A Sample Of Our Japanese Koi - Tancho

These Tancho are a sample of just one variety of Koi that we have in stock and their famous Japanese flag colouring creates a lot of popularity around them. They're a well-desired fish within the Koi trade and everyone is always after a nice Tancho for their pond.

I once had a customer that said if he could afford it, he would have a pond full of these, and only these! They definitely create a nice calming effect in the pond. 

Hoshikin Tancho

These particular Tancho are from Hoshikin Koi Farm. Hoshikin is one of the best Tancho breeders out there at the minute and you'll no doubt have seen online that they are capable of growing to 90cm +. Hoshikin has really been producing some serious stuff when it comes to Tancho.

These are nisai (two-year-old) examples, you can see they're already a very large size for nisai. The larger one here is coming in at 52cm.

The Maruten pattern and the body

With Tancho, many people strive to achieve the perfect circular head pattern, that Maruten pattern, but without spending serious amounts of money you're going to struggle to achieve that perfection. Really with Tancho, I think a lot of it is about body shape, they are a plain white fish so apart from that head pattern everything you look at is the body. With a lot of Tancho at the cheaper end of the price scale you might find they go a slightly pinky/orangey colour, whereas with good quality examples like these you can see the shiroji (the white) quality and I would expect it to hold that way as well.

With these examples the Maruten pattern on the heads are nice and the beni quality is good, nice and deep, and you can see there are no breaks anywhere. On this example there's a nice rounded pattern, it's not quite central to the head, but nevertheless, a nice rounded pattern, and if you're looking to grow them on to big sizes a body shape like this is very impressive. This one has a nice, wide, big head, big shoulders, and a really nice perfect body line. It would make for magnificent Tancho at 85cm +.

What can go wrong with Tancho?

The main thing that can go wrong with Tancho is loss of the Maruten pattern, but from nisai and upwards I would expect him to start holding out quite nicely. On these examples you can see the depth of the colour is nice and strong, I really don't see that going anywhere.

There are no signs of shimmies coming up anywhere along the body - shimmie is a black dot that can sometimes rise up in certain fish - however, in Tancho if it had enough shimmies it would make for a Tancho Sanke.

As I've already said, the main thing with Tancho is the white shiroji. On this particular one you can see that it is currently slightly yellow, that's because they have been quite heavily fed with colour-enhancing food which always has put a bit of a strain on the shiroji, but nevertheless, it's not bad and I would expect it to come back quite nice and white after a winter or so in colder temperatures. The other two examples here have really held out nicely.

Get in touch for more details

At Perfect Aquatics we've got a large specialist Koi facility and we will always do our utmost to help our customers. If you're looking for a particular variety of Koi or would like our specialist advice on selecting Japanese Koi for your pond, please get in touch and a member of our team will be only too happy to help.