They laughed at 100,000 readers a month.
Here is what happened next.
I kept fish as a hobby. In 2005, I turned that hobby into a one-man side business — installing and maintaining aquariums around Tokyo — and built a website for it myself. The inquiries didn't stop coming, so I quit my trading-company job, went independent, and incorporated Tokyo Aqua Garden the following year.
Twenty years later, our aquarists have designed and installed more than 5,000 aquariums — in offices, clinics, restaurants and homes, including the Mauritius Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka. A team of 23 keeps hundreds of client tanks healthy on maintenance rounds across Tokyo, every working day.
From the beginning we did one thing differently: we published everything we knew. Every technique our aquarists used on their rounds, every failure, every fix — written up and given away for free, in Japanese. We have never had a sales team. People read what we know, and some of them call us. That has been the entire business model for twenty years.
In 2017, I launched a hobbyist magazine site and declared a goal: 100,000 pageviews a month. Industry people laughed at me — the market was mature, the incumbents were established, and who was I? I understood the laughter. I just didn't agree with it.
Now we are doing the hardest thing we know how to do: starting from zero again, in a language that isn't ours, in a market where nobody laughs at us because nobody knows us at all. This site is where our twenty years of working knowledge becomes English — rewritten for American water, fish and stores, illustrated by our own staff painter, photographed in our own tanks.
No ads clutter these pages, and none will until the site earns real readers. Our maintenance business in Tokyo pays the bills. What we want from you is simpler: keep your fish alive and thriving, and remember who helped.
— Motoki TotsugiFounder & Editor-in-Chief, Tokyo Aqua Garden Co., Ltd. · Tokyo, Japan
Who makes this site
Founded the company in 2005 after a fish hobby outgrew his apartment. Editorial responsibility for every guide on this site rests with him.
Art-school-trained painter with years of fishkeeping experience of her own. Every illustration on this site — including all 35 medaka variety watercolors — is drawn by her hand.
Aqua Garden Bldg., 3-2-7 Itabashi, Itabashi-ku, Tokyo 173-0004, Japan · Founded 2005 · 23 employees
Japanese sites: t-aquagarden.com (aquarium rental & maintenance) · tropica.jp (our aquarium magazine; no relation to Tropica Aquarium Plants of Denmark)