Do Not Mess With Fish 252,

and you thought fish were fun!

well they look like fun in the city of Shimabara on Japan’s Kyushu island, when I think of drains I imagine dark putrid water that has everything in it, except life, but not so in Shimabara, photograph mahlervv/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-3.0),

when the area around Shimabara was affected by the natural disaster known as the “1792 Unzen earthquake and tsunami” which killed 15,000 people, no one imagined that the dozens of fresh water springs that started gushing out would one day put the city on Japan’s travel map and inspire its now famous nickname – the “City of Water”. There are at least 60 known springs throughout Shimabara, making clean water one of the city’s most abundant resources, there is so much of it, in fact, that it flows through the drain channels along some streets, because the water is so pure, at one point authorities decided to put some koi carp in the channels, and Shimabara became the City of Swimming Carp,

Shimabara, along with a handful of other Japanese towns (Hida Furukawa, Gujo Hachiman and Tsuwano Town) are the only places where you can witness such amazing sights, it soon became a popular tourist attraction and authorities continued to add more koi fish throughout the city. Today there are hundreds of them swimming against the current and waiting to be fed and admired by tourists. Despite the “don’t feed the fish signs”, people just can’t help it, but the koi definitely don’t mind, what an amazing sight it must be, to see koi in the drains, and nobody takes them home as a souvenir!