Peder, you said something that’s VERY important for practice.
It’s not just about the mechanics of casting a line…
“I aim for rocks and leaves for practice”
ACCURACY is soooooooo important!
Look at the YouTube videos of the masters.
They are astoundingly accurate.
As for handlining a fish in, as soon as I begin that I’m actually hoping it comes off! Clean & quick release, get back to fishing. Win win.
I play that game too. It’s so cool when you gently light your fly on a floating leaf.
We are getting there now.
Cast cast cast, out front, practice, cardboard circle if you don’t want to make a dedicated board. Put a tuna can on that. Use a Velcro dot on the bottom. Cut the tip off of a kebari and place a dot of JB weld on it so it doesn’t hurt or stick. It will slightly enhance the sound, the “tick” it makes.
Practice!
Actually do it.
It is a solid gold investment in your skills.
Practice the same way so you can evaluate rods to your skill. See which ones work better for you. Do the same thing with the lines you make.
Then…
Start doing that on your non-dominant arm.
Improve your other side…
Something I have learnt that I havn’t read here is the simple technique in practice that is to turn ones head and watch ones back cast, seeing the rod ‘power up’ and the line straighten before beginning the forward cast.
Thanks everyone for taking the time to provide information and tips. I realized through the comments that ‘practice’ will be the single most important factor in my persuit to become better at Tenkara, specifically casting a long line. Given I do not have the luxury to fish with experienced Tenkara fishers, practice and patience will be my biggest teachers.
Thanks! (with great gratitude)
This, right here.
I teach this to some, more than others.
Looking at the rod how it powers up with such little effort!
But I thread the back cast into a hole into the trees if it’s tight. If it’s real tight, I might cast backwards but I’m really just showing off…
He is right, look at your cast, look at what the rod is doing to the loop.
He is so right.
Oh yeah, When first taking up tenkara I recall reading this priority advice from several Japanese tenkara anglers; First learn to cast. Second learn to cast accurately to a point.
Don’t really recall what was listed third. But I would say learn what point to cast to, that is learn where the fish are likely to be. Or possibly, third would be learn where to stand when you cast, so that you do not spook the fish. If Mr Fish exits his hiding place, a precise cast to where he was a moment earlier won’t matter. 
Yeah, side casting is also and easy way to see how the rod tip loads at stop of the back cast. The rod doesn’t need to be in a plane horizontal to the ground, 45˚ or so works fine.
Thanks Adam for posting this thread and the above comment.
Definite Kudos to @CM_Stewart for writing what he wrote.
In general, it is healthy to release what we think we know and what we want tenkara to be and to read between the lines. Chris’ article is all about learning and improving…and if it can happen to him in this stage of his experience, it can happen to any of us. There is a difference between doing what we like and actually learning from legitimate tenkara techniques. This is not a “what is tenkara?” discussion. This is about tenkara technique.
Compared to others I am low on the technical and definitely do not practice as much as I should. But much of what I and others have learned from Adam Klagsbrun aka @NotoriousToker is a real gift and I thank him for his perseverance and generosity. So much of his effort is selfless and a genuine wish for his audience to learn. Although he has sort of been missing from posting on Social media, I hope he would feel comfortable to post here at some point.
I have been enjoying the utility of stiff hackle for a couple seasons now. I also used to throw killer bugs and other hackless patterns but rarely ever these days. Great article and thanks for sharing.
@Gressak, can you point me to Adam Klagsbrun resources online? I’m always looking for good links. Thanks!
That is the only one I know of. As you can see he has even slowed down in his blogging.
I think he has pulled away from the book of faces and has limited interaction these days.
Our community largely is charged and not receptive to guidance. The conflict in our community is a knee jerk reaction of the immature and/or inexperienced. I can see how some folk who champion tenkara finally give up, which is a shame, but when the world has deaf ears there is no point in conversation. The best move is to not play at all…or to hand pick your audience.
That is something I have run into my whole life. Sometimes a student, myself included, is not ready for the next step. They need to be ready for it and may have to work to get there. There is no shortcut to experience and especially with disciplines that have a denser internal philosophy…some students may never be able to absorb instruction, their wiring will not allow them to the next step. We all have limits.
Umm, I would not say that but I know what you mean.
I quit social media groups on FB because of marketing. FB by and large is fun but not a place I go to learn. The reason why I still visit is Japanese friends and friends and family fhere.
