JAPAN
The cormorant is the bridge between God and man.
JUNJI YAMASHITA,
master cormorant fisherman, 2001
I’m sitting on a veranda that opens onto a well-manicured garden. From a perch in a small tree that extends over a pond, a single cormorant presides like a dark prince. The bird’s gray feet are wrapped around the highest limb. A few more cormorants roost in a tall cage at the far side of the garden, while others waddle around freely or stand on the edge of half an old boat that rests beside the water. Occasionally one of the birds croaks, and once in a while I can hear the clinking of ceramic from the adjoining coffee shop. The name of this café is the Japanese character for cormorant, pronounced simply as oo.
One of the cormorants stands almost at my feet, by the step to the veranda. He is thirty-five years old. Apparently this bird has been blind for a few years. His eyes are glazed over with cataracts. The animal is so old and weary that he can’t lift his neck. He sits perpetually curled over, with one side of his face on the stone.
Our host, the owner of the garden and the coffee shop, is Mr. Junji Yamashita.1 He is a master cormorant fisherman, an usho, on the payroll of the emperor. He is one of only six usho in Gifu City, the most esteemed area for cormorant fishing in Japan. His official title is Cormorant Fishing Master of the Board of Ceremonies of the Imperial Household Agency. It is a hereditary position. Yamashita’s extended family of cormorant fishermen can be traced back seventeen generations.
* * *
I’ve spent over a dozen years studying cormorants, observing a local colony of these birds, and traveling to places such as Gifu City to learn more about cormorants and our relationships with these seabirds. I first stepped onto this admittedly quirky path because I was looking for an interdisciplinary project for my master’s thesis. I wanted to study one subject in a way that would require the gobbing together of literature, history, science, and current management policy.
One morning I read a front-page article in the newspaper about fishermen from Henderson Harbor, New York, going out on an island and slaughtering thousands of cormorants. I read this at the kitchen table. My housemate at the time, Munro, told me about how during his years in Japan he had watched men using these birds to catch fish. These men considered cormorants to be sacred animals. While eating a bowl of Cheerios, reading the article, and speaking with Munro, I remembered once learning in a literature class the contrast between a lovely poem by Amy Clampitt, titled “The Cormorant in Its Element,” in which she extols the mysterious grace of how these birds can both fly and swim, against the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, in which he used a cormorant perched in the tree to evoke Satan himself. I realized that I also knew of a small colony of cormorants at the mouth of my local Mystic River, on Long Island Sound.
Here was the project I’d been searching for.
So I began exploring more about cormorants. I soon found that this family of birds, for all their physical abilities and vast global range, has been reviled, gunned down, and demonized for at least five hundred years, particularly in Europe and North America. Yet in other parts of the world, either for their abilities to help men catch fish or the immense value of their guano for fertilizer, these cormorants have been valued, honored, and protected for more than fourteen hundred years.
I finished my thesis and went on to work on other projects, but I kept studying and thinking and observing cormorants while getting my PhD and then between the duties of my current day job as a literature professor. Over the years, I’ve kept gathering a guano-load of bizarre and compelling historic and contemporary stories about our relationship to these particular birds. All the while I’ve been trying to figure out why and how and where and when it was exactly that we either love or hate these animals. And in doing so, in studying the cormorant in literature and human history and science and in current management policy, I’ve arrived at a few larger lessons about our ever-shifting relationship to animals and the broader natural environment.
Studying the cormorant properly requires a circumnavigation of the earth, which we’ll do in this book in huge flights across time and geography. Most of these places I have visited myself over the years, such as islands in Antarctica and the Galápagos. I traveled to touch the corpse of an extinct cormorant preserved at the research collections of the British Museum. I flew to Peru to put my feet on the most famous guano hills in the world. Closer to home, I visited Henderson Harbor, the Mississippi Delta, and the mouth of the Columbia River. Other spots I have visited vicariously through historic journals, correspondence, interviews, literature, and fine art. These are Cape Town, Bering Island, and the sheer cliffs of the Aran Islands off the Irish coast.
This book explores all these places and a range of different people and their varied relationships to cormorants. The people appear in this order: an usho, a charter fishermen, a writer of short stories, a 1940s naturalist-explorer, a future wildlife manager, a curator of bird skins, a sculptor and her favorite 1740s naturalist-explorer, a novelist, an aquaculture researcher, two guards of a guano island, and a veterinarian-bird rescuer. And then me: the first wing-bat, as far as I’m aware, to embrace this cormorant in a full-length cultural and natural history that migrates across the globe.
The trip to Japan was my first big expedition. I wanted to start with the oldest of stories and one of the strongest of connections to these birds. I was able to persuade my housemate Munro, fluent in Japanese, to come along. We recruited our other housemate, a biologist nicknamed Hoss.
