This now being the third day in Japan , im getting real twitchy to bowl some koi , so i was getting a bit worried about the news that alot of breeders cannot be visited yet due to the excessive snow . Last night our agent was ringing like mad as surprisingly alot of breeders have been caught out about how many dealers there are in Niigata and have not cleared the snow from thier premises. ( This might seem strange , but remember how much can fall in a day , and if no one is going round Niigata whats the point of doing it every hour/day ) We arrived at our first appointment and i couldnt be any happier as it was at Maruhiro , this is the guy who i usually refer to as going to the mad hatters tea party .This is no offense , its just the guy is always laughing , has boundless amounts of energy , and is just great fun to visit .I always enjoy going here and today wasnt going to be any differant . Visiting Japan many time over the last few years , i have noticed that the dutch dealers seem to go round together and pool thier buying rsources , normally in the autumn i have customers so it wouldnt really work for me , this time not needing many koi and bearing in mind you only need to visit breeders once i thought it might be time to give it a try . A few weeks ago i called the agent and sugested it , and he laughed and said at last , you listen to me ! So enter Freeso and his customer Robert . Within 5 minutes of bowling koi i could see that we would work well together and soon while there were many larger two year ready for pricing .We started on the better quality koi as thier were many very nice ochiba and gin rin ochiba , and as i had sold all of mine from the previous trip this where i started . Working with my new Dutch friend i couldnt believe how the quantity we were buying affected the price , and we soon had quite a few boxes of better quality koi . The ochiba /gin rin ochiba were all 45-50cm , and all female except one . Being all individual prices it will take some time to get the prices on the website so please bear with me. Sorry about the photos , but i had left the flash gun in the car and although some snow had been cleared it was still a mission getting in and out of the breeders fish house . A quick look through some smaller nisai of equal quality and , some options to think over on some much higher grade nisai , and a handshake on a deal to be finalised later during the week it was time for lunch.