It’s Only Goldfish—and Yet

Every year, an exhibition titled “Art Aquarium” is held using thousands of goldfish.

I too went once, in the past. It was, indeed—for us humans—a romantic, fairy-tale world unfurling, where countless vividly colored goldfish danced.

But I couldn’t simply enjoy it, and left the venue still carrying a complicated state of mind.

Thinking from the goldfish’s standpoint: bathed in laser beams flying every which way, wandering in a dark-night space, jostling together in a “three-C’s” crush inside cramped tanks, with no water plants to hide in or rest among, swimming in rotating tanks and losing their balance—these are conditions that could by no means be called a happy environment for the goldfish.

Even admiring goldfish swimming in such a harsh world, I cannot grow rich at heart.

Rather than a culture that toys with and enjoys goldfish in a human-first way, it is precisely by giving them a happy environment—valuing goldfish, too, as fellow living things—that we humans who admire them can also reach a happy, enriched feeling; and that worldview, I think, is the mind of care and gratitude toward “all living things” that fits the age ahead.