Takashi Amano layout seminar

I love the way students gather around him like adoring padawans to a grand master jedi. He is the grand master. He single-handedly altered the world of freshwater aquariums and made it what it is today. He wrote books, he developed a line of merchandise suitable to his style and to his approach.

This seminar is taking place in his own shop in Tokyo. The lighting above the tanks were developed by him. It's a minimalist style that hides all the electrical components. Originally it's a Japanese style of garden design that brings above ground Japanese gardening sense underwater. Over time his style changes to become less rigid with one large rock and three supporting smaller rocks and several much smaller fill rocks, and so on. He says the word "wabi-kusha" which means a random spontaneous wild side of nature, that being Japanese means rigidly codified. They can't help themselves. They rigidly codify everything even random spontaneity.  It means, go down to the river and pull up some mud and bring with you some plants that you find there. But make sure that it's beautiful with upright and spreading and hanging elements, and make sure that it's interesting. Boom. wabi-kusha.

Here's the thing. We're the same age. Exactly. His birthday is my birthday. He lived a few miles from where I lived on the outskirts of Tokyo and he took up the aquarium hobby at the same time and same age that my brother and I did when we lived there. He stuck with his hobby steadily throughout his whole life and literally changed that whole world and I took the abuse of "No. No. No. No. No." Until I had my own place and indulged myself a tank of the size that I wanted all along and learned about him.

Duckduckgo images [wabi-kusha]

As you see for yourself, Takashi Amano's wabi-kusha is placed just so. There is nothing random about it.

So I feel this weird connection.

He died this month in 2015.

What a bummer!

He started all this as a young man bringing home to his little apartment bottles of carbonated soda water and pouring them into his little aquarium. He wanted to see if he could get his plants to thrive with additional CO2 and with enhanced lighting without killing the fish. He writes that his apartment was overrun with empty soda water bottles. His experiment worked. He kept up to develop small CO2 tanks with a valve that release and sparges one little bubble every few minutes or so.

Sparge. It's a w-o-r-d.

The gravel was best when just so. He developed his own line of gravel. He wrote books. He made it easy to follow his way. Hobbyists followed his lead. Enthusiasts, mostly young males, sought his instruction. They latched onto him. They adored him. They'd do anything to be near him, to be part of the scene he created for himself. They climb all over large tanks and inside them to do the things he cannot do. He literally painted garden scenes with a palette of live plants, picking them up with extended tweezers and inserting them into the gravel. Observers have never seen anything like his technique. Just watching him work is fascinating. It's like watching Picasso scribble pictures.

You'll notice in this video the gravel is sloped steeply high in the back and low in the front, then after the rocks and driftwood are placed in the center, it's not shown, but more bags of gravel are added behind so a low wall of gravel is piled up behind the driftwood and planted nearly half the height of the tank.

Also not shown is you've got to get in there and constantly trim the plants or else their varying growth rates will change the design to something outrageous and unwanted. Some plants grow slowly while others are rampant. The balance goes off in the span of a month. The moss he attached to the driftwood to hide the wires will take over the entire tank and break off to get into the roots and stems of all the other plants. Ask me how I know that. The stuff is insane. I won't use it anymore. Although it has an interesting texture and you can do quite a lot with it and the fish love it.

I'm down to ten fish.

I know which species I want.

I want three species that school, or shoal, of three variations in color and sizes. I want them to exist well with each other. Technically a community tank, but more of a heavily populated  3-species tank.

In all the reviews that I read in the descriptions of various fish I notice that American hobbyists buy a few fish of each species. Then go crazy with the number of species for an insanely mixed species tank. They all say, "I had two of those Boesemani rainbows and three of those harlequin rasboras." Along with a dozen other types of one or two fish each.

Takashi Amano usually had one species of fish for the whole tank and with schooling fish that's what you see in nature. Often you see one species of plant, or possibly two species, where western gardening style requires several species of plants intermingled.

Western style garden requires foreground, mid-ground and background plants of various heights. But that's not what you always see in nature.

We needn't be stuck in a format. The gravel can be perfectly flat, say, as the Platte river bed is flat and sections of the Amazon river. It can be one species of plant and one species of fish.

Or the tank can be trashed as if a tree fell into the river with grass species of differing heights.

Or the rocks can look like the scree at the base of a cliff. Fish like to hide in there among them.

The underwater scene can be anything. It can look like nature or it can be fantasy or it can be underwater garden. It can be a sunken ship with strewn treasure or it can replicate Bikini Bottom with Sponge Bob Squarepants.

I'm ready to buy additional fish.

The place that I like to buy them is temporarily out of two of the three species I intend to buy.

Check em out. LiveAquaria.



$15.00 each. Ew, those rascals. Last time I checked they were $10.00 each. I'll have about ten of these. They're temporarily out. I might just buy them locally. These are the largest. They stick together. They go well with other fish. They get great reviews.



I'll have about 30 of these. They're great in the tank. Fairly active. They stick to themselves as if the other species don't even exist.

And I cannot even believe they're out of neon tetras. For a fish store that's one species that you make sure that you never run out of. Come on! Get with the program. This is the species that everyone wants. To my dismay hobbyists usually only buy a few at a time. At the most they'll buy five or six.

I'd like to have about 50. So I bought them tonight from Aquabid. A seller was offering 24 for $30.00 with shipping of $15.00. Rather inexpensive.

So I bought 2.

That's 48 fish with one shipping cost of $15.00. That shipping is actually quite low.

$75.00 / 48 = $1.56 each. Not bad at all. Actually rather cheap.

So I have that one species of my 3 species idea taken care of. The photograph on Aquabid is terrible so here is the photograph from Live Aquaria.



They're the cutest little things.

I prefer they stay a bit nervous. That causes them to stick together.

But the other larger fish will relax them. They respond to the ease of the larger fish, so long as the larger ones are not threatening. In that sense, the larger fish are "dithering fish" for the smaller more nervous species. In that situation the tiny tetras stop schooling and disperse throughout the tank.

I like them better when they stick together.

But then I also like them when they are comfortable.

I'm torn between two behavioral traits.

Actually, all three species tend to stick together. So I'll get to see them move through the tank as fish-clouds. And that's really cool.

They'll move through my design of sunken Alexandria being taken over by plants. Nothing at all like a Takashi Amano natural undersea scene, yet still inspired by his realizations and by his techniques.