Written by Kazunori Okada - © 2024 Kazunori Okada, All rights reserved.
Catch & Eat
Catch and Eat (C&E) is a practice of keeping the angler's catches to consume for food. To share my thoughts on this, I want to begin by sharing a story of introducing tenkara fishing to five girls.
Three summers ago, I joined a handful of friends and their families to spend a week together at Muir Trail Ranch (MTR) in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains. MTR is located within the drainage of the south fork of the San Joaquin River. This watershed is a part of California's designated wild and heritage trout waters, which holds a variety of game fish such as wild brown trout (Salmo trutta) and rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss). As a part of our group activities, I volunteered to teach tenkara fishing to my friends including their kids. By that time, I had already experienced teaching tenkara to quite a few people but never to a group of five girls ages 6 to 13. On a beautiful summer morning, we gathered by a nice deep swimming hole, and I gave a brief lecture on tenkara's history and techniques, emphasizing its simplicity. After a little casting practice, we moved to a riffle section and began practicing fishing. First time ever fishing for all of them! Teaching the stream-work to each of these kids while fixing their tangled lines and making sure they were safe on the rocks at the same time was quite a challenge. The youngest pre-teen girl, "M," was a bit afraid of water so I did not give her a rod of her own and asked her to watch instead. After the four other girls got into their own rhythm, I turned to her at last. I showed her the rod I was using for demonstrations, the beefiest 4.5-meter honryu rod, but obviously, the rod was too big for her. So, I let her hold the rod with both her hands as I also supported it with my hands standing behind her. Using our four arms, we swung our rod together as I explained to her how it worked.
"You see, "M," the spots by the rapid flow? Fish like being in a place like that."
It was not easy to control the cast using the long rod together. But finally, we made our first good presentation of the fly. In my relief, I checked how others were doing by a side glimpse. That was the moment I felt a sudden heavy jolt in my hands. "M," feeling the same weight in her hands, screamed out of her lungs and into my ears,
"What! What is that!!!"
She did not let her hands go as we danced in the rapid together. A few minutes later "M" and I landed the best fish of that trip, a beautiful wild 18-inch brown trout! Oh, she was so excited. Everyone came around us in a circle and observed the impressive fish in our net. One of them asked if she could touch it. I answered her.
"Yes, but slowly and carefully, okay?".
As her index finger touched the side of the fish, it jumped powerfully. The girls also jumped and squealed at the same moment, followed by their long laughter. That was the moment I identified a learning opportunity for these young friends. Teaching is my day job, so I have keen eyes for such an occasion. I asked them if they wanted to eat the catch and if they wanted to see how they would prepare for it, which is … very graphic and gross... To my surprise, all of them immediately agreed. So, it went. I passed on to them an important life skill of how to euthanize, clean and keep the fish in the wild. Below, I repeat the same lesson I gave to them for those who wish to learn the skill.
(Editorial Note: The following texts include graphic descriptions of how to kill fish. If you do not care to read this part, please click here to skip the details.)
Hold the fish backside up steadily but not too firmly. The force of your grip should not be enough to break an egg.
The first mission for keeping fish is to slaughter the landed fish as compassionately as possible. This is performed by damaging the brain of the fish as quickly and decisively as one can. The brain of a fish is located at the intersection of the side lateral line and a vertical crease in the middle of the gill cover. You can perform this in three ways: with a knife, stick, or rock.
Insert the tip of your knife's blade from the head between the eyes and push it in the direction toward the intersection of the two lines. When the blade's tip touches the brain, the fish will react by jolting. This is the sign that your knife reaches the brain. Move the blade tip by wiggling it. You are doing this right if the fish continues to jolt. Be ready for sudden moves of fish with tightening of your grip. Continue this until you see that fish's mouth opens and stays open.
Alternatively, use any thick and heavy stick or small rock to hit the same location on its head between the eyes. Hit forcefully a few times. It is important to be decisive and not to be gentle to avoid prolonging the process.
When no knife/stick/rock is available, locate a solid surface of a large rock or tree nearby. Hold the fish belly up with both hands and swing the fish’s head hard onto the surface. Repeat this a few times to make sure the fish is finished and has not just passed out.
Wash your hands well..
