Japan Cast 2018: Ep.1 Arrival and Hokkaido

0:00Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Tenkara Cast. I appreciate you guys coming back in. And if you've been listening to the episodes of the Tenkara Cast, you might know that the next few episodes are going to be a little bit different because, as I have announced on my last episode, I am now in Japan. So I'm here on my annual pilgrimage to Japan to learn a little bit more about Tenkara, to bring Tenkara stories to you. Just to kind of understand a little bit more of the whole philosophy and just as always be deep into it. And people always ask me about my trips and I thought I'd kind of catalog the trips in the form of short episodes from the road live as it happens. and today is my first day of actual fishing. So right here, right now in a hotel at the end of the day and I have a few minutes, I decided to create a little podcast for you.

1:02So I'm here for about two weeks and I'm going to be trying to post episodes every two to three days just about things that I've learned, things that I've experienced, different insights or just about the trip itself. For those of you who are interested in possibly visiting this part of the world, uh for those of you who are interested in where tenkara comes from and those stories and so forth i'm going to be here for about two weeks the next uh four days i'm going to be fishing hokkaido uh the northernmost island in japan the very big island and when you look at a country japan um after that i'm going to be meeting up with jeremy our designer and the designer of my book and we're going to be going around so uh stay tuned i'm particularly excited about the uh episodes that i'll be creating with jeremy from the road but i thought i would kind of start with a little introduction to this new series uh which uh tj's uh suggestion i'm going to be calling them the japan cast so these are podcast episodes from the road in any case i uh arrived in japan about three days ago uh two and a half days ago roughly and i've uh i spent about a day or a full day in tokyo with my wife and we were mostly just visiting some old friends uh for a day just kind of hang out with them and use that day to kind of get a little bit of a head start on getting over the jet lag which is always kind of tough you know first couple of days we always wake up at three in the morning for no reason and feel miserable in the afternoon so i wanted to have little bit of that time before the beginning of the fishing part of it so they in Tokyo the highlight I would say there was that my wife convinced me to go to the owl cafe and where it's it's exactly what it sounds it's a cafe full of owls and they're very cute and it's kind of cool but the highlight of that was being able to take the feathers off the owls as a you know as the feathers were on the floor and I gave those to Dr. Ishigaki as a gift and he was very stoked to get owl feathers to tie his flies with. They're actually really nice feathers. So I'm not sure if anybody has tied flies with owls but that's that's going to be something that he's going to be doing pretty soon.

3:29After the day in Tokyo my wife went up to Yamagata to visit her grandparents but I went down to Nagoya to meet up with dr. Ishigaki I spent the evening at his house catching up with him and his wife and then early this morning we flew to Nagoya you know we left his house at like 5 30 super early in the morning had a little layover in Tokyo and then made our way up to Hokkaido and the reason we're here is because Hokkaido is kind of like the wild country of Japan it's much less populated than the rest of Japan it's also got some really nice rivers large and small and a lot of large fish so we're gonna be going after some large trout here during my time here which is a little bit I mean just for the fun of it but also kind of goes to disprove the myth that Japan only has small trout so in my experience Japan has the same trout as we have anywhere else in America unfortunately the culture of catching and keeping fish is really strong so I think people people don't usually give trout a really nice chance to get big they do get big in the mainland part of Japan as well I have seen 20 plus inch trout from some rivers in Japan but mostly they're kind of hard to find in many parts of the country up here in Hokkaido I can find a lot of them. So today we got in around three in the afternoon. We only fished for a little under three hours and I'm here with Dr. Ishigaki and his friend Nakayama. Nakayama-san is a friend of his.

5:12First time that I'm meeting him. Very experienced in caught angler as well. And in those three hours all of us caught a couple of fish and every fish except for one that I caught every fish was over 20 inches. They're all very large fish. We are primarily catching a couple of different species here. One of them is the white spotted char. It's a, as it sounds, you know, as name sounds, it's a char that has this big white spots on the body. And I'll be sure to be sharing some photos on Instagram and our social media platforms and our blog, as well as tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast, you're going to see one episode for the Japan cast or one page for the Japan cast. And it's going to have all the episodes, all the photos as I kind of go on with this trip. So, uh, we, you know, they, I didn't catch any of the amemasu, uh, the white spotted char, uh, but they did. And they were beautiful fish, um, long, you know, big fish. Uh, they were kind of skinny um but i think that's uh mostly what they are i think they just don't tend to get a very fat fish uh there is an abundance of food here um and i'll talk a little bit more about that in a second so that's what we did this afternoon um and i got some beautiful footage of that i didn't fish a whole lot because i wanted to get some videos to share with you later so i did get some beautiful video of them catching some large fish and that's going to come up pretty soon take a look to on our Instagram account if you don't follow us Instagram has a new feature called IGTV Instagram TV and I'm in the process of adding a little video to to post there's our first debut video for IGTV and that's gonna show some of the fish that we caught on our first day and one of the coolest things that I saw today too was you know as soon as we arrived there's this incredible hatch of very very large mayflies they were probably size 4 like a beige tan kind of color a very light color and they were just going off the hook I mean they were just flying up and and they would probably they were mostly for the most part land on the branches and go right underneath the foliage and it was the largest most prolific hatch I've ever seen in Japan Japan does get hatches as well, but I've never seen anything quite like it.

