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Sunday, October 21, 2012

Okeanos Aquascaping: Osaka, Japan phonebooths converted to goldfish aquariums

For a number of years, I thought about how I could combine three of my favorite interests into a single profession: Japan, Coral Reefs, and Aquariums. I thought that I would have an aquaculture facility for deepwater rare tropical coral reef fish that I would fund through selling to the Japanese rare fish market (where deepwater reef fish typically sell for $1000 - $30,000 or more USD).

Working in the public aquariums sector several times over the path of my career I've never been satisfied with the idea of a typical home display aquarium. 

I've long thought about creating lap pool reef tanks or designing entire mesocosms whereby one aquarium that snakes around an entire room in a horseshoe shape goes from brackish water marshland on one end to deepwater coral reef at the other.

I thought I was alone in my visions... until I read about Okeanos Aquascaping. They are a small firm creating just such groundbreaking displays around the world... including a multi-million dollar concept they created for Robb Report that comes close to recreating a public aquarium in a person's home (article here).

But what really struck me about their group is their coverage of other unique aquariums around the world... including a group in Osaka Japan that is converting old telephone booths into sealed goldfish aquariums!

See the pictures below and the original article here! And when planning your next aquarium, think bigger than a box... and if you can't turn your own vision into a reality, hire someone qualified (like Okeanos Aquascaping) to execute your every wish.
 


 
 
Pictures from the blog article: Ring Ring — Fishy Phonebooth! The Beauty of Public Aquariums
Posted by Dabney B. on Monday, October 8th, 2012

Monday, October 1, 2012

To all my recent Japanese visitors, Thank You!!! (Arigato Gozaimasu!!!) ^_^

I am writing this small note out of order from my usual posting, just because I made the observation that one of my posts about Japan became summarized and translated by a journalist and then posted in Japan, causing a lot of links recently to my blog posts on Japan.

For my Japanese friends (and Japanese language readers), here is the journalist's original post: http://news.searchina.ne.jp/disp.cgi?y=2012&d=0928&f=national_0928_019.shtml
The original blog post of mine that caused the attention (also pushing me to the weekly top 1000 free blogs on ClustrMaps) is here: http://adventure-naturalist.blogspot.com/2012/09/travel-tuesdays-japan-country-report.html while another little post I made about what I think are my 10 best photographs from Japan is here: http://adventure-naturalist.blogspot.com/2012/09/foto-fridays-japan-10-best-pix.html


 http://www3.clustrmaps.com/counter/maps.php?url=http://adventure-naturalist.blogspot.com
Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you to all the new visitors and I hope that I didn't offend anyone with the small controversial note that I made (I could say many negative things about the United States or any country really)... I hope that the overall feeling of my blog is one of appreciation for Japan and a hope to go back again and again and to continue making new Japanese friends. Please visit the original blog post and leave comments (I've already replied to three people) and I hope to add more pictures for future Japanese trips sooner rather than later.

Cheers and thank you again. And now, to probably start studying the Japanese language again, because Google Translate isn't very good with Japanese. You'll see what I mean if you try to use Google Translate on the link to the journalist's article above.

-- Robert