Hold the fish belly up in one hand. Use a small sharp knife. Insert it into the anal cavity and slit the belly skin open going up. The belly skin of the trout is thin. Do not insert too much of the blade into the fish. A quarter inch or less would be enough. When the blade reaches the chest between the pelvic fins, cutting could become difficult due to a hard cartilage. Be careful. Cut up to the connection of the head and the belly.
Cut the small connection between the belly and under-head as well as the thin connective membranes between the gills and the body by knife or by fingers. Cutting the membranes could cause significant bleeding, especially for larger fish. Be prepared.
Grab the gills firmly at its connection to the upper head. Pull it up to detach it from the head. For a larger fish, use a knife to do this. Once the gills are detached from the head, gently pull it down toward the anal cavity. This will take all the guts. You see a small colon connected to the body. Cut it close to the cavity and now you detached all innards of the fish from the body.
You see a black band inside the stomach along the fish's spine. This is the kidney. Remove it by using your thumb nail to push it up from the tail to the head with. You need to repeat this a few times to remove the kidney well.
Clean your hands well with water again. Then clean both inside and outside of the fish. Remove all red and black remnants in the stomach cavity. Wash off the slime from the skin as much as possible. After cleaning, dry the fish as best as you can.
Cover each fish with clean paper or leaves you find by the stream then put them in a bag, so the skins of fish do not touch others. Keep it cool and avoid putting them under the sun.
Dig a little hole in the ground away from water and bury the guts. Check regulations before you go fishing. If disposal is prohibited, bring the innards in a separate bag, or perform steps 4-7 as soon as you reach home.
During the lesson, one of the girls became visibly emotional. She left the lesson quietly and cried by herself for a short while. But she came back to our circle soon and continued learning with the rest. After the long day, back at the ranch, they all enjoyed eating the trout as a part of our dinner that night.
I see a true value in teaching proper skills to youngsters like what happened above. Self-sustenance is an important skill we are all prone to forget while enjoying the convenience of our modern lives. It is a part of the angler's privilege to know how to prepare and consume the freshest of our catches. Confidence in knowing such skills would make us more wholesome as humans. Even if these girls do not become anglers, it is good for them not to forget the fact that all nice fillets of fish or meat come to their table by someone else doing the difficult tasks of raising/catching/killing of the animals for them.
Tenkara is rooted with those who brought the fresh fish to our tables: commercial river anglers called shokuryoshi (職漁師), also known as kawadachi (川立ち) in Japan. Shokuryoshi’s techniques for fishing and preservation/cooking styles of their catches are direct heritage that remains true and relevant in tenkara today as its integral part. In this sense, studying the history of tenkara helps us deeply understand an aspect of C&E and vice versa. The earliest document about these commercial anglers goes as far back as the 17th century in the area of Kurobe River (黒部川) in Toyama (富山). They were most active during the 19th century to the mid-20th century in various mountain rivers of Japan. Over many centuries, folks who resided in the mountains lived off the forest due to the lack of sizable farming lands. Their life was hard because the economy back then was built around and reliant on farming the rice that they could not produce. So, they had to supplement their income by commercially hunting bears and fish, and by foraging spring sprouts and mushrooms. Luckily, they were located near well-known hot spring retreats. These retreats were located too far from the ocean to regularly serve fresh saltwater fish for guests, a common practice of hot spring retreats across Japan. Many guests of these remote hot springs were there to treat their long-term ailments, and some believed in the medicinal effects of wild trout, which increased demand, and thus their price. So, mountain folks could earn hard-to-come-by cash income during the summer by catching native Japanese trout such as iwana (岩魚 Salvelinus leucomaenis), yamame (山女魚 Oncorhynchus masou masou), amago (雨子Oncorhynchus masou ishikawae) and delivering them to these retreats over high mountain passes on foot.