From mid-May to mid-October each year, Junji Yamashita and his five fellow usho fish most nights, as long as it is not a full moon, an exceptionally high tide, or the water is not too cloudy with rain or sediment. The usho fish the Nagara River, which runs through the middle of Gifu City in a valley winding between steep hills. Gifu Castle, a modern reconstruction of a fortress that dates back to 1201, overlooks this portion of the river from the tip of Mount Kinka.
The Japanese word for cormorant fishing is ukai. It is a performance. Each night hundreds of spectators—mostly older-generation Japanese—come in buses and pile onto the dock, where one of the fishing masters puts on a microphone.
The usho explains his clothing and the history and process of ukai. He grabs a cormorant out of a basket and shows, with the help of an assistant, how he ties a string—a collar—around the base of the bird’s neck. He feeds fish to the cormorant to demonstrate how its long neck expands with the food in its gullet. To the gasps and shutter-clicks of the spectators, the usho then makes the bird regurgitate four long fish out again—all at once onto a tray.
After the introduction, the usho, his assistants, and the cormorants—who are carried four birds to a basket—return upriver as if departing backstage. They go to join the others and prepare for the evening’s fishing.
Some spectators get ready to watch ukai from the rocks along the shore, but the more luxurious way is by dinner boat, which is what we do tonight. We take off our shoes and find a seat. The crew poles the boat upriver and under the bridge. We watch the sun go down behind the mountains. Under paper lanterns, we eat and drink, anticipating the fishing. The boats play recorded traditional Japanese music, and at one point we watch a boat float by that is filled with entertainers in traditional Japanese dress. Some passengers on our boat light sparklers. By chance, this is one of the special evenings when there are also fireworks from the shore. The city has closed the roads beside the river to remove any noise and light from cars.
The first thing we see of ukai itself is a glow behind the bend of the river. The light is from the fires. Soon the six boats appear around this bend. Everything goes silent. The river is transformed. We can hear the oars through the water and the splashing of the birds. The crews of the dinner boats maneuver their vessels in a choreographed dance around the fishermen, staying out of the way while still providing every passenger a close-up view.
Ukai is spellbinding. This first time I see it I’m embarrassed to admit that all I can think is, how is it possible that this has not been made into a scene in a Hollywood movie?
Mr. Yamashita, like the other five usho, commands his own boat: a long narrow craft with a thin wood extension off the front, a sort of bowsprit. Yamashita stands up at the bow to tend his fire. This blazes forward in an iron basket, hanging from a wood pole fit into a slot at the base of the sprit. Yamashita has wrapped the base of this pole with leaves, providing lubrication as he rotates it from side to side, depending on where he wants to cast the light. He fuels the flames with slats of pine. The fire reflects off the water, attracting the fish. Embers pop and spark, floating down and sizzling into the water or dusting back toward Yamashita with the forward glide of the boat.
To protect himself from the fire, Yamashita wears the usho uniform. He looks like a sorcerer. He has wrapped a dark linen cloth around his head to shield his hair. He wears a full-length black or dark-blue cotton kimono that he has folded up under his straw skirt. This skirt extends below the knee and repels water, insulates, and protects his legs from the beak and feet of the birds. Despite this gear, Yamashita still has small burn holes in his kimono and in his muneate, an additional layer of cloth worn over his chest. On his feet, he wears special straw sandals with only half a sole, so that his heels meet the deck to keep from slipping.
While tending the fire, Yamashita manages a flock of twelve cormorants swimming in the river. He holds their leashes, the tanawa, in one palm while with his other hand he adjusts each string—plucking, overlapping, tugging, slacking—as the birds dive, fish, and return to the surface with their gullets full. While still managing the others, Yamashita pulls individual cormorants back to the boat, picks them up, squeezes the fish out of their necks into a basket, then returns each bird to the water. The fire lights up the cormorants’ wet heads and the patch of white and yellow on their faces. When not diving, the birds swim ahead of the boat and under the flame, as if pulling the craft forward, as if the cormorants are dignified little black foxes guiding a dark Merlin.
The leashes fan out from Yamashita’s hand. He has tied each line loosely enough around the bird’s neck to not restrict movement, but firmly enough to stop the passage of larger fish down into its stomach. Yamashita explains to us later that the cormorants swallow small fish while they are diving. He says they could even eat the larger fish if they really wanted to, but there is an “understanding.” The birds drink the oils from the fish, which is their favorite part, Yamashita says. Then the birds allow him to take their catch, since the cormorants know they’ll get whole fish later.
