Today was a great day , but unfortuantely ive not been able to sleep again since i arrived , in fact i worked out i had only fours sleep since i left the UK ! This combined with the heat out here nearly ended me having to go back to the hotel , but the decsion was made to muddle on and im so glad i did . First appointment was at Marusei , the water had cleared since the pp it had yesterday , and we set about getting some unuausl varietys for our nisai pond that is priced up at £150each or two for £250 , this is an important thing for me as it is bringing in a lot of buisness from the garden centres , and as someone once told me "todays koi keeper is tomorrows hobbiest ! " . So the idea is unusual , clean and may be some tidy go sanke to get people into the fact that Japanese koi are not as bad value compared to others that are imported from around the world . In these ponds we went through there were Mukashi ogons , chags , mezo ogons , sanke , kigoi , yamabuki , kogani ochiba and many , many others .The breeder was out today so the old man stepped in and it was great working with this legend of Niigata , but we will have to go back as they have a lot of biggetr koi that the father couldnt price up . As we hadnt seen him for nearly 12 hours it was decieded that we should visit Maruhiro to make sure he was ok , and the fact that he was going to let us hand pick through some tosai .Within minutes we had selected one box of sinhgle colour koi for growing on , and a box of all varietys . We were then offered another hand select of higher quality go sanke but had to decline as we had an appointment with Tanaka , so promised to return in the afternoon . Tanaka was once a really big name in the uk ten or 15 years ago , but seems to have been forgotten about , but lately becoming better know for his amazing brood stock for tanchos ! For those in the know , will know he is also know for budo goromo and go snake at extremely high levels . As part of his push for promotion , he has made us a very good offer to select high quality tosai , the price is not cheap , but then quality never is ! We selected 50 tosai to be shipped in two boxes , they were simplay amazing and we are not going to sort them out into differant prices , simply reason is we dont have to as the level throught all of them is very high . Also what he will do for us is selct what he thinks are the best ten , and he will certificate them , but i wont know which ones they are untill they arrive as we diddnt have time to do it today . So a little bonus for one in five of you ! The varietys were mainly kohakau , few snake and the odd koromo .After finshing , the selected tosai were moved into clean water and then i realsied how good these little gems really were , the sizes were about 18cm to 23 cm .From here it was straight back down to see our old friend Maruhiro , he was asking about what we had bought from his brothers farm and i explained about what we were trying to do to sell Japanese koi into the non Japanese market , and he got all exceited and said you need some go sanke cheap then , he pointed at the first pond and said new koi , before we could stop him he had a siene net and a pond of standard but nice nisai had been netted . Some pretty go sanke were caught up so could be added to all the kawarimono we bought this morning . We were then moved onto the next pond ,and i do mean moved on as we havnt asked and thats what its like here , but we wouldnt want it any other way ! This time he started catching up koi without asking us , and i said what are you doing now you now ? , before we knew it he had caught up half a dozen tanchos and gin rin tanchos laughing his head off as he went , Gary san Gary san he kept shouting gettiong more excieted with every one he found ,I then took iover and got some gin rin go snake as well . Whie i finshed off this task he was off again and this time placed some very high quaity go sanke in a bowl , we purchased a sansai sanke from Sadazo blood line with amazing skin quality , the photos dont show this but im hoping the video will , a larger nisai gin rin kohaku , and an amzing female nisai showa produced from Dianchi blood lines . Then we talked about larger koi and he placed a 60cm sansai sanke in a bowl , a long converstaion then took place about how good the koi was to leave in Japan for a coupe of years , the koi is ours to decide wether to ship or leave for Azukari . This koi was no way cheap , but i had to ask for some more at a higher level to compare and may buy more than one ! He said come back tomorrow and i said we may not have time , he shrugged his shoulders and muttered somthing as he walked away , i have a limited understanding of Japanese so had to ask for a translation , it was exactly we will see about that ! As we packed our cameras away and finsihed off our paperwork the fish house was unusally quiet , whats he up to now the agent asked , he come back laughing , carrying a sock and shouting Gary san Gary san , come back tomorrow and make a box up , with that he emptied the sock into a bowl where two small nisai emerged , a stunnig gin rin kohaku and an amazing shusui , we both looked at each other as if to say where the hell did they come from , the craft bugger had done it again , looks like we would be back again tomorrow . Sorry i cant add all the pics today as im kinda in need of somtime time in bed , ill try and get the website up to date as i wake up .Last pic is the 60cm sansai sanke from Maruhiro , once again the pic does it no justice !