Dear Friends of Matsunosuke,

We hope your Spring has been beautiful and blessed.  We would like to share with you the Spring we have had in Isawa, Yamanashi.  The full bloom of cherry blossoms was forecasted for March 22nd; however, the weather returned to winter again unexpectedly, and the Spring did not arrive until the second week of April.
The busy shipment season has been with us once again, in spite of the beautiful season which seemed to demand us to stop working and appreciate the beauty of the spring time.   After a wave of the major shipments during the jumbo Tosai season, we will pick up our regular schedule in mid April.   Our important  task now is to prepare for the spawning.   This means, for the INC staff, it is the hard work to prepare for the mud pond for the baby fish, which will be born in the new season.  All the staffs are working on the baby fish pond which has been left unused during the past winter.   
The “Golden week” of May is approaching us soon when numerous Japanese people will be taking advantage of the long weekend and enjoy their free time for traveling or something special.  However, in Isawa, the work still goes on, getting all the ponds organized for the next wave of shipments.  We would like to share with you the photos we have taken in between our busy schedule.  The photos were taken when we were installing Koi at the Buddhist temple.   The temple did not have a good up-keep of their mud ponds, and therefore, the water was rather muddy; but the gardens was very impressive and simply out of this world.  Please enjoy the photos taken during our visit for the Koi installation.
We would also like to share with you some of our private harvest photos taken last autumn.  Please visit the link for “private harvest photos” which we have not had the opportunity to share with you as of yet.  The harvest photos are from our ponds that we harvested without our visitors present.  Some of the private harvest was done before the main harvest event took place.   As you can see in the photos, the scale of harvest is much larger.   In a larger scale, it was necessary that we achieve more efficiency by using the machinery instead of more manpower.   All the staff watched with nervousness and care, but like last year, it went very smooth and without any problem, and we were simply grateful for the successful harvest resulted from using the machinery.  
The following photographs were taken during the Koi installation at the Buddhist Temple in Yamanashi.  Cherry Blossoms are in full bloom and it makes the scenic landscape even more magnificent.

-Koinobori