The material and lay of the leash resists tangling and fraying. If Yamashita pulls the tanawa hard it won’t break, but if he twists it sharply against the lay of the line, it will snap. In this way he can free a bird if its leash gets caught under a rock. Between the leash and the collar around the neck is a thin stick of stiff plastic, which hangs parallel to the cormorant’s back. This helps keep the line out of the bird’s way and helps the usho handle the cormorant. This stick used to be made of whale baleen.2
In each boat are two or three assistants. At the stern, steering with either an oar or a long bamboo pole, is the tomonori. At the waist is the nakanori, who helps to navigate with a smaller oar. This man also helps manage the incoming fish as well as the cormorants and their baskets. Yamashita fishes with an optional fourth man, a nakauzukai. This fisherman sends six additional cormorants into the river and manages them from the waist of the boat.
The demonstration of ukai lasts less than one hour. The climax is the sougarami, where all six boats form a line across the river and drive the fish. The usho shouts a guttural “ho-ho” while a crew member in each boat bangs his oar against the hull. Aside from a few camera flashes, the entire performance feels ancient.
After the sougarami, the fishermen drift their boats over to the beach in order to let their cormorants onto the shore. The birds croak and walk around, some standing with their wings spread. The usho removes the leashes and collars. Without irony, Yamashita and the other usho reward these birds with fish.
As the cormorants eat, the dinner boats return under the bridge and to the dock. Like after a sad movie, most of the spectators appear subdued and pensive. To increase the odd impression, the Gifu City tourism council plays through giant speakers a Japanese version of “Auld Lang Syne.” The song echoes across the river. It is surprisingly moving.
If you think I’m exaggerating, that this melancholy sounds like nonsense, consider that people have been feeling this for hundreds of years. In the seventeenth century, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō wrote of ukai: “The cormorant fishing of Nagara River at Shō in Gifu is famous throughout the country and it is as fascinating as the accounts. Without wisdom and talent, I cannot possibly exhaust the scene in words, but I long to show it to those whose heart understands.”3
Bashō wrote a haiku about his experience with ukai. Zempei Yamashita, Junji’s second cousin, translated the verse this way:
After the brightest sight
Of the cormorant-fishing
There remains a loneliness alone,
The gaiety diminishing.4
In today’s Japan, ukai is a cultural display. It is a form of entertainment and a way to preserve historical skills and practices. In this way it is somewhat like a falconry show in England or certain types of American rodeos. The cormorant fishing masters are in the same class in Japan as traditional sake brewers. Over one hundred tools of ukai are listed as “Important Tangible Folk Custom Cultural Assets of the Nation.” The sound of the usho knocking the boat and his “ho-ho” shout is officially recognized in Japan as among the country’s “top one hundred soundscapes.”5 To the emperor himself are presented the first fish caught in the cormorants’ gullets each season, delivered officially from the governor of Gifu Prefecture and the mayor of Gifu City. When members of the royal family and their guests come to Gifu, they view ukai in a private sanctuary along the river.
People have been using cormorants to help them fish for at least fourteen hundred years. People have fished with cormorants in China, Japan, India, Korea, and possibly even in ancient Egypt.6 Pictures and textiles left by the Chimu culture in Peru suggest they, too, domesticated cormorants to fish.7
It is not clear who exactly originated the practice. Fishing with cormorants in China has been conducted since at least the Sung dynasty (960–1279). Some archaeologists believe they have evidence of the practice in China as far back as 317 BCE.8 Eventually fishing with cormorants became widespread and commercial over a large part of China, but now it is conducted predominantly in a few areas in the southern provinces, often as a tourist display, but also still as a local artisanal fishery.9 The birds have been known colloquially in Chinese as “black-headed nets,” “fish catching gentlemen,” and “black devils.”10
The first definitive written record of cormorant fishing in Asia or elsewhere, however, is in Japan. It seems to have come from a Chinese envoy visiting Japan in 607 CE. This is in the Chinese Sui shu: “In Japan they suspend small rings from the necks of cormorants, and have them dive into the water to catch fish, and that they can catch over a hundred a day.”11
On the Nagara River near Gifu City, census records as early as 702 suggest there were cormorant fishermen living and working by the river.12 In the twelfth century, twenty-one usho houses stood in seven villages along the Nagara.
