| Imagine
Imagine me and JasPR and Ranskye and Steve and Mickey all live within walking-in-the-snow-distance of each other in the hills of nigata..and we get in a little friendly competition...
let's imagine it was 200years ago... just imagine... travel back in time ...200 years ago...
5 years ago JasPR-san got a carp he called the "spotted-One" to come out of his rice paddy in october. Biy he thought his shite didn't stink all Winter. It wasn't a REAL "spotted" carp..it had like 2 fuzzy areas where the brown was coppery. But JasPR-san wouldn't come back to any of our houses after he had seen the unusual carp we had caught and were keeping for next year's restocking. I had a completely copper carp with with barbels, a much more beautiful fish than that splotchy JasPRsan fishagoi... Mickey-san and Ranskye-san agree late one afternoon after we had been sitting by a roaring fire watching my Copper Queen and tossing back Saki that my Carp was more beautiful..perhaps the most beautiful fish they had ever seen, And that JasPRsan's koi look liked 5-day old dog poop frozen on the snow.
Much better than even the red carp that Steve-san's wife accidentally grilled up and fed to him when he came back from the red - lantern area of the valley. that carp was beautiful... his wife was jealous on two counts... Sometimes my wife here's me in my sleep talking lovingly to my koi...but that is another story...
the point is each year we on this hillside must come up with a carp that is far more beautiful than those on the hillside of Brian-san (spits on ground) or they will laugh at our luck.
It is just something we do to pass the time..but anything you do is worth doing your best...
OK so maybe it didn't happen exactly like that but consider this scenario...
Give me, JasPR, Steve, Ranskye, and Mickey (and another couple of hundred rice farmers) a couple of off-colored carp each...just a little something different showing on them...and then lay down this ground rule...
1. Each year we will breed these carp and will eat all but five of them...the five we keep will be our brood stock for the next year... and the five can be any of the carp we want. Now what are we gonna do....?
Yep we are gonna start playing this up...like the bull fights we have..who has the funniest, most colorful, brightest, best body as far as carrying meat even....you know friendly competition is gonna develop.
just like koi breeding except (now here is why koi DID develop in the outback of Japan, and develop as rapidly as it did)
All the people that breed koi have to kill off all but a very VERY few of them at the end of every Autumn.
HOLY CRAP! Imagine how fast the genetic shift would occur!
All the pet shop koi...killed
All the Show grade koi.....Killed
The ONLY koi to be used for breeding purposes will be the very best... <.01%
no that ain't how it is done by the big boys in Japan..they consistently breed iffy koi hoping to find something..and they hold huge numbers of so-so koi for years before they see whhat they bred....breeding takes a long time nowadays.
back then it was wham bamm thank you maam...
it was breed weird carp get weird carp NOW...they might have thrown away a koi that would have outdone any other koi hatched that year if was kept in a mudpond for 10 years.
BUT THAT WASN'T THE NAME OF THE GAME either...
They were NOT breeding for the future..they were not Breeding for weirdness..they were breeding for food...weird fish were just a by-product...weird fish were not beautiful..they were oddities...just amusing in the Harbest and kept for the helluvit...later the "weird" carp became beauty within the eyes of the rice farmers... they had saki right?
But this is my point....
by killing off 99.99% of the carp EVERY year these rice farmers took "sembetsu" to the stratosphere....all the koi that were available for breeding the next year were special....
Imagine if the breeders in Japan closed their farms and volunteered to do that.... each year they could keep 10 koi to breed from the next year, and their koi would be judged based on how they looked at the end of their tosai Summer, NOT any other criteria..imagine how quickly the "tosai" look would become extreme. Each YEAR the cycle would begin again! not 5-10 years..the final result would be there, right there in 5 months.
And done again based on what they chose right then and there for next year.
And THAT is another reason carp turned into koi way back then, in the mountains of Japan... the "breeding technique" was compressed into the six warm months of the year..and Sembetsu was GOD. | 
03-30-2008
Linear Mode
Similar Threads 
