1st appointment today Igarashi Kazuto right up in mushigame. As usual he did not fail to impress the whole group, his quality is magical and i truly believe he is one of the best breeders in Japan. Koi were bowled up and i found myself with a 58cm tancho showa, very happy. Next stop was Tanaka, a whole pond of Tanchos around 30-40cm and as white as you like but very expensive so we moved quickly onto Iwashita who has a marvellous variety of weird and wonderfull selection and again fairly pricey but most of his varietys are hard to find. One particular example that caught our eye was a stunning scaled gin rin hariwake, with an inazuma pattern. While in mushigame we thought we would pop back to yagenji again and see when they were going to harvest again and to our pleasant surprise they had just done a small mud pond. I found a kohaku with a pattern and skin to die for, while customers bought a shiro utsuri and a super clean kikisui.

Heading back down the mountains we stopped at Kawakami to see if they had any matsuba ogons for an order i need, the ones they had were just to small but saw a very nice shusui yonsai that i have put on the go back and look at list. Into Ojiya city and a visit to hasegawa famous for his kohaku, but we still could find the elusive 4 step that our customer wants. With a large shiro on the order book we then went to hosakai round the back of ojiya and was shown a stunning sansai but again just out of our range. Over the top of the mountain and a visit to Oofuchi and things went very well. On our trips the customer always has first choice so when i saw a great sansai shiro one of the group wanted the koi bowled, but it wasnt quiet big enough so into my box it went along with a stunning doitsu platinum ogon.

After that it was every man for himself, steve bought a stunning 40cm tancho sanke, graham an exellant sanke with a superb lustre. not to be undone i found a few orders and koi for the shop, all femake and all sansai, matsuba ogon, tancho sanke, two doitsu hariwakes, then Oofuchi showed us a pond with nearly a dozen tanchos all around 40cm and made me an offer i couldnt refuse so we came away with more koi than we had bought in a few days, HAPPY DAYS as a good friend of ours would have said.

Two boxes of tanchos and a great view over oofuchis mud ponds.