Yamakoshi Mushigame is Koi Genesis

Welcome to Mushigame, Nagaoka Niigata, Japan

Mushigame, a small settlement in Nagaoka City’s Yamakoshi district, sits in Niigata’s heavy‑snow mountains where generations of farmers carved steep slopes into a mosaic of terraced rice fields and terraced ponds. Terracing, an old, practical water collection method, gathers snowmelt and spring water to make farming possible. Life here was never only about one crop or one craft: families raised rice, kept cattle close for work, transport, and gathered for tsunotsuki (bull sumo), a horn‑to‑horn contest rooted in farm life and preserved today as a nationally designated Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property. This is a landscape still lived in and cared for by hand that was recognized in 2003 by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as an important cultural landscape tied to agriculture, forestry, and fisheries. Later, Yamakoshi was celebrated nationally through the Chūetsu region’s “rice farming and carp raising system utilizing the blessings of snow,” with acknowledgement from Japan’s agricultural heritage program.

Welcome to the Yamakoshi Mushigame area of Niigata Japan. Where Koi began. ©KevinWarren/KoiWaters

Yamakoshi Mushigame is Koi Genesis because from those same ponds came Yamakoshi’s other world‑shaping legacy, nishikigoi—aka koi. Yet even that story begins as rural common sense. Carp were traditionally raised as food, grown in paddies and ponds, and brought close to homes before winter. In the early nineteenth century, a red-spotted koi sparked selective breeding and the birth of modern koi bloodlines. Yamakoshi Nishikigoi, or Koi, gained national attention after the 1914 Tokyo Taishō Exhibition and got their nickname, “Living Jewels.” Koi breeders from Yamakoshi were among the first in Japan to reach buyers both in Japan and overseas, helping set global koi market standards for what the world now calls Niigata koi.

The 2004 Niigata Chūetsu Earthquake tested everything: landslides and slope failures tore through Yamakoshi, including Mushigame, ruining koi ponds and forcing evacuation—yet these Japanese koi breeders rebuilt within a few years with support from fellow enthusiasts across Japan. Today, Yamakoshi Mushigame matters not only because it produces great koi, but because it shows the deeper foundation beneath them: a working mountain culture where water, rice, animals, and community endurance still flow together as one.