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Opening the curtains, I was greeted with a dark looking Nagaoka city scene. We had a fair snowfall over night and it wasn't stopping. Heading off down Route 17, which I suppose is similar to our A1 or any other major dual carriage way in the UK, the weather wasn't looking any better, or the driving conditions.
Yeah... Great! Turning off the super important main road...
Much better, the sprinklers doing there job. Driving through this village only take a couple of minutes, and at the other side on the road up to Mushigame, it was back to driving on snow, all the way up past Kaneko, the Yamamatsu tosai house, and Yomogihira (famous for it's Tori gate, onsen resort, and Makoto Tanaka (Marusho)).
Our first stop in Mushigame was the lower Yagenji koi house. Absolutely everything in here was sold and hard not to see why. Excellent examples of Kohaku, Sanke, Gin Rin, Doitsu, Koromo, Kigoi, Kikusui....
There aren't any tosai in this house, so we attempted to get up to the larger house, up the steep drive. This could have been a disaster if the brothers weren't already busy. Owning some form of machinery is essential for most farms.
Again, more sold Nisai and older koi.
But we got what we came for - an excellent mix of tosai for general stock, these will be available in our tosai ponds being built on my return.
The view from the Yagenji fish house is quiet spectacular, even if I did have to hold the camera at arms length to get over the huge pile of snow.
Next stop was Yamazaki, famous for metallic koi, particular Doitsu Hariwake. The farm breeds a massive mix of variety, and more recently is producing nice Goshiki.
First job was to select some good value nisai, I picked some Karashigoi, wagoi and doitsu, some Doitsu Hariwake, Kujaku, a Doitsu Chagoi and then some excellent value Sansai Purachina.
Checking the sex of the larger koi. Ok, I knew at this price I wasn't going to get all female but it's nice to pick in my favour! I picked more than I needed to fill me boxes and put a couple of males back.
Thank you to my customer/camera man for the unflattering pics of my balding head here.
Despite the very nice weather around Yamazaki, Marusei, Chogurou, Miyatora etc, the weather in Mushigame was awful, so we abandoned our final appointment and had an early finish.
I was getting a little worried I might not get the two most important items on my shopping list at this point, what will Day 5 bring?
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