[KoiCop]

Hello Ray,

Here's the pertinent section from the same article explaining how showa came to be:

Near the beginning of Japan's showa era, deep in the mountains of Niigata, a koi breeder named Yamaguchi, who lived in Kogomo, Higashi Takezawa, experienced an accidental koi breeding that produced a unique tri-colored koi to be called showa sanshoku.

As the story was told in 1985 by Tasuke Hoshino of Niigata, a male shiro bekko broke through a pond sep­aration and bred with an asa­gi. This produced the strange tri-colored female koi that Yamaguchi sold to Jukichi Hoshino when it was two years old. A description of the koi indicated it had nose sumi, motoguro on the pecto­ral and caudal fins, the sumi of utsuri, white ground and hi patterns.

Hoshino waited until the koi's fifth year to breed it with a male kohaku, ki utsuri and a shiro utsuri. For three years he spawned the koi and the resulting offspring estab­lished showa as a separate koi variety.

You'll quickly notice, I'm sure, that in this 1985 anecdote the varieties that combined to produce showa are different -- as is the fact that Hoshino was relating the incident and gave credit for the accidental breeding to another breeder.

Interesting, yes?

PS: Thanks, again, for all you do to track down these kinds of oral histories and then try to sort them into a semblance of order. Not an easy task, to be sure.