Although bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops) are usually grey, this extremely rare creature is an albino and has no colouration – apart from a tendency to turn pink when feeling flushed.
Photos show how the animal is normally white, and occasionally pink when swimming along regular coloured grey dolphins.
Albino mammals are born without melanin, which gives the colour to both eyes and skin, and albino dolphins are extremely rare.
In fact this specimen is believed to be only the second one ever put on display in an aquarium after it was purchased from fishermen.
And they may well have been doing the animal a favour, as albinos are easy prey out at sea as they lack the colouration to blend in like their grey coloured relatives.
Experts said that it was remarkable that the animal had actually lived so long before ending up at the Taiji Whale Museum, in Higashimuro District, in southern Japan's Wakayama Prefecture.
Controversially, the creature was captured during the annual dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji.
The town and the hunt was made notorious by the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary "The Cove," which shows fishermen herding dolphins into a cove either to be captured for aquariums or killed for meat.
It was reported that 1,218 dolphins and small whales were captured there in 2011, though it did not specify how many of those captured were killed.
But the rare albino was one that did survive.
Since then it has become the subject of a detailed study by the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and the Institute of Cetacean Research who recently published a paper on the fascinating creature.