TATEGOI AGAIN!
by Peter Waddington

The word ‘TATEGOI’ can not be found in any Japanese dictionary, it is only a word known today by those in the Koi hobby. Japanese ‘outsiders’ to the Koi hobby have no idea as to the meaning of the word and would look blankly if the word came up in general conversation. To those involved in the Koi hobby, however, it is the single most important word in Nishikigoi and translates roughly as ‘Koi which will become good’ or ‘Koi which will become better’. It is also a relatively ‘new’ word first used in the mid 1960’s by a few breeders of Niigata Nishikigoi. To fully appreciate the meaning of the word one must go back in time to the age before the word was invented, to times before the arrival of the first vinyl bags came onto the Nishikigoi scene. To further understand this let us go back to the very early 1960’s and try to understand the Nishikigoi business as it was then.

In the early 1960’s, Niigata was the only real area where Nishikigoi could be found in any real numbers although a few breeders were starting to produce some Koi in other areas but were nowhere near as prolific as the breeders of Niigata – Hiroshima; Nagoya; Shikoku; Saitama; Shizuoka and Isawa spring to mind here but way back in the early 1960’s Niigata was the only real area where an abundance of Nishikigoi could be found after the October harvests – very little culling was carried out in those times when only deformed Koi were discarded. In those days Niigata was very inaccessible to those travelling from other parts of Japan as there were none of the luxuries of Niigata today which is now served by Shinkansen (bullet trains) and a major freeway. Instead one had to drive by car winding upwards on narrow roads over great mountain ranges and a drive from Tokyo to Ojiya could take some eight hours to complete. Because of this inconvenience few Japanese Koi hobbyists visited the area themselves and instead bought their Nishikigoi from dealers who had made the pilgrimage to Niigata to purchase stocks for re-sale and returned them to their facilities in other parts of Japan. As to the dealers themselves, many originally visited Niigata just to purchase small, salted Carp fingerlings bred by the Niigata breeders as a delicacy for the table and it was only through seeing Nishikigoi being bred in the area decided that perhaps they could transport some back alive to their locality to see if they could be sold to local people with garden ponds to join their goldfish.

In these early times these carp dealers often found themselves hopelessly lost in the Yamakoshi mountains on many occasions – roads today are narrow and twisted, back then they were little more than mud tracks! It was common in those days for a dealer to regularly buy the total production of a particular farm on a yearly basis and the farm would not sell to another dealer until their regular dealer had visited them first. The carp dealers would stay overnight at the breeders house before loading the Koi the next morning to then make the long journey back to their homes in different areas of Japan. The Nishikigoi were then put on display and sold to the new generation of ‘Koi collectors’ who cared for them in their garden ponds. Transportation from Niigata to other areas of Japan was by a very early version of the zip-top oxygenated containers widely used today; these early containers were made from wood.

December/January ‘07-‘08 Issue - Subscribe now!