My relationship with ryukin is not always good. I remember my first encounter was when I was 10 years old. There were two ryukin imports in the local fish shop. I was amazed by the hump of the fish, and it got carried away into my dreams for weeks. The price was rp 25.000 (the equivalent of usd 2.5), but it was too expensive already for a school boy at that time. As I grow up, my esteem of ryukin gets lower and lower. I was into sideview ranchu at that time and was thinking that sideview ranchu was everything. My first breeding project was ryukin, since I think it was easy. And indeed, the breeding confirmed me that ryukin breeding was too easy. After that, I abandoned ryukin altogether and focused on sideview ranchu.

Now, as I am preparing to write a book on goldfish appreciation as a joint effort with a friend, I begin to relearn about ryukin and is breeding it again to collect sufficient amount of illustration. So, after 13 years, I come back to ryukin! My friend teaches me humility by showing me so much that I don’t know about ryukin. Now I begin to appreciate ryukin again.

Maybe I want to be like Tom Bombadil in the goldfish world. I care less about the trend, the market, etc. I like to work on my own terms. The trend on ryukin today is the short tail ryukin. I do not have an interest on it. My interest is to create a sideview broadtail ryukin since the older tradition consider it to be the most valued in the ryukin category and it is not easy to find anymore.

I bought a pair of sideview broadtail ryukin from China. If they breed true, then this would be an easy project. To my surprise, the genetic of those two were not stable. The genetic of topview broadtail was thick on them. So, to my dislike, I ended up with topview broadtail offsprings. Please don’t get me wrong. Topview broadtail has its own beauty. Just that it is not my goal right now. The second weakness was in the hump. Very few have decent humps. So I suspected that American veiltail bloodline might be thick on them. To produce true sideview broadtail ryukin turned out to be not easy.

My solution was to cross the broadtail I had with long tail ryukin, as I am convinced the genetic of long tail ryukin should be stable already. So I bought some long tail ryukin from China. The purpose is to strengthened the genetic of sideview tail, but retaining the broadtail (fan-like) characteristic.

To my surprise, I found out that there was a genetic of short tail in my long tail ryukin parent! I was puzzled to the reason why should the Chinese cross the short tail and long tail ryukin in the first place. So, from this cross I get short broadtail, normal short tail, normal long tail, medium broadtail, and long broadtail! I am suddenly rich! But I will stick to my first priority, which is the medium brroadtail. So I will sell all the other types.

I am glad that so far the sideview appearance has been incorporated into the broadtail with success to some extent. In another month I will harvest them and be able to show some pictures.