Kenhanafuji

Kenhanafuji (FB2461) is the rarest of the original Japanese foundation bulls and one of the most valuable Wagyu sires ever, nicknamed the 'International Bull of Mystery' and cited as the highest-selling Wagyu bull of all time. He is genetically distinct from the famous Tajima marbling sires: he carries no Tajima blood, instead being roughly 75% Fujiyoshi (Shimane) and 25% Kedaka. His pedigree runs Itohana x Kensei x Itochiyo; his sire Itohana (FB504) was a linebred Dai 7 Itozakura son and one of that line's highest-marbling sires in Japan, and his dam was Hana Fuji 472029 (FB563). Kenhanafuji was imported to North America in 1994 by the Mannett Group (later World K's), in the same shipment as Takazakura. He is celebrated above all as a maternal sire, producing large-framed, productive, feed-efficient, good-tempered daughters, and only a handful of North American ranches ever held semen on him, keeping straw prices high and rising. He recorded roughly 403 registered progeny in Australia. His birth year is not documented in the sources reviewed. One distinction is worth drawing out, because it is rare: Kenhanafuji carries no Tajima at all. Of the foundation sires with a published 16/16 analysis, only 7 show a zero in the Tajima column, and he is one of them — his 16 parts fall to Itozakura and Shimane with a little Kedaka and Tottori either side. In a breed whose reputation outside Japan was built almost entirely on Tajima marbling blood, a sire carrying none of it is an outcross of a kind that simply cannot be reconstructed now that the export window has closed.