Izumiya Koi Farm

Izumiya is the Yamabuki Ogon farm. Ask anyone in the trade who makes the best metallic yellow koi and you get the same answer, and the farm's own list of main varieties runs Kohaku, Sanke, Showa, Aigoromo, Yamabuki Ogon, Mukashi Ogon and Shiro Utsuri. If you want a Yamabuki with clean, even fukurin that will keep growing past 80 cm, start here.

The farm is in Minaminigoro, Ojiya, and is one of the oldest names in Niigata. Ichiro Mano, the founder, was a cattle broker who opened a general store called Izumiya (the area has springs) and dealt in koi on the side; he is the man a young Manabu Ogata apprenticed under in the 1970s. Senichi Mano, the third-generation head, built the brand. An Izumiya Kohaku won Grand Champion at the 14th All Japan Combined Nishikigoi Show in 1982, and in 2001 Senichi took Grand Champion at the Niigata Nishikigoi Show with a ten-year-old Kohaku of the farm's Tomoin line. He went on to chair the All Japan Nishikigoi Promotion Association. His son Ryu Mano runs the farm today.

Izumiya fish are bred the old way: natural spawning, mud ponds ahead of greenhouses, pond bottoms fertilised the way a farmer builds a field. Senichi's own line is that his koi are plain as tosai and win as adults; the local word is gotari, the naughty kid who turns out fine. The growth and the thick beni come from the Tomoin bloodline, which the family has kept and refined since the 1940s.

Do not expect flashy tosai. Buy an Izumiya for the fish it will be at five years, and buy the Yamabuki before anything else. ChampKoi imports koi from Izumiya Koi Farm.