In the early sixteenth century a female usho fished on the river. Her name was Ako. She apparently was not only skilled, but also fished with twelve cormorants, perhaps one of the first to use this many at one time. One Japanese scholar wrote: “This lady of old is regarded as the mother of ukai.”13
In 1564 Nobunaga Oda, a warlord and major figure in the history of Japan, helped further ukai on the Nagara River. He treated cormorant fishermen with respect, declaring the position of usho as honorable.14 Oda granted ukai and the fish caught by the cormorants a special status at Gifu Castle. He gave the usho money for rice each month and a new boat every four or five years. Soon Oda invited the servant of another lord in the region to come see ukai as a spectacle. Historians mark this as likely the first instance of ukai perceived as entertainment. In the following years, cormorant fishing started to become a court event, viewed by the nobility.15
On the Nagara, cormorants catch for the usho a fish named ayu. During the time of the Tokugawa shogunate, ayu became a popular sushi fish for the military. Thus ukai came under direct control of a feudal clan. The usho received money for rice in exchange for ayu sushi packed in barrels and sent to the shogun’s castle in Tokyo. The shoguns outlawed dams, weirs, and net fishing on the Nagara River anywhere near where cormorant fishing took place.16
Ukai thrived under feudal protection for centuries.17 In addition to the practice of using cormorants for fishing, cormorant feathers were gathered as roof materials for sacred birthing huts. This was presumably derived from ancient beliefs—both in Japan and China—that if a woman in labor had a cormorant in her arms or at least held a cormorant feather, her delivery would be faster and easier.18
The Imperial Restoration of 1868 pushed out the Tokugawa shogunate, which meant a temporary end to the stewardship of ukai. Yet soon the new emperor came to see ukai in Gifu for himself. Then he came back a couple of years later to watch it again. Before the end of the nineteenth century, he had issued a decree declaring that cormorant fishing in Gifu Prefecture was now protected by the Imperial Household Department.19
The city of Gifu gradually began to center its cultural and economic identity on this history and practice of cormorant fishing.
The first European description of cormorant fishing in Japan seems to be from the diary of English merchant Richard Cocks in 1617, which describes a type of ukai conducted from the shore. He wrote: “Soyemon Dono made a fishing over against English howse with cormorants made fast to long cordes behind their winges, and bridles from thence before their neckes to keepe the fish from entring their bodies, so that when they took it they could take yt out of their throtes againe.”20
By the late nineteenth century a few more accounts had been published, including an 1889 article in the Times in Britain, written by Major General Henry Palmer of the Royal Engineers. Palmer’s description of the practice on the Nagara River is strikingly similar to how ukai is performed there today. Palmer went on an evening dinner boat. The spectators drank hot tea and ate fruits, sweetmeats, and eel. He described first seeing the glow of the fires and then the sounds of the cormorant fishermen banging the hulls and shouting to urge on the birds.
Palmer wrote: “Next appear the forms of the boats and the swarthy figures of men, thrown up with weird, Rembrandt-like effects against the inky blackness of the night; and in the water round about the boats are numbers of cormorants, behaving to all appearance in the maddest fashion.”21
Palmer described seven boats with four men in each. The birds had metal rings around their necks:
The master is now the busiest of men. He must handle his twelve strings so deftly that, let the birds dash hither and thither as they will, there shall be no impediment or fouling. He must have his eyes everywhere, and his hands following his eyes. Specially must he watch for the moment when any of his flock is gorged—a fact generally made known by the bird itself, which then swims about in a foolish, helpless way, with its head and swollen neck erect. Thereupon the master, shortening in on that bird, lifts it aboard, forces its bill open with his left hand, which still holds the rest of the lines, squeezes out the fish with his right, and starts the creature off on a fresh foray—all this with such admirable dexterity and quickness that the eleven birds still bustling about have scarce time to get things into a tangle, and in another moment the whole team is again perfectly in hand.22
Historians believe a few earlier Western accounts encouraged Europeans to take up the practice. Over the centuries it became an aristocratic sport. The first known record of semidomesticated cormorants in Europe is in Italy, revealed in a painting by Vittore Carpaccio, called Hunting on the Lagoon, painted about 1495.23 What is happening in this painting has been much debated. It depicts several men in shallow boats aiming stretched bows toward the water in which cormorants are swimming. Some have interpreted the scene as the hunting of cormorants or just persecution of these birds for sport. A few details, such as cormorants standing serenely on several of the boats, reveal that what these men might be doing is actually shooting clay balls at fish, using their trained cormorants to scare these fish up to the surface.24
In sixteenth-century England, Elizabeth I placed a bounty on cormorants and other birds, declaring them “pests of the crown.” Her successors James I and Charles I, however, maintained a “Master of the Royal Cormorants.” This man was charged with keeping and training the birds to fish for the pleasure of the king.25 In 1618 James I was so infatuated with watching his cormorants that he built a house and ponds for these birds, as well as for his trained ospreys and otters. The site was where the current Houses of Parliament stand.26
