Breeder: Sakazume
Sakazume Koi Farm (坂詰養鯉場), known in Japan by the house name Sakubei, is in Oguriyama, Ojiya, Niigata. Sakutaro Sakazume founded it in 1964; his son Shinsaku came in full-time in 1972 and runs it now. It is a small operation — about six acres, roughly 50 ponds, three people.
Sakazume is a Goromo farm. Budo Goromo and Ai Goromo are the main crop, and the Goromo line here dates to 1991. They also breed Kohaku on the Sakubei line, built on Yagozen stock, plus Showa and Yamato Nishiki.
Goromo is a connoisseur's variety and an easy one to buy badly. It is a Kohaku with a layer of indigo laid over the red — ai — and everything depends on that layer. On an Ai Goromo the indigo edges each red scale in a clean crescent; on a Budo Goromo it pools until the pattern reads like bunches of grapes. Done well it is extraordinary. Done badly it just looks like a dirty Kohaku. Sakazume select their parent fish on the ai before anything else, which is precisely why their name is the one to look for here.
Sakazume 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.
Everything in this collection is Goromo — Ai Goromo, Budo Goromo and Ginrin Budo Goromo — which is exactly the point of buying Sakazume.
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