By PHRED DVORAK
Takashi Amano is on the floor of his living room, demonstrating the best way to appreciate his nearly 2,400-gallon fish tank.
Takashi Amano's Aquariums
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Ko Sasaki for The Wall Street Journal
Takashi Amano's specialty is lushly planted tanks where arrangements of stone, sand and wood play a starring role, and fish are the 'supporting cast,' as he puts it. See more photos in the slideshow.
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"Lie on your back and look," urges the 58-year-old photographer and designer, gazing up at the aquarium's 13-foot spread, which is pierced by tree branches from the Amazon that crawl with plant life and swarm with schools of silvery fish. "You feel like you're inside," he says.
Mr. Amano should know. As the pioneer of a high-end style of aquarium design whose aim is to mimic—and even outdo—nature, he has dived into rivers and seas around the world and photographed their ecosystems. During the past three decades, Mr. Amano's influence has spread from a niche group of aquarists in Japan to a global network of acolytes who design so-called nature aquariums for businesses and wealthy households from Texas to Qatar.
Mr. Amano's specialty is lushly planted tanks where arrangements of stone, sand and wood play a starring role, and fish are the "supporting cast," as he puts it. Most of his aquariums don't have lids, letting greenery spill out above the surface of the water. They change with time, as leaves sprout and stems lengthen.
A custom-designed tank is pricey: For a 228-gallon nature aquarium, like the one he designed for the lobby of Midori Hospital in coastal Niigata City, Mr. Amano says he charges around $42,600, including design, setup and materials ranging from rocks he's collected himself to lighting. Maintenance is extra, about $600 per month for staff to trim plants and change water.
And Mr. Amano is choosy about the kinds of work he'll do. These days, he and his company, Aqua Design Amano Co., take on only the biggest and most challenging commissions, like one completed recently for 2,500- and 3,000-gallon tanks at the Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo, or a potential order, under study now, for another 13-foot-wide tank in the home of a Japanese businessman.
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Beth DeCarbo on Lunch Break introduces us to Takashi Amano, the father of high-end aquarium design, whose custom tanks sell for about $44,000. Photo: Ko Sasaki for The Wall Street Journal.
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The setup can be grueling. Staffers place each plant with tweezers in the soil at the bottom of the tank before adding water. The biggest tanks are too large to arrange from the outside, yet standing inside disturbs the layout. For the Sumida Aquarium job, the planters propped themselves on supports stuck with suction cups to the sides of the tanks, while Mr. Amano directed. One employee spent so long face-down that he got a nosebleed.
For logistical reasons, Mr. Amano says he won't travel to the U.S. to design anything less than 13 feet wide. He recently quit designing saltwater tanks, since "no matter how hard you try, you can't beat nature" in beauty.
"I don't do things when I can't win," he says. "I can win with freshwater."
Mr. Amano's own tank is on the floor of in his living room at his home in Niigata City. Over the 11 years he has had it, he says, it has endured three big earthquakes that caused mini-tsunamis of water sloshing onto the floor, but no breakage.
A frank, outspoken man with graying hair and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, Mr. Amano grew up in the region where he's still based, a marshy flatland on the opposite side of the Japan Alps from Tokyo.
Despite comparisons of his work to the rock gardens of Kyoto or the woodblock prints of Katsushika Hokusai, Mr. Amano had no formal design or artistic schooling. Instead, he trained as a professional track cyclist, plowing much of the $1.6 million he won in 1,078 races over 17 years into his twin obsessions of photography and aquariums.
The young Mr. Amano learned by trial and error, withering "countless numbers of plants," as ADA's corporate chronology says, and developing tools and techniques from scratch. Mr. Amano says he would sometimes spend a week just arranging the rocks in an aquarium. "I'd worry at it until 2 or 3 a.m., then the next morning I'd get up and hate it," he recalls. "So I'd do it over again and again."
Mr. Amano started ADA in 1984, and by the late 1990s, he was selling an extensive line of his own aquarium supplies—from carbon-dioxide pumps to soil to planting scissors—all things he'd created in his quest for the perfect tank. He also photographed aquatic plants and fish in the Amazon, Borneo and West Africa, as well as his own aquarium layouts, which gradually attracted world-wide attention.
Now, ADA is an 86-person company with around $12.2 million in annual revenue. It sponsors an annual aquatic-plant layout contest that this year got 2,021 entries from 63 countries. Mr. Amano's latest photography projects involve documenting in meticulous detail the wild landscapes of Japan, since he worries that environmental damage will change these habitats irreparably.
But creating aquariums remains a passion, says Mr. Amano, sitting in front of his massive living-room tank.
"Creating nature," he says, "is the ultimate luxury."
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