THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD IS THE RECORD OF A MAN IN QUEST OF HIS DAILY BREAD.
—Hedrick Wilhelm van Loon
Tenkara has its roots in the mountains of Japan, in the practical approach of the subsistence fisherman, and the pared-down efficiency of the professional. It is on Japan’s high-gradient streams, where clear plunge pools and fast riffles place a premium on accurate presentation, that tenkara has been refined for over three centuries.
The fly rod in Japan, like its European counterpart, was designed to extend the reach of the angler. Because of the heavy, unwieldy wood used in the European rods, the development of the reel was likely inevitable. But the Japanese rodmaker had access to lightweight bamboo, which was used to produce lithe and aesthetically pleasing rods. Constructed in the round, they could be made in sections, allowing for easy storage and transport. There was no need for the click and whirl of the reel, nor for the excess line to go with it.
During Japan’s 260-year Edo period (1603-1868), the Tokugawa shogun ensured the region’s security and peace through an iron rule. With this peace came leisure, especially for the samurai. These warriors, a significant portion of the populace, were encouraged to fish. Some say this was to temper their warlike nature; others say it was to keep them fit and trained in stealth, agility, and quick reactions. The samurai, who were the dominant class, made fishing fashionable and commissioned rods from bamboo crafters. After the Meiji reforms and abolition of the feudal system, fishing became widespread, and many swordsmiths found employment crafting rods with metal fittings and even inlaid mother of pearl.1
In Japan there are forty-six genera of bamboo and over six hundred species. This variety allowed early rods to be joined in matched sections at the bamboo nodes. They were beautifully lacquered and strengthened with silk thread,2 and the bamboo core was carefully removed to lighten the rods.
The art of fishing for the small, flavorful Japanese ayu was called tengara or tenkara, and consisted of two styles of fishing: silk lines rigged with a line of bare hooks or with a cast of simple flies. These long ayu rods were jigged up and down in a playful fashion from shoreline. The water fished was typically flat. In fact, this water provided the modern name for this form of fishing, dobutsuri, which means “fishing in slow current.”
The manufacturers of sewing needles began crafting stylish flies for the court nobility and aristocrats in Kyoto. The flies, known as kebari, soon became a form of high art, utilizing silk in every color, dubbing “fleece” from the flowering fern, pheasant, and peacock feathers, and even gold foil. Most of these flies display a unique directional angling of the feather, the reverse hackle, and were tied on needles as small as three-eighths of an inch long . . . miniature beauty.
The first flies were likely sold in the 1600s. The Meboso family in Kanasawa and the Katsuoka family in Hyogo Prefecture have preserved this traditional craft to this day. By 1703 gold foil was being used in flies manufactured for the ugui, a small freshwater fish. In 1850 these flies were being built in Bansyu, Kaga, Tosa, and Akita for the ayu fishermen. According to Yugi Meboso, by 1926 production had reached over one million flies per year. Ninety percent of ayu flies are now manufactured in Hyogo Prefecture. The flies are tied on special eyeless and barbless hooks in a technique that takes five years to apprentice. Modern variants include such exotic materials as gold lamé and snakeskin. There are more than six hundred traditional ayu flies, many being identified with a particular geographic area such as Kaga Kebari and Bansyu Kebari.
It is interesting to note that Izaak Walton, with his “light one-handed rod,” was writing The Compleat Angler on the other side of the world about the same time that ayu and ugui flies were being sold in Kyoto. In Spain, fishing the long rod using horsehair-furled lines with reverse hackle flies probably dates from the same era.3 Perhaps even the long rod of the Italian Po River region dates from this time. The long rod is perhaps a natural development, but the reverse hackle fly makes for a remarkable synchrony.
The urban and coastal city dwellers would occasionally travel to the scattered mountain villages to visit the markets; they would also make pilgrimages to the Buddhist and Shugendo temples that dotted these sacred mountains. These visitors were more educated than the mountain dwellers, and their appreciation of the artistic and the aesthetic were developed to a high degree. The mountain people, by contrast, lived within the practicality of spare living and rhythm of the seasons. Travel was difficult and the mountain culture was isolated to a large degree by geography, but the mixing of the two very different cultures occurred from time to time and they influenced each other.
