Taisho Sanke Grade A Koi Carp Cyprinus Carpio

Description

Taisho Sanke Grade A Koi Carp Cyprinus Carpio

The Taisho Sanke (TYE-shoh SAHN-keh), often shortened to Sanke, is a koi with three different colours. A Sanke will have a shiroji (white) base with a combination of hi (red) and sumi (black) markings along the body. It is this pattern that has led to the Sanke often being described as a Kohaku with sumi markings.

In fact, Sanke koi are very closely related to the Kohaku variety. The Sanke variety originated from a Kohaku breeder in the early 1900s. The breeder, Eizburo Hoshino, discovered that some of the fry was being born with slight black markings along the body and he decided to explore this pattern more. Hoshino bred one of the parents that were producing these interesting fry with a Shiro Bekko (a white koi with a black pattern) and had great success. Almost immediately, the fry were being born with the Sanke pattern that we are used to seeing today with equal proportions of each of the three colours.

Unfortunately, Hoshino had no success when trying to breed some of these original Sanke together. All of the fry that were produced had either muddy colouration and patterns or did not display all three of the desired colours. By this point, other breeders had seen some of these koi and were attempting to replicate Hoshino’s results for themselves. Most breeders found that producing the original Sanke koi from Kohaku and Shiro Bekko was straightforward but none of them were able to stabilise the variety and were all finding the same results as Hoshino when breeding them together.

In the mid-1920s, a breeder by the name of Torakichi Kawakami entered the Sanke breeding game, but it wasn’t until 1949 that he had any success. Kawakami decided to breed one of these Sanke females with a normal male Kohaku to great success! Between 1949 and 1953, Kawakami continued to do this and produced a number of good quality Sanke who all produced Sanke fry when bred together. Thus, the variety was stabilised! 

Kawakami was the first and the only breeder who was able to stabilise the Sanke variety and so, the bloodline he produced was called the Torazo line after Kawakami’s father and business. In fact, every Sanke koi alive today contains this Torazo bloodline. Some other bloodlines have been established, including Matsunosuke and Jinbei, but each of these bloodlines can be traced back to the original Torazo bloodline.