Shintaro mudponds - May 1987

I was chatting with Saito-san the other day and he asked where I'd found the book with the old picture of Shinoda-san, or Ushizo as he's more commonly referred to in Japan it seems.  The book is actually new, in fact published 2 years ago tomorrow, 25th April 2007, I found it in a local Ojiya bookstore.

The book title is 'Furusato Yamakoshi ni (a Kanji I don't know) kiru'.  Furusato means 'old village'.  I'll shortly be joining a group of breeders for a beer, hopefully i'll be able to find out the missing kanji symbol.

I popped into see Saito-san this afternoon wish him a good business trip to the USA next week to visit Sugarloaf Koi and took the book with me to show him.

I'm not sure I'd ever have recognised the view below, despite the fact I've photographed it 100's of times, and spent many hours in the heart of it.

The picture, taken in May 1987, shows some of Shintaro's mud ponds.  The bank along which you can see the figure walking was obviously in 1987 a rice field.  The 3 rows you can see next to him being rice seedlings being grown before being planted out.  This is now one of Shintaro's mud ponds, indeed the pond where these photographs were taken last autumn.

The pond behind the 'hut' was the pond that contained the 39 best Shintaro ake-nisai last year.

You can get an idea from the picture below how it looks today.  The empty mudpond being the one that's the rice field in the picture above.

Tomorrow I shall try to replicate the original picture which I suspect was taken from the bank of mud ponds which are now owned by Kanno Koi Farm.

Just last Friday Saito-san could be found preparing that empty mud pond ready to hold Koi for the coming season.  Exactly what will go in it I've no idea at this stage.

This week Saito-san was still busy preparing mud ponds, this time the tosai ponds in Katsuraya. 

Interestingly, despite the fact these ponds were full of water, they've all been drained to tamp down the sides ensuring they retain water through the summer.