What I noticed next, within a few hours, truly astonished me. All of the fish appeared peaceful, whereas before, 3 of the veteran damsels chased the other fish around the tank taking bites out of their fins, now they all just swam about. Every once in a while, one would chase another but now it almost seemed playful, and it didn’t last for long.
As amazing as the peaceful effect on the tank’s inhabitants was it could not prepare me for what came next. Over the next day the water in the tank became visibly clearer, and as time went on the water became so clear that it looked as if the fish were not swimming in water at all but were in fact floating in a tank full of air. The only way I could even tell that there was water in the tank were from the air bubbles. The effect was truly amazing, and the tank stayed cleaner for a much longer period. Before putting up the kanji characters, the tank would need a cleaning about every 5 days, after the kanji characters a week and a half would go by, and the tank would still be clean. If the effect of the Kanji characters on the fish could be so profound, what could it have on us as humans?