| I would tend to agree, it depends on your audience. I wouldn't be interested in any of these discussions, just not my personal cup of tea!
Lam
Buying tosai is a sucker's game. If you want to learn about "quality" and how it develops you need to look at thousands of very high quality tosai stock, the parents of said stock and maybe some of their older brothers and sisters to begin to understand how a particular bloodline develops.Also, what the breeder had in mind when he selected the parents to breed together.
Going to a dealers and staring into the tosai vats is nothing more than an exercise in futility. I know, I've personally been there and done that for more years than I care to count (takes my hard head longer for things to sink in)!! These fish are mostly nothing more than Grade A stock the breeder keeps for export, nothing more. As JR says, if you want to see better quality, start looking at the older fish, say, 3-5 years old. You will see the quality the breeder had hoped for from the beginning, so you will see what "quality" really is with regards to conformation, depth of color(s) and patterns. In a lot of cases, the patterns aren't something we Westerners under stand from what we've been taught. The breeder reveres a fish because of the overall "quality" not just pattern - that is only one attribute which is lower on their list of desirable traits than ours. Like Steve C says about a pond/filter - IT'S A SYSTEM!! Well, the overall artistic beauty of a fish is what the Japanese see.
Tony
The difference between buying fish DIRECTLY from breeders like Dainichi versus others who breed from Dainichi only stock comes when the culling is done. Who knows a genetic line better than the ORIGINAL breeder. They have lineage knowledge the others don't necessarily have. So, when they cull, they have a broader base to draw from. If I want to watch a Danichi line showa develop and learn from it, then I would buy directly from Dainichi. I also would not buy a tosai. It would be nisai or sansai. I may even leave it in Japan to grow out for at least one year to give it the best care I could so it has a better than even chance of developing the way it should (I don't want to ruin it before it has a chance-LOL)!! If you really want to compare apples to oranges, Matsunosuke line sanke are used by most breeders in Japan. If you wanted to learn about the genetic line, who would you buy from? Even if the fish were bred true from only Sakai bloodlines. If you would choose others, then why not try Matt McCann's fish at Quality Koi? He uses Matsunosuke bloodline and he is a domestic breeder with lots of potential fish! Might be worth a try as quite a few here have done and can attest to.
Mike |