Breeder: Yamaju
Yamaju is a Niigata koi farm run by Hoshino Shigeyuki. It works mainly in the varieties that sit outside Gosanke — Asagi, Shusui, Kumonryu and Ochiba Shigure — and Hoshino is credited with developing the Yuki Asagi.
Yamaju 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.
Our Yamaju selection is Shusui, plus a Hajiro.
Shusui is the Doitsu version of Asagi, and one of the oldest crossbred varieties in the hobby — a pale blue-grey body with red running up the flanks and a single row of large dark scales along the dorsal line. Because the fish is scaleless everywhere else, that dorsal row is the whole composition: the scales need to be even, well-aligned and unbroken from shoulder to tail. A gap or a doubled scale is immediately visible in a way it never would be on a fully scaled koi. The blue should be clean and cool rather than muddy, and the red below the lateral line should stop in a definite edge rather than creeping upward.
Hajiro, the other fish here, is about as different as it gets — a plain black koi with white fin tips, no pattern at all, and far more striking in a planted pond than that description suggests.
Live koi ship Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anywhere in the USA. Browse all available Japanese koi.