[Maurice]

Brady, the story of my sensuke kohaku is a long one, January 2003 I went to the All Japan show. After I went up to Niigata and then later travelled south to Mihara to meet up with our friend Naoki. It was during one of the rare occasions they had snow in the Hiroshima area. Naoki drove his car from Tokyo and had planned picking me up from Mihara station, but the weather was so severe he could only get his car off the express way and dump it in a filling station. He phoned one of the breeders we were visiting to explain we were stranded, this was a young breeder called Oyama.

Oyama san said not to worry and he would collect us and take us back to his place in the 4 wheel drive truck. He lives in the mountains, the name of the prefecture escape me right now, weather came in worst, he decided it was silly taking us back to our pre-booked hotel and asked us to stay with him and his family.

Well we ended staying 3 nights with him, he was good enough to ferry us round to the planned breeders and each even we returned to his home. Naoki had pictures of all my koi on his laptop and we spent hours looking through them and discussing their merits. One male koi I owned drew his attention, he was impressed by it’s quality, but said it needed a very special female to pair with, less it may produce many heavy pattern and bengoi babies.

Anyway on the last day of our stay with Oyama san, I was looking in his 2 year old sales pond and asked if he thought he had koi which may make suitable oyagoi for me, he hustled me off to his pond with all his big koi and pointed to a superb tancho kohaku. He explained that my male he was looking at the evening before had many qualities, but the pattern was a little heavy and may pass on to its babies. In his eyes this would be the perfect partner for it.

I looked at the koi and could not see how I was going to be able to afford that sort of quality at that point in time. He went on to explain that he was a breeder of sanke, showa and kohaku, he had bought the tancho as nisai for the express purpose of using it for oyagoi, but during the summer decided to sell his oyagoi kohaku and concentrate on sanke and showa. Well at the time this tancho was in the mud pond growing and stayed there till harvest. He went on to say that the tancho had a small kink in its leading dorsal ray and this stopped it being a show koi, he had bought it from a small breeder who had stuck very closely to the original sensuke line. He thought it was the purest sensuke available?

Anyway he went on to say he was impressed at what I had achieved so far and wanted to help if he could, he said I could have the tancho for what he had paid at nisai. An absolute bargain for me, she was then sansai and 66cm. It was 40cm when he placed it in the mud pond, he thought it would grow very large, but advised me that working on my own, it was better not to try and grow the koi too large, as handling large koi on your own is very difficult, it did not need to be big, it was carrying the genes to pass on.

Anyway that is the story of my sensuke tancho kohaku, sadly I have never found out the name of the breeder. Somehow it got forgotten, it’s hard when having to work through an interpreter.

She's 70 something now, I did not get chance to use her this year, but will next.



Straight from the bag from Japan, Feb 03. I do not a have current photo.

Maurice.