I do share a little tenkara there but not my primary focus.
Social media has its own set of issues.
I prefer learning from experts and experience.
For 23 years now, I’ve been promoting small stream fly fishing with with Yoshikazu Fujioka, for ten of those years helping lots of Japanese tenkara experts get the real stuff out there. When a sniper on FB starts taking shots at me telling others I’m not Japanese enough?
It makes me laugh.
And then I realize, people don’t know who did what… with whom.
So screw social media that way.
I just live my life and have fun doing what I do.
It’s better that way.
I like Adam’s blog. I get a kick out of what he writes. His photography is good.
Has there always been so much in-fighting within the Tenkara community around what and what is not “Tenkara”?
It seems like a lot of resources I have stumbled across eventually leads down to that conversation, which dissolves into people split into two camps a) traditionalists (“Tenkara should only be done this way and you need to learn from the Japanese masters” and b) evolutionists - individuals open to exploring and expanding ideas.
I can see how new people get turned off from reading forums and blogs, especially when individuals become pretentious about their own camp. I, for one, don’t really care how long a person has been fishing Tenkara, if they were an “early adaptor”, how long their blog has been in existence", who they were taught by, etc. I like the style of fishing, find it effective, and would like to learn more effective strategies for the environment I live in.
I live in a place where almost no one Tenkara fishes and I get laughed at (shunned) for the approach. However, I read come to the community to find I potentially get shunned for not doing exactly the way some Japenese individuals decided to do it in Japan.
Reminds me of the punk rock community when I was younger. A community that was partially destroyed from too much in-fighting about its own definitions and I felt missed the biggest picture.
Just my two cents from an inexperienced newb.
Not going back ten years from when Daniel Galhardo first started the wave introducing tenkara outside of Japan. It took a few years before bickering started. It seems to ebb and flow in intensity. I’ve become unaware of the level of it going back about 4 years because I’ve learned to avoid online places where it most often happens.
It mostly seems a thing in America and Europe. Not in Japan, where fishing methods outside the norm seem to be recognized as outside the traditional tenkara method with a smile, not as here with a disapproving look, and “Hey, you’re doing it wrong!” Ignoring an old Japanese idiom - 10 Colors Tenkara - the expanded meaning is 10,000 people 10,000 different ways of practicing tenkara.
It us a turn off. A major additional reason why I avoid facebook where most of that happens. I prefer an open forum like this one where it is clear from the forum name, open mindedness to various methods is expected. For me - recognition of what is or is not traditional tenkara - is appreciated and helpful. Condemning someone for being outside the norm is not.
A lot of people seem to lack tactful methods for disagreements. I would never say to someone they are doing it wrong and what they are doing is not tenkara. I would only say, I do it this way, you might want to try it and see if it works better for you than the way you’ve been doing it.
All that being said. Words mean things, and if used to mean something it is not, clear communication is degraded. Not possible. But I’m a technical type guy, speed and velocity are different things. In the west " tenkara" has come to be a word to cover all types of fixed line fishing. So it is improperly used. In Japan, I think, tenkara is more narrowly defined, but probably not as narrowed defined as defined by the western tenkara police. I think there is a greater recognition of difference between traditional tenkara and modern tenkara practices there. In the end - it’s only fishing and definition of a word. Not a major sin that injured someone.
Well said David.
Regarding tenkara policing…
The only thing I would add is the context of the tenkarabum entry and how Chris admittedly resisted understanding how a killer bug is not a tenkara fly. This is Chris Stewart who is extremely well versed in everything tenkara.
That kind of distinction of what flies are and are not tenkara flies often come up for debate and considered a bit on the end of tenkara policing, which I feel is an unfair term.
I really do not think it is a matter of tenkara policing, those folk who may have noted to Chris that the killer bug is not a tenkara fly. It is often more of an attempt to enlighten that there is a difference in what people are doing and effective tenkara technique. All the tools work together as a whole. There are some tools that cannot be easily substituted.
Sort of like how a recipe needs all its parts to be effective. Like leave the eggs out or substitute them with chicken. Its a free world, so if people want to use chicken instead of eggs to bake cakes, they can have at it. It sure makes for an interesting cake. Is it edible and filling…Yes!
