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12setsofchopsticks · 6 years

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A Post About Goldfish

To be clear: we are talking about the animal, not the delcious cheesy snack.

So. Kingyo--or Goldfish as we say in English--are my favorite animals. I’ve always kept them as pets and loved watching them in ponds. However, since moving to Japan I haven’t quite had the resources to start up my own tank. Sad!

Luckily, Japan loves goldfish too and I’ve had a whole bunch of really cool opportunities to see some really beautiful fish!

To give you a better understanding of my favorite fish, let me tell you a few things about them (For the sake of this blog post, I won’t be talking in scientific terms but will instead use more common language)! The first thing you have to understand about goldfish is that there are essentially three different “kinds” of goldfish that you typically see. Those kinds are:

Common goldfish, Fancy goldfish, and Koi

Common goldfish

(PSA to please not put your goldfish in a bowl like this!)

Common goldfish are exactly what you think they are. Just your regular orange fish, although they do range in color from black to olive to pale yellow and white and everything in between. These are the guys that you see at pet stores for about 15 cents each and they tend to have an (unfair!) reputation of being short-lived and disposable. This is probably because, due to their hardiness, availability and price, they are often used as feeder fish—meaning if you have a hungry predator pet (like a turtle) that requires live food to survive, you probably go to Petco a few times a month and stock up on those 15 cent lil guys. However, given the right conditions (AKA if your lil buddy is living in the proper sized aquarium rather than a miserable existence in one of those so-called “goldfish bowls”), it is not unheard of for regular goldfish to live many years and sometimes grow to obscenely and unusually large sizes.

In Japan, these fish are also famously featured in the festival game 金魚すくい, 金魚掬い( Kingyo-sukui), which means “goldfish scooping.” It’s a common game for children where they use a paper net to catch as many goldfish as they can before the paper deteriorates in the water.

Whatever the children can catch in bowl, they can then take home as their prize! I played this game once and it was a lot of fun, but surprisingly difficult. I did catch myself a friend, but I decided to release it back into the pool with the other fish because I didn’t have a cozy tank for it to come home to!

Fancy goldfish

Oh, these guys are my little loves! Fancy goldfish is kind of an overhead term that is actually comprised of many different varieties of strange-looking goldfish! They have been selectively bred over hundreds of years of fishkeeping to accentuate various bizarre deformations such as bulging eyes, brain-like growths on their heads, and many other unusual traits. However, almost all fancy goldfish can be distinguished by their split “fantail” and more egg-shaped body compared to their common cousins. Similarly to their common cousins, though, fancy goldfish also come in a vibrant multitude of colors, but my favorites are the red and orange ones. While some varieties of fancy goldfish appear kind of ugly and alien-looking, others can be supremely beautiful. I just love these little suckers.

These are the kinds of goldfish that I love keeping, partly because they are truly stunning fish, but also because they have really wonderful personalities (and YES, fish CAN have personalities!). Here is a picture of my beloved pet fancy goldfish (Ryukin variety!), Lips, may god rest his fishy soul RIP.

Fancy goldfish are everywhere in Japanese culture, specifically in art. I often see them on stationary, fans, and other textiles as well and, of course, I always buy things with goldfish on them because I am a huge sucker. Recently, I was super lucky to actually catch a fancy goldfish ART EXHIBIT with Shota!! It was called the Artaquarium (he really knows the way to my heart) and it was so so cool!!

There were dozens of really intricate aquarium tanks with different species of fancy goldfish (there were other kinds of fish too) and I was super fangirling out over them. I don’t think Shota knew what the difference between a telescope eye goldfish and a celestial eye goldfish is (spoiler: Telescopes have bulging eyes that face outward whereas Celestials have bulging eyes that face upwards) but agreed that it was an awesome exhibit.

Koi goldfish

Finally, we have Koi. These are the super big and beautiful fish that you often see in garden ponds. While koi look just like bigger goldfish, they are actually considered an entirely different species that common and fancy goldfish! It’s true that they are both in the same family—goldfish and koi are both species of carp—however, their ancestral heritages are not at all the same! Goldfish were developed nearly two thousand years ago in ancient China by selectively breeding Prussian carp. Koi, on the other hand, were developed in Japan from the common carp and became a popular hobby in the 1820s. Today, there are over 20 recognized varieties!

SO, what is the physical difference? Well, of course if you have ever seen koi fish in a Japanese garden, you might know how enormous they can get. On average, a koi can reach up to about 3.3 feet in length, but goldfish, which are generally smaller, usually only grow to about a foot in length. Koi also have little whisker-like things called barbles at the corner of their mouths which they use to sift around the bottoms on ponds. Koi fish also have a reputation for being much longer-lived than their common and fancy cousins—likely due to the fact that people who have koi often keep them in large ponds with adequate filtration where they can live a happy life mucking about in the silt and detritus, versus your regular carnival fish that you put in a makeshift bowl made from a two-liter bottle of diet coke (yes I did this, but we all make mistakes). Generally, koi have a lifespan of around 50 years but with proper care they can live to be over 100 years old; the oldest koi fish on record was a fish named Hanako who lived to a be a whopping 225 years old! Maybe you are thinking that I am “full of carp” (LOL) because there is no way a fish could live that long! BUT her age was scientifically verified by counting the rings on her scales, similar to how you would count the rings on a tree to determine it’s age.

One time, I was with some friends of mine wandering around a part of Tokyo called Ueno and we just happened upon this enormous and wonderful KOI SHOW. Like, it was this whole giant area filled with 50 gallon tubs of water that all had between one and three koi in them and it was marvelous.

These koi were slightly different than your run-of-the-mill koi that you might see in any old pond—these were competition-bred, show quality koi, meaning that, rather than the <$10 you might pay at a pet store, these guys can fetch a price tag anywhere between $1,000-$10,000. Of course, many things can affect this price, like color, pattern, age, and size. The most expensive koi fish was sold for today’s equivalent of 2.2 MILLION DOLLARS. Let that number sink in for a second. That’s the cost of my college education EIGHTY TIMES; or the cost of a house in my hometown—and a really nice one at that. Not sure if there were any fish of quite that caliber at this event I found myself at, but damn, that must have been some fish.

CONCLUSION / LIFE UPDATE

OKAY so now y’all know everything about goldfish. Congrats on making it through this post, it took me a long time to write. SO LONG, in fact, that I have a very important edit/announcement to make since I began writing this post, and it’s that I finally splurged and got MY OWN fish tank here in Tokyo! Its 60 liters (Liters? What are those?) and it’s the new forever home for two very genki ryukin goldfish. The red and orange one is named Shippo, which means ‘tail’ in Japanese and the little calico is named Sprinkles, which means ‘jimmies’ in Bostonian. They are both slightly (re: very) naughty and love messing up my plants and have also eaten every cleaner shrimp that I have attempted to introduce into the tank ecosystem.

Welcome home, fellas!

#kingyo #goldfish #ryukin #when a hobby becomes an obsession

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