In this sporadic interaction, it is believed that knowledge of fishing with long bamboo rods and beautiful flies was transformed into what we now know as tenkara. This theory is supported by the general uniformity of the Japanese kebari fly and perhaps to a lesser degree by the evolution of the bamboo rod. Certainly the professional fisherman found an opportunity to supply visitors with fish at the scattered mountain inns. In any case, it is certain that tenkara as we know it today was developed primarily by the subsistence and professional fishermen who lived in the heavily forested mountains, and who fished with a focus on efficiency.
The rushing streams and shallow streambeds of mountainous Japan made the terminal sinker of the lowland rig useless. A brace of flies was also unnecessary for the rapid-fire mountain casting required to harvest fish from these streams. Of course, the fishermen of the mountains could not afford the dainty and expensive flies of Kaga and Kyoto, and bait fishing made for twice the work of a reusable fly. Hence these pragmatists simplified, making the kebari fly out of only two materials, fiber and feather. With its reverse feather hackle animating the fly on quick retrieves, it was perfectly matched to the brisk mountain streams, as was noted in this nineteenth-century comparison of the Japanese fly to the British Soft Hackle by observer George Elliott Gregory:
I am told that European flies do not succeed in Japanese rivers and had heard as a reason, assigned by a gentleman, himself an angler, that the feathers of which the wings [sic. hackles] are made, being too soft and pliant to resist the press of the rapid streams of this country, collapse and then cause the artificial fly to lose all similitude to the real insect. This would seem to be the case inasmuch as the wing of the Japanese flies are made of bristles and give to them, when out of the water, a very rough and rigid appearance as compared with that presented by flies of European make.4
Lines of furled horsehair replaced expensive silk even while simple bamboo rods made of a single length of bamboo were being carried over the shoulders of the mountain fishermen. Tenkara fishing became a reliable source of food. Any excess fish were sold in the markets. Though the ayu was not available to the mountain fisherman, other fish were. The iwana, which means “fish of the rocks,” is actually a char similar to our brook trout and lives in the very cold high streams. The amago, which means “fish in the rain” (for that is when they are best caught), and the yamame, which means “woman in the mountains” for its beauty, are true trout. They became market staples of the commercial fishermen.
The first known description of tenkara fishing in English is likely a report by Gregory to the Asiatic Society of Japan on March 28, 1877. This British observer described the ke bari fly rod as being “a simple bamboo rod,” noting that “the line is used with a float but without any sink and the bait as the name ke implies, is an artificial fly.”5 The rod was described as being intermediate in length between the twenty-one-foot koi-tsuri-sao and the three-foot-six-inch haze sao, and was said to be used exclusively in high-gradient mountain streams. Another record of the tenkara style of fishing comes to us in the Tateyama Mountain Climbing Diary of Ernest M Sato (n. Sorbian), recorded in the next year. He and his companion fished in the mountains for their iwana supper. Sato was an able linguist and British diplomat during the early modernization of Japan and founded the Asiatic Society that provides our best English-language records of tenkara to this day.
While the verifiable origins of the name tenkara are likely lost, one theory has it that an early writer observed the mountain style of fishing and misnamed it for its lowland cousin. Some say the name derives from a skipping game, chingara, and refers to the tenkara angler jumping from rock to rock. Another proposes the name comes from tegara, the ancient Japanese dialectic for a yellow butterfly.6 It is perhaps fitting that the name tenkara, which means “from the heavens,” remains a mountain mystery.