In general I try not to inject too much into this anymore, but I think that the guys who have been marked as policing forces might be a bit misunderstood. There are some pretty mind blowing tenkara concepts I have learned from some of those guys, so I tend to lean in that direction. I do not have the skill to apply them all, but I am working on it when I can.
Yup, this site might be turning into the same thing…
I could care less.
I’ll just do it, write about it and share it.
You like it?
Cool.
If not?
I don’t care.
Practice tenkara your way.
Sadly bickering is not isolated to tenkara - not even to fishing - it is everywhere online.
The real issue here is what a new person is confronted with online. When you search online for info you get confronted with blogs, forums, merchants and more “explaining” tenkara but the vast majority of it is how to fish existing “styles” of fly fishing and in some cases even spin fishing gear with the TOOL a tenkara rod.
It is difficult to sort through all this info and find out information on the techniques and systems that are what the tool was designed and refined over time to do.
As an example, your standard hammer with a nail puller side is designed to punch in nails and remove nails. Can we use this tool to punch in a tight fitting stud? Yes. Can we us the nail puller to lever out something else? Yes. Is that what it was designed for? No.
So yes we can use a tenkara rod to fish all kinds of methods in many kinds of water and for many kinds of species but that is (as an example) “stripped bass fishing with a tenkara rod” not tenkara the system. If everything just gets called tenkara particularly when it is young in this country and young in its explanation in english then the sources of information muddle the goods.
The so called purists or police (the ones I have met or spoken with) are really neither. Many use a tenkara rod to do all kinds of fishing and none of them are telling anyone how they should fish - they are just telling them that they should not call it Tenkara. They also are not opposed to experimentation and not opposed to modern materials they just want the system of fishing that is the basis of the modern tenkara rod to be the prominent information out there. The other point involved with the spread of information is that many of the merchants of the gear intentionally blur these lines to sell things. This is either out of ignorance, lack of caring or greed.
I started this whole post on Chris’ “a ha moment” with an “ah ha moment” of my own. Mine was that what Chris realized is a system in a technique that is at the heart of what Tenkara IS and I for one think that should be what new people to the sport find when they want to learn about tenkara. If they later want to chase bass with poppers and a tenkara rod then have a blast as I do 
but you dont need to Google Tenkara to figure out how to fish a popper.
Mmmm Chicken Cake!
It’s an old argument and it’s not mine, it never was.
Social media problems are not tenkara problems.
Social media problems are social media problems.
I’m not looking for respect in social media, no problem. I’m looking for fun and good times. Arguing with people about what tenkara is is no fun. I know what it is.
All kinds of approaches, the snipers are the worst. They take long distance shots without respect. The others just flat out use words to hurt people.
Social media is just a strange place.
This weekend I taught a bunch of people to catch fish using tenkara rods in a mountain stream. We used kebari I tied and teaching techniques my Japanese friends taught me.
So much fun and real!
The guy I taught is super important in real life.
The people I teach?
That’s real.
I teach a lot through my web site.
It’s community based and respectful.
That’s real.
Some sniper taking long distance shots?
You missed the point.
They say the fittest shall survive
Yet the unfit may live
Let 'em wear gaudy colors
Or avoid display
Hey it don’t matter
It’s all the same
So I do this and I do that
So I do this and I do that
So I do this and I do that
It’s never straight up and down
It’s never straight up and down
It’s never straight up and down
It’s never straight up and down
Oh you got a nickel
I got a dime
I’d like to get to know you
But I haven’t got the time
You gotta walk like a mannequin
Roll like a tire
Act on reaction
Dodge the big spud fryer
So wiggle on the bottom
Wiggle on the top
Wiggle up the middle
And laugh a lot
Cause I’ve been living in a wiggly world
Wiggly world, a wiggly world
I got to tell you
I’ve been living in a wiggly world now
Wiggly world,…
Thanks for the honest conversation about people’s thoughts and feelings about fragmentation in the Tenkara community. I think the dialogue cleared up a bunch of misunderstanding I had, partially out of being naive and partially out of not knowing people in the forum/community.
I gained a lot of respect from people’s responses and feel this community matches closely with what I was hoping for.
I did not mean to ruffle any feathers and was not meant as a disrespect to anyone.
I hope that this forum does not fall apart like some of the others previously referred to. There is a lot of knowledge and experience here, and I check his place on regular basis excited to find out more.