We keep fish for a living.
This is everything we know.

Care guides written by the working aquarists of Tokyo Aqua Garden — a maintenance company that has looked after other people's fish, professionally, for twenty years. Translated from our Japanese guides, rewritten for American tanks and water, and honest to a fault.

Written and photographed by real, named people in Tokyo 東京

東京の水槽現場から

Medaka eggs photographed days before hatching, embryo eyes visible — Medaka eggs, days before hatching — photographed in our Tokyo fish room. No stock photos on this site, ever.

In twenty years we have installed more than 5,000 aquariums in Tokyo's offices, clinics and homes, written 3,600 care guides in Japanese, and answered the same worried questions thousands of times. Japan has kept fish for four hundred years; we have kept them for twenty, every working day, for a living. This site is where that experience becomes English.

Contents — start with your problem

See all 21 guides →

From our first twenty-one guides

An Amano shrimp grazing on plants in a planted aquarium

Shrimp & Invertebrates · From Japan

The Amano shrimp is named after a Japanese legend. Here is how we keep it in its home country.

Takashi Amano showed the world what this shrimp could do. We've stocked it in hundreds of client tanks since. Feeding, tank mates — and the truth about breeding: you can't, and that's fine.

Read the guide

A newly hatched transparent medaka fry near the water surface

Medaka eggs: hatch them the Tokyo way

Our most-read guide in Japan — the degree-day rule, fungus control, and the three-day fry deadline.

Fin rot: treat it before it's too late

The 0.5% salt method every Japanese keeper knows — dosed correctly, in US units, with the math shown.

Motoki Totsugi

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Founded Tokyo Aqua Garden in 2005. Twenty years and five thousand aquariums later, he still believes in publishing everything the company knows.

Satoko Nakajima

Staff Aquarist & Illustrator

Art-school-trained painter with years of fishkeeping experience of her own. Every illustration on this site is drawn by her hand.

From the illustrator's desk

Hand-drawn watercolor illustration of a neon tetra by Satoko Nakajima

Hand-drawn illustration of a corydoras catfish by Satoko Nakajima

Hand-drawn illustration of a rummy-nose tetra by Satoko Nakajima

Hand-drawn illustration of a four-stripe damselfish by Satoko Nakajima

Every illustration on this site is drawn by hand by Satoko Nakajima, our staff aquarist and art-school-trained painter — many of these species she has kept herself.

A small lexicon — words we'll teach you

ensui-yoku: The Japanese 0.5% salt bath — our standard first response for a sick fish.
sekisan-ondo: The degree-day arithmetic that predicts, almost to the day, when eggs hatch.
wabi-kusa: Planted balls born of wabi-sabi — the beauty of the imperfect and unfinished.

In 2017, experts laughed at my goal of one hundred thousand monthly readers. By 2023, our Japanese sites reached three and a half million. Now we start from zero again — in English, this time. Motoki Totsugi, founder — read our story

Tank Notes from Tokyo

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