In the nineteenth century the sport of fishing with cormorants was revived by a few men in England, most famously Captain F. H. Salvin, who fished with the birds for at least thirty-five years. He had experience training hawks. The first cormorant that he trained in 1847 he named Isaac Walton. (After this prize bird died, they learned by dissection that Isaac was actually a female.)27
Across the Channel in France, the sport goes back to at least 1609. King Louis XIII owned trained cormorants. They were a gift from King James, arriving with an English keeper.28 On record at Fontainebleau Palace is a position from at least 1698 through 1736 called garde de cormoranes.29 In the nineteenth century M. Le Comte Le Couteulx de Canteleu owned cormorants at his castle and even wrote a short book on the subject. His La Pêche au Cormoran (1870) opens with an etching of a young Frenchman holding a cormorant named Tobie.30 (See figure 3.) The young man, wearing breeches and a beret, holds his cormorant like a falcon. This was often the way cormorant fishing was performed in Europe, walking down to the water with your prize bird on your arm. Some even put little hoodwinks on the cormorants.31 In the late nineteenth century the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec fished with a trained cormorant. The artist would promenade “Tom” on a leash in the evenings. He brought his cormorant into cafés, where it supposedly drank absinthe. (To Toulouse-Lautrec’s horror, Tom died when a man shot him mistakenly while hunting.)32
In 1903, a French fisherman named Pierre-Amédée Pichot found the taming of the birds fairly easy. He wrote of the cormorant: “His heart is very near his stomach, and one may be reached by way of the other.” Pichot continued: “If you feed him out of your hand, you will have trouble to prevent him from following you everywhere, ascending the stairs behind you, perching on your furniture, and leaving on all pieces incontestable traces of his rapid and abundant digestion.”33
Even today in small surprising places outside of Asia, such as in Macedonia, locals still fish with cormorants, whether for food or catering to tourists. American author and sportsman Daniel Mannix fished with cormorants with some success in Pennsylvania in the 1960s.34 A small group of indigenous people in Peru keeps domesticated cormorants on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world.35
Ayu (Plecoglossus altivelis), the fish that the cormorants hunt on the Nagara River, translates to “sweetfish.” It is closely related to salmon and found only in the streams, lakes, and coastal waters of Asia. Ayu can grow up to one foot (30 cm) long. Toward the mouth of the river, the fish eat algae, plankton, and crustaceans, but up in the Nagara the ayu are mostly vegetarian, scraping their food off rocks and leaves with specially adapted teeth.
The ayu has a varied role in Japanese culture. Scientists like to count ayu, using them as an indicator species to gauge the health of a river. Fish farmers raise ayu in Japan. Recreational anglers vie for them, too. One sporting method is to put a live ayu on a hook. Since ayu are aggressively territorial, a fish will come out to attack another and get snagged.
Maritime anthropologist Tomoya Akimichi wrote that the ayu is probably the most popular freshwater food fish in Japan.36 Tourism brochures claim that ayu smells like watermelon. The fish is served smoked, preserved in salt, grilled, fried with tempura batter, served raw as sashimi, and fire-dried for making broth. Ayu is most popular as shioyaki, where it is skewered, rolled in salt, then roasted.
During our visit to Gifu, Munro, Hoss, and I tried them all. We even bought ayu-flavored snack crisps and gift-wrapped ayu pastry. Ayu does indeed taste good. To me it has a mackerel flavor. (It does not smell like watermelon.)
I first tasted shioyaki ayu when I was so kindly treated to dinner by Mr. Katuzo Hino, one of the volunteer tour guides in Gifu. In her purse, his wife smuggled into the restaurant a sample of her own specially prepared shioyaki ayu. She felt that I should try it. I smiled nervously. I didn’t know how to eat it. Mr. Hino had some English, but not a great deal, and Munro and Hoss were off singing karaoke. The grilled ayu did not seem a chopstick food. I kept smiling and took it up with my fingers. I bit into the middle of the fish as if it were corn on the cob.
The Hino family started giggling.
I apologized.
Mr. Hino said: “No, no. Good. You eat it like we do.”
Yamashita and his fellow usho use Japanese cormorants (Phalacrocorax capillatus).37 Japanese cormorants are most commonly found on the rocky coasts of central and northern Japan. They also breed on the coasts of nearby islands and the facing shores of Siberia, China, and Korea. The feathers of the adults, like those of the majority of cormorants around the world when breeding, have iridescent greens, bronzes, and purples within their glossy black. Adult Japanese cormorants also have thin white feathers, called filoplumes, that extend out from their head and neck. Individuals can have so much white feather fluff that it looks like they have a white beard. Hence the Latin species name, capillatus, which means “hairy.” Japanese cormorants have a white-speckled band around each bright emerald eye. As with every cormorant species except the Galápagos flightless cormorant, the females tend to be just slightly smaller. Female Japanese cormorants, as with all cormorants, have the same plumage as the males. It is difficult to distinguish gender in cormorants. Scientists who absolutely need to get it right use DNA samples.
There is also a freshwater cormorant in Japan, the great cormorant (P. carbo). This bird looks similar to the Japanese cormorant but is also native to the interior rivers and lakes. The great cormorant is the most widespread of all cormorant species, ranging from Tasmania to Ethiopia to Nova Scotia. Though it might seem more logical for usho to use this great cormorant, since they are already adapted to fresh water, Yamashita and his fellow fishermen of the Nagara River have long preferred the Japanese species. They believe this cormorant to be heartier and easier to train. Japanese cormorants are also a bit larger than the greats in this part of the world, so they are capable of catching larger fish.