7:49The fish, we were catching them on the surface, primarily using just regular Sakasa Kebari, the reverse hackle style flies, but not seeing a ton of rises. And so that was kind of interesting. There's all these mayflies going up and down, but not a ton of splashes. Some, but not a ton. and as soon as I started seeing those large flies I just put on a okie kebari the size 8 tenkara flies that I often tend to favor anyways and I caught a rainbow trout that was probably 21 22 inch it took me a little while to bring it in about two minutes actually the whole thing got caught on video by Nakayama-san and it was a little under two minutes to land it but it felt like a long time it was just a very large fish very very powerful in terms of the equipment as usually is the case with me i'm using a ito with a line a little bit longer than a rod you'll see some photos of the kind of environment that we're fishing here and that worked very well now just to kind of uh you know i want to make sure to share things that i learn as well as things that I experienced. And in terms of, I'll talk about a couple of things that just kind of came to mind in terms of visiting Japan. Because I do always get asked those questions, how to get around and so forth. So mostly, you know, most people are going to come through Narita. And I forgot how expensive the train ticket is, the Narita Express is to get from the airport to like downtown it's about thirty dollars or so to get to the central part of Tokyo you get to the airport people are super friendly super helpful so you can get around no problem and as I've done the last couple of trips I've been renting a hotspot usually I go to like Japan rail comm or something like that and I rent a hotspot which comes down to I think like a little under eight dollars a day or just about eight dollars a day I believe is what I paid and that gives me unlimited internet and I like that as opposed to like swapping sim cards and that kind of thing because then I could connect my computer my wife's computer without being dependent on my phone remaining alive and full and that kind of thing so that's kind of a couple of things that come to mind in terms of traveling to japan in terms of fishing nothing really different um all of our fish that we caught today were on the surface uh the large rainbow that i caught was just on my second cast and i cast on the other side of some currents kept in line keeping the line off the water and um the fish took almost immediately and I caught another fish too called the Ugui which coincidentally was actually the very first fish that I caught in Japan on my first trip back in 2008 and the Ugui it kind of reminds me of the fall fish that I've caught out on the eastern part of the United States a little bit like a chub almost skinny kind of long I'm not sure what family it is on but it kind of reminds me of those.

11:19But that's it. Mostly this episode is kind of an announcement of the series of the Japancast series of podcast episodes where I'm going to be sharing insights and learnings from the road every two to three days. Next couple of days is going to be Hokkaido. So look out for another update, probably at the end of my stay here in Hokkaido. And I'll have a lot more to talk about. After that, I meet up with Jeremy and I'm going to be taking him to some of my favorite spots in Gifu, which is mostly the Japanese Alps between Tokyo and Osaka. And we're going to be seeing a lot of really cool things and try to create a couple of episodes together. So stay tuned for those as well. And most important, keep an eye out on our social media because I'm going to be sharing a lot of Tenkara stories from the road as I go. So Instagram is going to be an easy one for us to share. instagram stories and photos um so stay tuned on those channels if you're interested in learning learning a little bit more about what i experienced in japan what i learned when i come and visit and so forth and do if do let me know if you have any questions uh if there's anything you'd like to have me cover in the next two weeks uh drop a comment on social media um or maybe like the the better channel might be just the podcast page you know if you go to tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast I'm gonna have one page for all the Japan cast episodes that might be a place that I I would check a little bit more often but yeah just let me know what you'd like to see as I'm here in Japan anything you'd like to have me find out and so forth but otherwise just stay tuned for some videos I'm going to be sharing one pretty soon here on Instagram so Instagram just wrote over this, wrote out this new feature called IGTV, the Instagram TV, and I'm editing a video for that. Primarily, it's going to be the highlights of the first day, first day or two.

13:27We'll see how it goes tomorrow. But stay tuned on social media for more cool updates and some photography that I'm doing on the road. Thanks so much for tuning in and for continuing to listen to the Tenkara Cast. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, and I'd love to have a review from you. Those reviews on iTunes especially are always super helpful. So I appreciate all of you who have taken the time to give me a little review. Those are helpful to have people learn about this podcast so that I can continue making more. I think it's just energizing to see people are listening to it. So thanks for tuning in. And until a couple of days from now when I'm going to create another episode for you from Hokkaido, Japan. And I'd like to extend a special thanks to Nikogawa Takenobu for allowing us to use his music on his podcast and our videos. This song is called Deeper Than a Vine, and you can check out his music at takenobumusic.com, or also look up our new playlist in Spotify, Tenkara Tunes, and you'll find a lot of his songs in there.

14:39Thank you.