhere in the USA.