Yamato-Koriyama Goldfish Town

If you have seen photos of a phone booth full of swimming goldfish here, it is gone. It stood on Yanagimachi shopping street until 2018, when it was taken down after an artist's copyright claim, and the courts later found against the street. What replaced it, from early 2021, is Goldfish Street: about 30 tanks, bowls and basins set outside roughly 28 shops along some 600 metres of the arcade, each with its own kind of goldfish. The shops sell a goldfish stamp book, the Gokingyo-cho, if you want an excuse to stop at each one.

The fish are here because of the castle. Local tradition says Yanagisawa Yoshisato brought goldfish with him from Kai when he took over Koriyama in 1724. By the end of the Edo period retainers were breeding them on the side, and after the Meiji Restoration out-of-work samurai and farmers turned it into a trade; the former retainer Komatsu Haruchika founded a goldfish company in 1879 and spread ponds into the old outer moat. About 20 farms still work today, and south of the centre you can see their rectangular ponds between the houses.

The Koriyama Goldfish Museum is the place to see them up close. It belongs to the Yamato Kingyoen farm, about 10 minutes' walk south of Kintetsu Koriyama, and is free, 10:00 to 17:00, closed Mondays. Tanks of different breeds sit next to old breeding books, among them an Edo-period goldfish keeping manual. It is small and mostly in Japanese.

A five-minute walk the other way is Konyamachi, the old dyers' quarter. Water from the castle moat runs in a stone channel down the middle of the street, where dyers once rinsed their cloth. Hakomoto-kan Konya, a dye house the Okuno family worked from around 1728, is now a free museum (9:00 to 17:00, closed Mondays) with an indigo vat you can dye at and a room of goldfish ornaments.

The National Goldfish Scooping Championship has been held every August since 1995 apart from 2020 and 2021, now at Kingyo Square in the municipal sports park: three minutes, one paper scoop, about 1,000 small goldfish in the tank. Spectators get in free.