Taniguchi Koi Farm: Hiroshima Tategoi, a Split Fin and a White Koi That Waited

Niigata has dozens of koi breeders within a short drive of each other. Hiroshima has a handful, spread out, and Zak's theory on camera was that the distance is why they are good: "In Hiroshima there's a lot less, but they're all really high quality. Probably because they're so separated, they have to be high quality to survive." Taniguchi Koi Farm was the first stop after the bullet train and the flight south, and it was warmer the moment we stepped off the plane.

Everyone knows Taniguchi for Golden Corn, the gold Ki Asagi that is the farm's own variety. It was the first thing Zak ever bought from him, and "it's what everyone wants from him." This visit was about everything else: the tosai houses, the Gosanke, and a fish that stayed white for three years.

Three houses, sorted by future

Mr. Taniguchi keeps his tosai in separate greenhouses, and which house a fish is in tells you what he thinks of it. The first held what he could sell that day. Many of his other houses, he explained, hold koi that are already sold. All he had left from the Golden Corn spawning was Ginrin, the scaled-sparkle version, which suited Zak fine: "last year I didn't get Ginrin, so I'm going to choose a bunch from here." You can either pick fish by hand at one price or take a mix at another, and with a hundred fish in the pond, "choosing by hand is going to take a long time."

The second house held fish he was growing faster. These were siblings of the first group, the same spawning, but the ones he had picked out and was feeding harder, to sell at two, three or four years old or to enter in shows. His own description of them: "they're not that pretty right now. They are future koi." You could see it. Small fish with pattern already running down the flanks that, as Zak put it, "as it gets bigger and fatter, that will come up."

The third house was the best. Zak asked whether these were tateshita, the grade just below a breeder's kept fish, and got corrected: "No, no, no. It's better than tateshita." A Ginrin Kohaku in there drew a long pause and then, "that would do well in a show in the US, for junior koi."

Through all three houses the same thing came up that comes up at every farm. "When they're not as high quality, it's kind of easy to choose. You just try and find the best ones." The hard choosing is in the best house, where every fish is good and you are guessing at the fish it will be in three years. Zak chose one for its body despite its size, one for its pattern, and then did what he does when the breeder knows more than he does: "Hey, choose me koi."

Three that stayed behind

The deal Zak made that morning was for three tategoi, two for a customer and one for us, and none of them left Japan. All three stay at Taniguchi for a year so Mr. Taniguchi can grow them out for the All Japan Koi Show. "We're going to leave him here for a year. Maybe we'll make a video in a year to see how it goes."

Two were Ginrin Kohaku and one was a Showa, and the conversation about the Showa is worth repeating. There was a second Showa in the bowl with more sumi already showing. Mr. Taniguchi preferred the one with less. The black was there under the skin, it just had to come out, and the motoguro at the base of the fins was cleaner. "The other one is like the sumi came out more, but this is a better koi." Then he showed Zak the parents. Zak's reaction to the male: "That pattern. Not just the pattern, the quality of that one is amazing." In the Japanese conversation, the point was that on the male side, the pattern is what matters most.

Surgery in a bowl

One of those three, the Showa a customer had asked for, had a slightly split fin. Mr. Taniguchi fetched a kit. He put sedative in the bowl and waited for the fish to go under, "for the safety of the fish, because you don't want to perform surgery on a live, moving-around fish," cleaned the area right down to the bone, and stitched the fin with sutures that dissolve as it heals. Lifted into clean water, the Showa woke within seconds. Zak's summary: "He's a professional." For a fish bred from those parents and headed for a show in Japan, it was the obvious thing to do; it was also the first time most of us had seen it done.

The older fish

After the tosai came the house of two-year-olds and up, and this is where the point about Taniguchi's range lands. "He's really well known for the Golden Corns. I think a lot of people don't know he produces such good, high-quality Gosanke." There were Sanke Zak called beautiful without qualification, Ginrin Chagoi, Platinum, and a few fish of a newer type he is working on: Cha Utsuri, a Chagoi with black coming in, which Mr. Taniguchi hopes to develop until the sumi covers the body the way it does on a Shiro Utsuri.

Then there was the koi he has had for years. For its first three years it was a pure white fish with an excellent body and nothing else. He kept it because he believed the body would carry it, and one year the pattern arrived. It is 95cm now and has won a string of awards. "That's why you have to have patience in koi keeping." He has a few more pure white ones waiting; with Golden Corn, he said, the pattern sometimes doesn't show until the fish reaches 70cm. The fifty white ones he gave away to a golf course, and what they turned into, is in the Golden Corn post.

He also showed us an 80cm male from a cross he is pleased with, bred to a Matsukawabake, that is throwing all sorts of offspring, including aragoke, the big-scaled fish. Because the Matsukawabake mother changes so much with her sumi, he expects the babies to change a lot too, "for the better, in a cool way."

A rule we didn't know about

Most breeders harvest their mud ponds through October. Taniguchi is not allowed to start until the end of the month. His ponds sit among rice fields, and draining them early would drain the fields too, so the local authority told him to wait until the rice is finished. It is one of those details that explains a lot: where a farm is decides when its fish come out of the mud, which decides when they are sorted, photographed and sold.

How the day ended

With another appointment waiting and a lot of fish still to go through, Zak gave up on hand-picking the Golden Corn and asked Mr. Taniguchi to choose a box for us. "He's a great guy, so I just said, please, you know, choose for me." Something had changed in the Golden Corn this year, too: the fish that usually come with white on the top had not appeared at all, and he didn't know why.

Zak's note to himself on the way out was that he needs to come back in autumn, because the two-year-olds he would have chosen had already gone. The tosai were worth the trip. "We're hoping to win some competitions. Junior koi. We're going to try our best."

Browse our Taniguchi koi, including Golden Corn, or every koi we currently have available. For the rest of the trip, start with how buying koi in Japan actually works; the next Hiroshima stop was Oyama. Live koi ship Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anywhere in the USA.