JAPAN • January 26–31, 2019

The time has come for our second seasonal trip to Japan. On Friday, we'll be leaving for Niigata to select our koi —both tosai and non-tosai—for 2019. On this page you can follow all the selection steps and communicate with us.

🇯🇵 Day 1 — January 27, 2019

Good morning! Today is Sunday, but in the Niigata area, every day is a good day for koi hunting. We start the day with a visit to Jagengi : lots of tosai, but the quality/price ratio doesn't convince us. We continue towards Kase through picture-postcard snowy landscapes: the quality of the shearers is very high, but… they've all already sold out. At Yamanaka Ohya we finally found what we were looking for: a top quality Shiro Utsuri among the top Koi. Here are some photos:

We continue to Marudo , Sakazume , and Saito , a promising young breeder. After lunch, we visit Takahashi , where we purchase two boxes of splendid tosai:

🇯🇵 Day 2 — January 28, 2019

It's sunny, which is already good news! We return to Marudo to select some Jumbo Tosai : with the help of his collaborators, it takes us almost two hours to choose about thirty of them.

Then we head to Marusei in search of high-quality Gosanke. Trusting Yoshiyuki-san, we select some real gems:

The afternoon continues at Suda , one of the very few Butterfly Koi breeders in Niigata. We are buying two beautiful boxes:

Finally we visit Aoki , the master of metallic Koi (almost all sold out), and we end the day at Yamazaki with around seventy specimens purchased to offer a wide choice to our customers.

The work seems finished, but there are still two days to go… who knows what the future holds!