The back story.
Sometime last summer Todoroki-san made a generous offer to send me some of his kebari. In the following weeks I was away from home at our vacation house four hours away. One day my wife called saying I had received a package from Japan. At the time I was also expecting a package from Keiichi-san at Tenkaraya. Asking who the package was from she said she thought it was from Todoroki. I send Todoroki-san a message telling him the kebari had been received. He was relieved they had been delivered. Only to discover when I returned home that my wife was mistaken, and the only package I had received from Japan was from Tenkaraya. It was a mystery why the kebari never delivered. I was disappointed they were somehow lost in the mail. I was reluctant to ask him to try again, and make a new burden on his time, materials, and generosity. However, as you will see Todoroki-san is a kind man.
Recently Todoroki-san graciously was willing to try again.
They arrived in the mail today. I am delighted with them. There are more than I expected, and a wonderful variety of them.
Todoroki-san, Thank you very much. I am humbled by your wonderful gift. どうもありがとうございます!
It will be a long wait till spring when I can fish with them.
Yesterday when I walked out to get my mail I walked along the creek that runs along the south side of my yard. I was surprised to see several small fish darting about below the thin ice covering the stream.
Adam,
Thank you for starting up this section in 10 Colors. The information is fascinating and informative.
I hope that you, David, and Todoroki-san continue to offer more information. I am very interested in the
Japanese history, methods, flies, people that started and refined Tenkara. Many thanks to you all for sharing.
I now that many people (including me) benefit greatly from this information.
“His story” is not always correct. To the victor, goes the spoils. If no one challenges the history, then it stands as written.
The books in this section are the history of Japanese Tenkara. That web page was written to show where I get my history lessons. Those books have stood the test of time. I won’t go into it much more, you either understand my point or not but the bottom line is, you should do your own research. I post the books because they are from Japan and they are written by the Japanese. It is up to you to decide for yourself, your interpretation of Japanese tenkara and the history of it.
This is the way that I do it and I share it. I’m grateful when people join in and share what they know freely.
I personally think Japanese history should be told by the Japanese. Their English is good enough, their command of the language is excellent.
Now, tenkara is outside of Japan. I’m going to focus more on tenkara NOT in Japan but where it has gone. I have respectfully attentive to the Japanese and now it’s time for reporting on how it has taken seed outside of it’s home. I’m super excited to go exploring with what I know in places so far removed from tenkara’s homeland.
I truly believe that tenkara has come of age, and the people that do it all over the globe, what they are doing is awesome.
Wow, mine too. I started out fishing very much like I fish now, but now with feathers instead of a grasshopper I caught.
2018 is going to be a transition year for me, more writing, less wasting time online. This will not change my participation here. There are a couple of you that I enjoy interacting with. You are respectful and I appreciate what you do.
Kind of similar to the Japanese language blog I turn up now and again.
It’s about replacing the cork grip on his tenkara rod with a wooden grip.
But the small world part is he writes that he learned to tenkara fish, when living in my home state here in the USA when he worked for one of the Japanese companies in the Kanawha Valley. He had not learned mountain stream fishing in Japan before coming here. Learned it here, but continued it after returning home.
If possible we will cooperate to become tenkara-net archive
Knowledge of my tenkara fishing is old knowledge because I learned while fishing with an old fisherman in the middle mountainous area
I think that you have a lot of knowledge of the new tenkara fishing
Things I know can be answered quickly and I will check what I do not know
There may be mistakes, but I will fix it
When FF fishing law spread in Japan as well, there are many personal mistakes and unfair information as well and there are now also difficult aspects that it is difficult to understand due to it
Mistakes can fix even later but unfair information eliminates
If everyone is Kurere forgive laughing my poor English
Cool, Hope I didn’t botch my attempted translation wildly incorrect.
Trying to discover the deeper meaning of, and the difference between iki / sui [いき・すい, or 粋 ・すい ]. Just kind of ran me around in circles. I suspected some people who tried to explain them didn’t really understand it themselves.
Ah, here is the link to that small world tenkara blog I mentioned earlier.
Where the blog author wrote: It was my first visit to friends in West Virginia when I lived in America to know (learn about?) Trout. … It was the headwaters rather than a mountain stream, where I experienced Tenkara Fishing for the first time.
[ トラウトを知ったのはアメリカ在住の時、
ウエストヴァージニアの友人に連れられ行ったのが初めてです。。。。。。渓流と言うより源流でしたが、そこでテンカラ釣りを初めて体験しました。]
How cool is that?
Totally surprising. It would have been less surprising if he had written that he visited friends in WV and took them tenkara fishing for the first time. But it was the other way round. He learned how to tenkara fish here, then kept tenkara fishing after he returned to Japan. Reverse export of tenkara culture.
Anyway, his post is really about - Thinking of river tools as mountain tools. Or maybe it is the other way round. Japanese sentence structure still confuses me which way things are going. His blog post is about making a wooden grip for his rod, tougher material.
Me too. Small world sometimes. 