Page 51 - Koi Net - On-Line Koi Magazine - Issue 68
P. 51
MARTIN SYMONDS AND JAPAN KOI EXPORT – also had our own packing station to pack and ship the
BACKGROUND koi from nearby.
I have been very fortunate to have been coming to MORE AND We would spend many months in the mountains
Japan since 1981 to buy koi, looking back now I didn’t throughout the years spending time with the breeders,
realise till many years later how fortunate I was to be MORE PEOPLE buying the majority of their koi and shipping them to the
able to do that. At that time very few foreigners had JOINED US ON UK and Europe. It also started to allow us to offer
come to Japan to buy koi. Little did I know how those people to come and join us in Japan on buying trips,
early trips would change my life. During the rest of the BUYING TRIPS and over the next few years more and more people
1980s I would visit Japan twice a year in the spring joined us.
and in the autumn and occasionally someone would
LITTLE DID I join me on those trips to buy koi. Over these years only At first it was dealers and wholesalers and then they
a handful of people came to Japan, it wasn’t until the would ask to bring hobbyists as well. In the early 1980s
KNOW HOW late Michel Capot from Belgium came to me to ask for when I first went there was no western hotels in the city
THOSE EARLY help in 1993 to start a new company based in Japan of Ojiya, but by the 1990s there was one and then soon
called ‘Koi Ichi Ban’. This would allow us to bring so another one so this allowed us to bring more and more
TRIPS WOULD many more people to this area. Not only did this make people to visit. Our close relationship with the breeders
was unique, they realised and appreciated the amount
CHANGE MY us become the largest exporter of Japanese koi Unloading thousands of koi we were selling and the amount of people we
around the world, it also allowed us to have our own of boxes of Koi in the
LIFE 100-year-old house in a village called Kataki and we UK in the 1990s. were bringing to buy their koi.
Martin selecting Koi in
the rain in the 1980s.
Not many fish farms
had fish houses.
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