The amazing story of a quarter-century friendship between a Japanese diver and a huge fish

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-10 19:46

This elderly man has been working as a diver all his life and, now, has been friends with one of the inhabitants of the depths for 25 years. And this is not a fairy tale, but a real story.

Hiroyuki Arakawa has been the caretaker of torii, one of the Shinto shrines under the water of Tateyama Bay, Japan, for many years. Over the decades that he spent in these waters, he managed to thoroughly study the local underwater world and, most interestingly, make friends with one of the local fish - the sheep-headed wrasse. In the video, we can see how they greet each other.

According to one of the latest studies, fish are able to remember the faces of people, and this is already a lot. “An experiment was carried out: first, the researchers trained the fish to point to a photograph of a person they knew by throwing a stream of water towards the selected photo,” says Dr. Keith Newport of the University of Oxford. “Then the experiment was complicated and the fish were given black and white photographs; later, we also tweaked the shape of the head in each photo to confuse the subjects. But that was not the case: the fish were still able to choose a familiar face in 86% of cases.

Japanese diver Hiroyuki Arakawa and his friend - a fish named Yoriko, with whom they have been friends for over 25 years

Every time they meet, the man lovingly kisses the fish on the forehead (if this, of course, can be called a forehead)

The first time they met was when Hiroyuki first sank to the bottom of these waters in charge of the state of the Shinto shrine