Breeder: Kawakami
Kawakami Koi Farm is in Uragara, Ojiya — Niigata, the mountain region where nishikigoi were first developed. The Kawakami family has been in koi at Ojiya since the late 1920s, when the business started out in wholesale, and moved into full-scale breeding in the 1970s. Like most Ojiya farms, Kawakami lost parent fish and field ponds in the 2004 Chuetsu earthquake and rebuilt afterward. The farm today runs around 80 mud ponds.
What makes Kawakami interesting is that they are not a Gosanke farm. While most of Niigata's best-known breeders compete on Kohaku, Sanke and Showa, Kawakami built its reputation on the varieties alongside them — above all Goshiki, which is the fish the farm is known for worldwide and which has taken the Kokugyo Prize at the All Japan Nishikigoi Show. They also breed Kumonryu and Beni Kumonryu, Shusui, Asagi, Shiro Utsuri, Kujaku, Koromo and a range of Doitsu forms — roughly twenty varieties in all.
That focus shapes how their koi look when you buy them. Kawakami breeds fish that already read clearly as tosai and nisai, with pattern and colour you can judge young, rather than fish that need four years before they show what they are. For anyone buying their first serious Japanese koi, that is a meaningful difference — you are not being asked to buy on faith.
Kawakami koi available now
Everything here was imported by House of Koi. We chose almost every older koi individually at the farm, and those are one-of-a-kind: each listing carries video of that exact fish with its size, sex and year born, and closes when that fish sells. Tosai are bought both ways: we pick many out of the pond ourselves, 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.
Kawakami Goshiki are worth knowing how to look at. A good one shows a clean white ground under the netted blue-black reticulation, with the hi sitting crisply on top rather than bleeding into it — and the Ginrin version adds a layer of reflective scales over the whole pattern, which is why Ginrin Goshiki is one of the most striking fish in the hobby.
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