Scientists and fishermen have found cormorants to be pretty intelligent as bird brains go. No other birds anywhere in the world have been trained to catch fish for man in any substantial way. Cormorants are certainly highly trainable. British and Israeli biologists who have raised wild cormorants in research aviaries have been able in a matter of weeks to devise intricate experiments by positively reinforcing the birds by feeding them fish, evocative of dolphin training.38 English researchers in the 1970s observed a set of domestic cormorants in China that could count to at least seven, since the birds would cease their work until rewarded for catching that many fish.39
Throughout the world cormorants in the wild work collaboratively to catch fish, and numerous accounts from both China and Japan describe trained cormorants fishing together to help haul an especially large fish within the grasp of their master.40
In China, cormorant fishermen often work their birds without a leash or neck collar of any kind. The cormorants respond entirely to the commands of the owner, even when fishing among large groups of other fishermen and their own birds. This is documented in a short film by Frédéric Fougea titled He Dances for His Cormorants (1993).41 Fougea crafts a story around a cormorant fishing family and their close relationship with these birds. Their cormorants do not have anything around their necks. Zong Man, the patriarch of this Chinese family, walks around with cormorants on his shoulder, beside him while he eats, and with several of them on a pole while he is driven in a little car to an alternative fishing site. When a chick is born, Zong Man stays with the newborn for several days in isolation so that he may feed the chick in private and the bird will imprint on him.
In the documentary, Zong Man has named his birds much as Santa has done with his team of reindeer. The cormorants are Escaper, Sleepy, Gimpy, and Son of Gimpy. He named the one who captures the largest fish Mao. Zong Man describes each individual bird’s personality and his or her skills.
Several other accounts throughout Asia describe how the birds reveal their individual personalities. On the Nagara River in Japan, cormorants seem to recognize a form of pack hierarchy. After a session of ukai, the cormorants line up on the gunwale of the boat, by seniority. The senior bird, the ichi, stands toward the bow or perches on the sprit. The other birds follow the ichi’s example. Like sled dogs, the cormorants become overtly upset if one breaks ranks by not lining up in the proper order.42
Cormorants are highly trainable. They learn quickly. They can fish collaboratively both for themselves and for people. They have individual traits and a social structure. They can count.
Not everyone is enamored with ukai. To many animal lovers it appears a cruel process for both the birds and the fish. After I chomped into that ayu at the restaurant, the special ukai-caught fish, I saw scratches by the head: from the cormorant’s beak. Tourist brochures claim dubiously that ayu are stunned when caught by the cormorant and dead before hitting the basket.
Part of the objection of animal rights advocates is how the cormorants are first captured. The Japanese cormorants trained for ukai are gathered in late spring from the rocky shores of Japan. Yamashita’s birds come from over two hundred miles (320 km) away, from the cliffs of Ibaraki Prefecture overlooking the North Pacific. With wood or live decoys, men attract the cormorants to a section of cliff that they have spread with sticky lime—like flypaper. After they catch the birds and tie their beaks shut, the men stitch through the skin on the top of the birds’ head in order to sew up the eyelids for the journey back to Gifu. The men try to catch cormorants that are about one year old.
Once back in Gifu, Yamashita and his fellow usho clip the tip of the birds’ beaks and snip a few feathers from one wing. They slowly bathe the birds in warm water, clean off the lime, and remove the eye stitching. The usho hand-feed them fish and gradually adjust the birds to foraging in fresh water and being on a leash. It can take a couple of years until a cormorant is ready for an evening’s ukai demonstration.
Chinese fishermen, on the other hand, raise their birds as chicks, hatched from eggs, and have thus completely domesticated them. The men often place the cormorant eggs under the bellies of chickens until they hatch. For genetic diversity they occasionally go into the wild to get new eggs.43
Yamashita thinks the Chinese method uses animals strictly as tools, similar to the keeping of cows and pigs. He believes the traditional Japanese method is a more equal one, since the birds are caught wild and not cultivated. Yamashita claims that even if he left his cormorants’ wings unclipped they would not fly away. He says that he removes a few feathers to make it easier to put them into the basket and, he claims, to “remind them that they are members of the usho family.”
Those who disapprove of ukai point out that the cormorants are leashed and swimming amid streams of sparks. They think the birds appear nervous, and people worry about the animals getting tangled. Some complain that the fishermen handle the cormorants too roughly, that the birds have been kidnapped from the wild. One author compared the raising of these wild birds to that of a relationship between a hostage and its captor.44 In response, there is now an independent cormorant fisherman in Gifu, Mr. Riki Nakane, who for over a decade has been seeking to alter ukai by adopting the Chinese method of raising the cormorants from eggs. He fishes with a ring around the birds’ necks, without a leash. Nakane’s cormorants come back to him by a whistle.45 (During the off-season, Yamashita and his fellow usho let their birds off leash, too. They free them into the Nagara to catch their own food.)
