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Day 8, Saturday, October 19
Here's me with Tadashi Ogawa of Ogawa Fish Farm. He specializes in shiro utsuri and ginrin shiro utsuri. Since I bought a beautiful ginrin shiro utsuri at the auction, I decided to stop by and visit his farm for the first time. I was very impressed with his shiro utsuris and ginrin shiro utsuris.

Hosaki Koi Fish Farm, at their largest mud pond. It covers an acre, and is 5 meters deep. Home to only 35 very large koi! It's taken days for the pond to drain to the point you see here.

As you can see here, it's an old style Niigata pond, where the water depth is controlled by large wooden plugs hammered into a concrete pipe, visible in the lower right quarter of the photo above. Every day, they go out and pull the next lowest plug.

A green mesh screen keeps the koi in the pond as the water drains.

The last plug is an oversized plug designed to drain the last 24" rapidly. Since it's wooden, it had swelled and required my oversized American body's assistance to remove, for which they were very grateful.

They herd the fish with their long nets to the catcher (that's me), who then places them in the large blue bucket.

That's me with a 32" yamabuki ogon.

Hosakai's son pulls the seine net around.

The pond is so big, that the workers have to help the net at the middle as well as pulling at each end.

The kids are home from school and come visit. If they choose to go into the koi breeding business, they'll be the third generation of Hosokai family to do so.

They're building the corral out of rebar and seine net so the fish won't jump out. There were 400 2-year olds in this pond. (continues on next page)