Some of these anglers descended originally from the Akita (秋田) region and were members of the mountain hunting and gathering nomad clan called matagi (マタギ). They traveled far and some chose to settle by the rivers (Zako River 雑魚川, for example) that became home to shokuryoshi. Using their traditional methods, they caught and sold enough fish year after year to raise families with many children. Technically speaking, they typically practiced bait fishing techniques with stream insects called kawamushi (川虫). This style of fishing is still practiced in Japan called keiryu-zuri (渓流釣り). But during the summer evening hatches, many used hand-tied flies for fishing which saved them the time needed to collect bait. Some masters preferred this style, called hane-zuri (羽根釣り) or fishing with wings, so they started to practice this regularly. These are the direct ancestors of Tenkara. Records of early Japanese fly fishing go as far back as 1678, cited as haegashira (蠅頭) meaning fly head. For more sources on the history of Tenkara written in English, see texts by Galhardo and Gaskell.
Even though most Japanese tenkara anglers exercise C&R today, tenkara’s root in commercial angling is clearly reflected in the way tenkara is practiced today. For example, the style of tenkara fishing "efficiently" covers many fishable spots in succession within a rapid stream. You do not linger in a single pool, taking your time, but exploring each pool swiftly with only a few accurate casts to find the fish eager to take your flies. It is like foraging for wild fruits. You visit tree after tree and only harvest from each tree those that are ripened and ready to eat, leaving the hard ones for later for yourself or others. This tenkara style was developed over time for catching as many young trout that are eager to take offerings as fast as possible because the hot spring retreats demanded a lot of small 6-8 inches of trout for a popular type of dish I will describe later.
This desire to increase the number of catches also manifests in many other fishing styles in Japan beyond the traditional tenkara fishing. This is so much so that there is a special name for this angling style, called kazu-tsuri (数釣り), to focus on catching a greater number of fish. Catching more than ten fish is honored and called tsunuke (ツ抜け) because the counting numbers from 1 to 9 in Japanese include the letter "tsu" (ツ) in each but those above 10 do not. "nuke" (抜け) means "without" so tsu-nuke or without-tsu indicates the numbers more than ten. This is slang among Japanese anglers to boast that he or she managed to catch "more" than ten fish. I speculate that these examples above are influenced by commercial angling practices, both in fresh and salt waters, where more fish equals more income.
Another example is the way tenkara anglers do not typically practice match-the-hatch, instead, they stick to a fixed set of only a few flies used for all varying situations. Many Tenkara masters today, such as Ishigaki, Sakakibara, and Sebata, even talk about the relative unimportance of matching a select fly from a wide selection and rather emphasize carefully controlling your casts and drifts. Using a single fly for the entire day of fishing, the "one-fly approach", is also a common idea. This peculiar style is also motivated by tenkara’s historical background. Using a single, or only a few flies, saves the time that would be required for selecting and changing flies at each pool. This style fosters more elegant and efficient/quick movements in stream fishing, which is regarded as the virtuous quality of anglers in Japan, called tegaeshi-ga-ii (手返しが良い) or "efficient good handling." The time saved matching and changing flies is spent focusing more on other aspects of the stream work and actually fishing, thus helping to increase the number of catches.
This one-fly approach also made sense for fishing in rapid streams where tenkara was developed. Trout in such an environment have to quickly decide to take the bait or not because the swift flows push the objects in it fast, leaving them no time to judge if the bait is fake or not. So, they tend to be more forgiving of the dissimilarity of your fly to what they are eating at the moment, allowing the approach to be effective. The one-fly approach also reminds me of the simplicity of tenkara, another important aspect of tenkara’s fishing style other than its efficiency. It is inspiring to see how simple the tenkara rigging is. No reel! It is just a rod, a line, and a set of a few ordinary flies. The minimalism of this style is akin to the functional beauty of certain professional tools like a well-designed old hammer for woodworking. It is also cultural as the Japanese traditionally worship reducing muda (無駄) or unnecessary excess. It is the less-is-more concept, that Marie Condo translated so well in her popular TV shows.
These Japanese commercial anglers also perfected how best to keep fish fresh and prepare them to impress their hot spring retreat clients, a natural effort to increase business revenue. As soon as a fish was landed, great care was given to maximize freshness. Some perfected a technique to net fish without playing it long in the water, which will keep their meat less stressed. They cleaned their catches right away and kept them in special cedar wood boxes. They used leaves to prevent the fish from touching each other and natural spring water to keep them fresh for a long time even in the middle of summer without electricity. This is something I also practice (minus the special wooden box) when I end up keeping any fish in my outings.