There is a small history of distaste for ukai, particularly among Buddhists. An early Japanese folk song, dating back to before the twelfth century, confirms that some have always had their doubts:
Woe to the cormorant-fisher
Who binds the heads of his cormorants
And slays the tortoise whose span is ten thousand æons!
In this life he may do well enough,
But what will become of him at his next birth?46
At the turn of the fifteenth century, Japanese author Enami no Sayemon wrote a play titled Ukai. This tells the story of a cormorant fisherman who is a doomed sinner. The usho says in soliloquy:
Then, in the dreadful darkness comes repentance
Of the crime that is my trade
My sinful sustenance; and life thus lived
Is loathsome then.
Yet I would live, and soon
Bent on my oar I push between the waves
To ply my hateful trade.47
As the play continues, the cormorant fisherman goes to a shrine to rest his birds while he waits for the moon to go down so he can return to fishing. He meets Buddhist priests who are traveling through. He tells them a story of how villagers drowned another cormorant fisherman for cruelly killing ayu with his birds. The villagers had shouted “one life for many.”
Mr. Yamashita is a Buddhist. Sitting in his veranda, he explains to us that the Japanese character for cormorant means “little brother bird.” But, he grins, he does not know who is the big brother. He explains that with animals “what you see is what you get—there is no front and back.”
The more we talk with Mr. Yamashita, the more he really gets going. Thanks surely to Munro’s tactful translation, he seems to begin to trust us. He speaks about a sincere love for the birds. He said that he would not be able to do the work if the cormorants did not accept him. He lives with these birds. He gets up in the morning with them. He goes to work with them. Yamashita says the cormorants are on a different tier than other animals. The analogy that best comes to mind is that of a hunter with his retriever or a sheep rancher with his collies.
Yamashita looks out into the garden at a cormorant roosting on a tall limb. He says: “The cormorant is the bridge between God and man.”
Munro, Hoss, and I look up at a Godzilla-size mural of a cormorant painted around three sides of a fourteen-story building. Then we separate to canvass the place. In Gifu City, cormorants appear in various forms on buses and street signs. They are embossed into the iron of manhole covers. (I take a charcoal rubbing.) Cormorants are welded into the stanchions of bridges and etched into the glass of phone booths. We find ukai scenes and cormorants painted on murals, created in mosaics on the walls of public transportation centers, and depicted on the sidewalk in front of an athletic facility. Usho and cormorants are honored in bronze statues in prime, central locations. Bashō’s poem is etched into stone by the river. There is a cormorant burial ground. The city has erected signs in both Japanese and English to identify the usho’s homes for tourists. Illustrators have drawn cartoon cormorants and caricatured usho on bank posters, business advertisements, and at the post office. Gifu City’s mascot is a big furry cormorant dressed in usho clothing. Tourism brochures proudly declare how the silent movie actor Charlie Chaplin was so enamored with ukai that he came back to see it a second time.
Volunteer guides like Mr. Hino and his daughter wear long shirts decorated with ukai prints as they greet tour buses. The guides also hold paper fans with matching ukai scenes painted on them. In the souvenir shops throughout the city, we find a dizzying range of ukai mementos, including hand-painted ukai paper lanterns, ceramic bowls with glazed ukai scenes, and bean pastries wrapped in fancy paper with ukai patterns. The shops sell ukai key chains, ashtrays, bottle openers, bracelets, T-shirts, and toothpick holders. I go on a shopping spree. Munro finds miniature wood models of the boats and cell phone straps with an attached plastic cormorant dressed as an usho. Hoss finds in another shop an ear-pick with a plastic cormorant icon on the handle. He finds a dashboard ornament of a cormorant bobbing in an usho’s basket.
While in Gifu City we spend several evenings viewing ukai from boats and on the rocky shore. We go to the art museum, where an exhibit features contemporary artists who painted cormorants and ukai scenes.
The history museum maintains a permanent exhibit on ukai. Here we find on a back wall a gigantic photograph of a small boy dressed as an usho. In the photograph, the straw skirt extends almost to the boy’s feet. He holds his little hands toward a glow, presumably a fire. The curator tells us the origin of this image, explaining that this is a boy during a holiday where children dress up as what they want to be when they grow up.