According to one author, the modern resurgence of tenkara began in the 1920s.7 Within thirty years a 1950 booklet described fishing with a rather stiff, twelve-foot rod, using either gelatin-coated silk line or nylon, of a length equal to the rod. Multiple sections of bamboo were also becoming the norm around this time, with some segments hollowed and used for nesting storage.8 So effective was this rod design that it survives nearly unchanged today. We can interpret all the essentials of modern tenkara, for example, in this postwar description of tenkara from a Japanese tourist bureau publication:
Silk of three threads thickness (3 rin) used as tippet leading to a feathered hook. A probable hide-out of the yamame is chosen, and there a fly is cast up-stream. Then the line is pulled toward the angler in such a manner that the feathered hook beats the surface. Yamame watches the feathered hook, and jumps at it in a flashing movement.9
Tenkara has persisted by providing food for the mountain people as well as mountain refugees from war and urban poverty. During the period of postwar modernization, however, tenkara’s popularity plummeted, and it was not until the 1980s that it began to see a slowly expanding interest. The first small tenkara summit took place in Japan in 1993. Organized by Dr. Hisao Ishigaki, a tenkara master who has sparked much interest with his writing and videos, the 2009 summit was attended by 160 tenkara anglers. Tenkara in Japan is benefiting from a renewed interest in outdoor adventure, the historical study of the mountain regions, and nascent but expanding catch and release practices.
In the United States, interest has been stirred in part thanks to a presentation of tenkara at the Catskills Fly-fishing Center and Museum on May 23, 2009. Accompanying the exhibit of Japanese fly-fishing materials (“Made in Japan” was coordinated by my consultant Misako Ishimura and will become part of their international collection), the tenkara demonstration was attended by fly-fishing legend Joan Wulff, who is a director at the center. Dr. Ishigaki came from Japan to provide American anglers with the rare opportunity to see tenkara firsthand, donating flies, rods, and lines to the exhibit. He provided a lecture and streamside presentation of tenkara casting, emphasizing that fly fishing could be made simple and uncomplicated, and advocating for catch and release. His emphasis on the unfussy extends to the simple, two-material fly he ties with hen hackle and sewing thread. He backs his provocative, pared-down, one-fly fishing techniques with science. A doctor of medicine and professor of visual training, Dr. Ishigaki has studied the visual acuity and peripheral vision of the trout (as well as professional athletes and sportsmen), contending that the motion and presentation of the fly far exceeds the blurred image recorded by trout acuity.
Serendipitously, in the month before the show opened, the tenkara rod was introduced to the Western Hemisphere through the enthusiasm and vision of then twenty-seven-year-old Daniel W. Galhardo. His company, Tenkara USA, has almost singlehandedly introduced tenkara to the western world, and has made extensive tenkara information available on its Web site. Complementing his work, the debate among fly-fishing forums and the curiosity of the major fly-fishing magazines has also been instrumental in the mounting interest in tenkara. Especially popular with hikers and ultralight backpackers, interest in tenkara has been phenomenal.
Tenkara is spreading internationally too. New Zealanders and Aussies are finding tenkara effective on their ultraclear streams even while the Italians are adapting to tenkara in the fast streams of Valsesia in northern Italy. The Swiss are fishing tenkara, and it’s being taken up by anglers in England and Wales, where the similarities between the traditional North Country Yorkshire fly and the traditional Japanese kebari fly have no doubt been noted.
Meanwhile, tenkara in the United States is already evolving. The centuries-old kebari fly and its traditional staccato stream presentation are being supplanted and extended by the many varieties of flies and fishing styles that characterize American fly fishing. This adaptation of tenkara is inevitable, although I hope that the origins of tenkara, from the hands of the pragmatic mountain fisherman, will not be forgotten.
1. Matuzaki, Meizi, Angling in Japan, Board of Tourist Industry Japanese Government Railways, 1940, p. 14.
2. Ibid., p. 12.
3. Basurto, Fernado, The Little Treatise on Fishing, 1539. Juan de Berga, Manuscrito de Astorga, 1624.
4. Gregory, George Elliott, “Japanese Fisheries” in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, vol. v, part I, March 28, 1877, p. 103 footnote.
5. Ibid., pp. 103-4.
6. Seseki, Yamamoto, www1.bbiq.jp/yamame/gogen_tenkara.htm.
7. Takeuchi, Junsaburo, Modern Angling in Japan, Shiryosha, Tokyo, 1950.
8. Sato, Koseki, Japanese Angler, Foreign Affairs Association of Japan, Tokyo, undated but est. 1955, pp. 10-11.
9. Ibid., pp. 16-17.