These anglers also processed their catch for the best preservation when transporting raw fish was not possible or desired. The anglers often kept a simple mountain hut as a base for their daily fishing expedition. Some of them had an open grill called irori (囲炉裏) which was placed inside the center of the hut. They skewered fish with bamboo or wooden sticks in a shape as if the fish is getting ready to jump to the surface for the aquatic insects, and then slowly smoked them at a distance by a grill. This technique is called yakigarashi (焼き枯らし). After a day of arduous work, these shokuryoshi gathered by an irori, warming their body and swapping their stories while making these slow-smoked trout.
Lightly smoked trout of a considerable size can also be filleted and marinated in salted vinegar. Then they can be made into masu-zushi (鱒寿司): a type of sushi called oshi-zushi (押し鮨). To make this popular mountain delicacy, you add some vinegar to cooked rice then put them on green evergreen leaves spread inside a container. Cover the rice with the vinegared trout fillet, then wrap the whole thing with the leaves. Pressing it by the weight placed on top of a container's lid will make this sushi dish, which is my favorite type of box lunch when traveling by train in Japan.
Whether raw or smoked, fish prepared by shokuryoshi were further cooked in various styles before being served to the clients at hot spring or onsen (温泉) retreats. Shioyaki (塩焼き), or salted grilled trout, is a standard serving method considered the best by many. Seven to eight-inch trout are the popular size for this dish. The trout is seasoned only with salt. Liberal amounts of salt are also applied on the head and fins to avoid them getting burned. Trout is then put on a grill. As soon as it is cooked to your liking, it will be served with a cut lemon. After eating their meat, you do not waste the remaining bones. They can be quickly grilled again and put in a warmed sake. This is called kotsuzake (骨酒), another mountain delicacy.
Smaller five to six-inch trout are preferred when making kanroni (甘露煮), or sweet pot-cooked trout, one of the main dishes in a common mountain resort dinner. These trout will be slow-cooked in a pot with sweetened teriyaki-like broth combining soy sauce, sake, and sugar. They are cooked for a long time until the bones become soft so you can eat the whole fish from head to tail. This is the reason smaller fish were preferred since their bones are softer than larger specimens. Beyond being an integral part of the mountain dinner fares, kanroni can be made with any other small fish and was also one of the common menus across Japan in various cultural celebrations such as weddings and New Year meals. This dish is, in fact, a part of my dear memory of my first fishing outing. I had another uncle who took me on my first-ever fishing trip to a local pier near my hometown. It was a sizzling summer day. My brother and I joined his family and rode a slow train for an hour to a small local port. We fished for gobies (マハゼ Acanthogobius flavimanus) using ragworms (ゴカイ). Gobies are little funny-looking fish. I remember watching the float getting twitched when they came to eat my worms. When landed, they danced around and tickled my little hands. My uncle visited there every summer. And he cooked all his catches in the same kanroni style then put them in his freezer. Come New Year’s Day, these little gobies became one of the main dishes of the traditional New Year meals called osechi (お節料理) shared among our extended family. Every time I eat kanroni gobies, I recall my late uncle and the fish dancing in my hands, which brings smiles to my face.
It is because of these commercial anglers' hard work that generations of hot spring visitors enjoyed beautiful, tasty, and nutritious meals in the middle of the mountains, and that we are blessed to know a variety of ways to enjoy nature’s bounty in Japanese cuisines. Paved roads now connect these remote mountain retreats, once only reachable on foot, to everything city dwellers can get in a supermarket. Trout farming was also successfully established in the 1960s and has become a thriving business today. These circumstances made the life of commercial anglers unsustainable. Shokuryoshi are now gone from their rivers. But their legacy continues to live in the spirit of tenkara fishing, even as we practice C&R today in Japan or elsewhere.