“I’m not absolutely positive,” the curator says. “But I’m fairly sure that is Mr. Junji Yamashita.”48
The Gifu City government subsidizes ukai. The imperial household donates a small amount for the usho’s salaries, but the city covers the majority of everything else. Over the last decade, one hundred thousand people a year on average have come to watch the usho and their birds. The boat trips bring in about 300 million yen ($3.6 million) a year, but it costs the city 500 million yen to run the entire operation. The city government and the taxpayers front the difference. Mr. Hino, who works for the city, says they estimate that the “extended economic effect”—hotels, restaurants, shopping, and all other spending that tourists bring—more than makes up for this investment, perhaps earning the city of some 415,000 people well over 4 billion yen each year.49 The city also earns tax money from ukai and employs directly about 170 people in ukai-related jobs.50
Ukai has changed subtly over the years. Hino marks 1963 as the year when the ayu population decreased to a level where fishing with cormorants for subsistence was no longer possible. Factory pollution and chemical input increased during a time of rapid economic growth. No longer would the cormorant fishermen sail downriver for trips lasting several weeks, even several months. They used to travel more than thirty miles to the Ibi River. The usho used to sail in small flotillas, living together on their boats with their cormorants, catching enough fish to sell in order to support themselves and their families.51
After 1963 usho had to begin feeding their cormorants more often with frozen fish. They began to use synthetic line for the tanawa, instead of the split inner bark of the Japanese cypress. They discarded the use of sails, preferring to use outboard engines to save time when transiting to the fishing grounds. Gifu City organized the introductory talks for tourists and the volunteer guide system, making sure some of them spoke a little English, such as Mr. Hino. Though the usho maintain traditional dress and their assistants wear Japanese coats and head cloths, some in the boat now wear wristwatches, khaki shorts, and even neoprene booties. They use a flashlight as a running light and drink from plastic water bottles.
In Gifu City some believe that ukai helps the ecological health of the Nagara because the government and its people want to care for the river, motivated by ukai’s importance to the local economy. Others believe ukai harms the river because the tourists on the shore and in the boats pollute the water.
The Nagara River was once part of a large, clear, free-flowing system until a large dam was completed in 1995, about twenty-five miles (40 km) south of Gifu.52 Fish gates are installed in the dam, but potential damage to ayu populations was at the center of the significant public protest against this massive construction project. Dr. Shiro Kasuya, a professor at Gifu City University, remains opposed to the dam and has quantified the resulting ecological damage. Kasuya told me that ukai tourism has declined sharply. He attributes this to the dam. During the decades before the construction, Gifu attracted more than twice as many visitors as today.53
Kasuya wrote in 2007: “The hotels in Gifu City, which are located along the banks of the Nagara River, have been forced, one by one, into closure. There is no attraction in watching the cormorant catch and swallow sweetfish [ayu] which are no bigger than a few centimeters in length. Sweetfish of 20, sometimes 30 centimeters [1 foot] glowing on an open fire has become a sight of the past. The flavor of the fish, which was the lifeblood of the tourism industry, has also inevitably been lost. The cormorant fishermen see their living fading away.”54
Yamashita has fished his cormorants throughout this transition. He agrees that the river’s health has declined during his lifetime, but from his perspective, this is the wrong way to look at ukai, his profession, and the birds.
“The primary role of ukai is its cultural importance,” Yamashita says. “It is not for keeping a river clean or even for catching fish. It is a cultural tradition. It is spiritual nourishment. To learn about sharing, work, and cooperation between animals and humans.”
Sitting in his garden, Junji Yamashita tells us that he has been an usho for fifty years. It was his father’s career. He was forced into it. Eventually he established his own way to approach the work and the cormorants. Now he believes he has the best job in the world. “I was born to do this work,” he says. Yamashita believes the passing down of the usho title from father to son, for so many generations, is part of what has helped ukai survive. Each time it is passed down, it changes a little. He added that cormorants have also changed over the fourteen hundred years of ukai’s history. Invoking the metaphor of the tanawa, the cormorant’s leash, Yamashita says: “There is a thread from me to the first usho.”
Yamashita explains that Confucius said that up until a man is sixty he does what other people say. After that, he can do whatever he wants. Now that he is over sixty, he has started listening to the cormorants. Yamashita tells us that it has taken him most of his life to realize the value of an usho. He was just going through the motions of a cormorant fisherman without understanding its true meaning.
Yamashita has one son. He rides in the same boat with his father, as the optional fourth boatman. “He’s not looking forward to the work,” Yamashita says. “But he will do it.”
He laughed when he said that his son, like him, might be sixty before he realizes what a wonderful profession it actually is.
Our visit begins to wind down. He declines our invitation to lunch because, he jokes, “I have false teeth.”
We say our goodbyes. We bow and give him our gifts. But as we walk onto the street, Mr. Yamashita hustles out and asks us to return for a moment. He leads us back into the garden. A couple of cormorants are waddling about. One splashes in the pool. The old one slumps with his head still on a stone. Another dark, regal cormorant sits motionless on the highest tree limb.
We follow Yamashita to the very back of his garden-aviary. In an alcove he reveals an entire diorama display about ukai. The exhibit is filled with photographs, mounted artifacts, boat models, illustrations of cormorants, and written descriptions. He explains that his father made it after he had a stroke and could no longer go out and fish. His father died the very day after completing the private family display.