About the Author
Kaz Okada hails from Nagoya Japan and resides now in Los Angeles. He is an avid angler for both fresh and salt-water fishing. His fishing experience has earned him several recognitions: two California Heritage Trout Challenge awards in 2015 and 2018, the California Supreme Master Angler Award in 2018, and three IGFA Fly Trout Slam awards (Grand Slam in 2021, Super Slam in 2022, and Fantasy Slam in 2023). He enjoys introducing Tenkara fishing to our youth and those with minimum fishing experience. When he is not traveling for his work, he loves to disappear into the foothills of Southern California and the remotest areas of the high Sierra mountains with his Tenkara rods. A member of Pier Fishing in California and Trout Unlimited. Follow his Instagram (@kazfishing) to learn more about his current exploits. For inquiries and permissions for reuse of any part of this article, please contact him at fishninjaa@gmail.com.
Endnotes
For learning more about MTR, see (https://muirtrailranch.com/. Accessed 15 January 2024).
Since 1971, Heritage and Wild Trout Program of California Department of Fish and Wildlife has managed “aesthetically pleasing and environmentally productive" streams and lakes in California as designated wild and heritage trout waters. They are listed in (https://wildlife.ca.gov/Fishing/Inland/Trout-Waters. Accessed 15 January 2024).
Literature about shokuryoshi includes the following texts published in Japanese (Koyama, 1983; Suzuno, 1993; Suzuno, 2002; Tokado, 2013; Onikubo, 2016).
Areas well-known for shokuryoshi include Zako River (雑魚川), Uono River (魚野川), Tamagawa Headwaters (多摩川源流), Nagara River (長良川), Oze (尾瀬沼), and Hinoemata (檜枝岐).
Hoppo hot spring (発哺温泉) in Shiga Heights, Nagano (志賀高原、長野) and Kusatsu hot spring (草津温泉) in Gunma (群馬) are well-known examples for such hot spring retreats.
Yutaka Yukawa is an author and well-known fly angler who wrote about iwana and yamame in his essays (Yukawa, 1983; Yukawa, 1991; Yukawa, 2014).
Intersections of matagi and shokuryoshi are discussed in (Suzuno, 1993; Yamamoto, 2012; Takakuwa, 2013).
For more information about keiryu-zuri, see (Yukawa, 1983; Ibuse, 1990; Suzuno, 2002; Yamamoto, 2012).
Daniel Galhardo, the founder of Tenkara USA, and Paul Gaskell of Discover Tenkara in the UK have written essays on the history of Tenkara in English. See (Galhardo, 2017; Discover Tenkara, 2024).
There are many how-to books on Tenkara written by many Tenkara masters in Japan. For examples, see (Kuwabara, 1988; Horie, 1989; Ishigaki, 2011; Sakakibara, 2014; Maruyama, 2015; Takakuwa, 2016; Sakakibara, et al., 2017).
Match-the-hatch is a traditional western fly fishing concept. It lets you find a fly that best mimics what your target is eating at a moment by trial and error. Consequently, you often end up staying in a single pool for a long time. This is like making a visit to a single best tree and wait for the big and nice but hard fruit on it to ripen. This technique shines when you are coaxing those finicky and large ones that lurk in pressured streams and in deep pools. In this context, it is interesting to consider the similarity of how Tenkara and Euro nymphing techniques have been developed over time in different locales.
Hisao Ishigaki (Ishigaki, 2000; Ishigaki, 2011; Ishigaki, et al., 2018).
Masami Sakakibara (Sakakibara, 2014; Sakakibara, et al., 2017).
Yuzo Sebata (Sebata, 2010; Sebata & Ura, 2018).
Marie Kondo, known as “konmari”, produced a popular TV show (Tyding Up, 2019), promoting to get rid of unnecessary things from households.
For example, the Gujyo style fishing practiced by keiryu anglers in Nagara river drainage uses this technique to net fish without touching them (Keiryu, 2013).
Iwao Sakai (酒井嵓) of Kosuge Village (小菅村) in Yamanashi (山梨) was the first to successfully farm yamame trout in 1965 (Tokado, 2013). For iwana char, it was Kazu Tsubota (坪田一) of Fukaze (深瀬) in Ishikawa (石川) (https://hakusando.co.jp/about/story/. Accessed 15 January 2024) and Kazuo Sumata (数又一夫) of Kurihara (栗原市) in Miyagi (宮城) (https://visit-kurihara.travel/features/4. Accessed 15 January 2024) who succeeded in farming them first in 1963 and 1968, respectively.
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[Accessed 15 January 2024].
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