Japan Cast 2018: Ep.3, From Gifu with Jeremy Shellhorn

0:00Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tenkara Cast, another episode of the mini-series I'm calling the Japan Cast, where I'm bringing reports of my experience fishing with Tenkara in Japan, the country of origin. And today we have our special guest that we've been waiting for, Jeremy Shellhorn. A lot of you might know him as our designer, he's the one that designed the book. a lot of the branding for Tenkara Yosei and so forth. And this time he's joining me on the road for a few days. And Jeremy, welcome to Japan. Konnichiwa. Hello. Hey, you already picking up Japanese. No, that's as much as I know. What else have you learned? I have learned that Japanese people are very nice to people like me that don't speak any Japanese. That's a good cop-out to say that you're not studying the language. But that's now we're here. why did you come to Japan this time?

1:02Well I came number one as a designer I always wanted to come to Japan just the culture and philosophy there's so much great design wrapped up in it and also just from following your adventures wanting to come here and see those these places and fish these streams myself and yeah it's kind of a dream come true we're in the town of Maze where it sort of started for you in a little bit and there I'm looking out the window at the Mazagawa River and if everybody want to listen to the river you can sort of hear it maybe maybe not but where we're at in Japan to me the first impression was it sort of looks like like Appalachia like the kind of smoky region in terms of the mountains but then the rivers are really wide and really blue even though there's been a lot of rain so it's just it's beautiful here. Nice so how long have you been in Japan at this point? We've been about what two and a half days maybe. Took a little bit of, you know, a little while to get here, like, um, just some travel difficulties. Uh, but then, and there were, there were some heavy rains when we first got here, but, um, it was nice to, you guys picked me up and, uh, it was, it was fun. Cause one of the first things that we did is we stopped and saw Hirata-san, uh, and his, uh, kind of his tackle shop.

2:34Yeah. So Hirata-san is the, uh, the person who some of you might've read about the Mamushi kebari, the snakeskin fly if you haven't check out the tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast i'm going to put a link to it to the story that i did many years ago on this podcast page on the japan cast series so hirata-san ties the snakeskin fly that are kind of famous so that was the first thing we did in gujo and what else did we do after we stopped at his shop well one of the neat things about stopping at his shop was seeing, I mean, he carries all kinds of tackle for fishing for IU, which is kind of his specialty. But then when you saw his tenkara section, it was very small. He really just kind of talked to us about his kind of views on simplicity. And for him, it was really about the color of the fly. And that was kind of cool. He really told us about, like you know he doesn't change much uh in his tenkara fishing except for really thinking about what the sky is doing and what the the bedrock of the and the bottom of the stream is like and that he changes it mostly on color and then from there we uh where'd we head from gujo we we were with um dr ishigaki um and so we spent a little time in a ryokan sort of a traditional inn which was really cool for me to see this sort of architecture and just the whole kind of culture and philosophy behind those inns. Yeah, that was in Shokawa. So that's all kind of like, you know, the Gifu Prefecture, almost in the Japanese Alps kind of area. Minamihida is kind of the other area, but Gifu Prefecture is kind of where we've been touring. And as Jeremy mentioned, like one of the most interesting things that I didn't know about Mr. Hirata was the his emphasis on color and that's like so different from any other Tenkara anglers that I fish with so one day I have to come back and actually fish with Mr. Hirata I've always seen him as a little bit more focused on ayu fishing but as you know he told us he actually does spend a lot of time Tenkara fishing too and it's all about color so if you see the photo of the Mamushi okay buddy the snakeskin fly that i'm going to be posting on this link um you'll see that it's a dark fly you know he uses the dark segments of the snake and then he has like light color flies you know and that's kind of the primary differences but he was saying that for him the light color flies imitate like immature bugs that are kind of soft and then the dark flies are crunchy older bugs so that's extra extra crispy extra crispy and some trout like that you know depending on the season and that kind of thing. So I feel like I still have a lot to learn from Mr. Hirata. He's, and he had some other notes too. They were like very unorthodox, I think in fly fishing in general, but definitely Tenkara. Yeah, he was a really sweet guy, really nice. And his wife was super nice. And because we were with Dr. Ishigaki, she actually gave us some frozen ayu that then we ended up taking to the inn that we were staying and they prepared it for us a couple days while we were there. Yeah and that's actually I should mention right now it's big time ayu season you know that's really the focus on a lot of the rivers in this region. There are some tanglers here and there but ayu is by far the biggest focus. That's something that they really love to eat it's a prized kind of fish. But Jeremy tell us about the toilets in Japan.

6:11the the the toto washlet toilet i could be a brand ambassador for that toilet it's an amazing thing i probably um stopped at the the greatest public restroom in the history of mankind when when we were headed up here when we were actually headed up to osaka and stopped a little roadside in so yes i'm very impressed actually not a roadside in but just a roadside stop you know it's not even an It was like a free place where you get a little bit of a bite to eat. And that toilet was pretty amazing. There was actually toilets that play music. And actually most of them will play the sound of a stream or rushing water to kind of disguise the sound of your bodily functions. But most of them will have jets and fans. And speaking of music, we both learned that Dr. Ishigaki, one of his favorite going to the river soundtracks is old western film soundtracks so that was pretty fun driving to the river with him the next day after sort of stopping at Hirata-san's and him blasting some I believe it was like from a spaghetti western or something like that oh yeah I listened to a lot of that music with him on this trip and that was new for me too I hadn't I didn't know that was his favorite music still learning about him after 10 years of getting to know him. Now in terms of design, I mean that's kind of a part of the reason you came here, just kind of getting inspiration. And of course you haven't been here very long, but have you made any kind of observations on any kind of really cool design things and perhaps how they apply to Tenkara as well?

7:53I mean we've seen, we've actually seen a lot. I kind of need to stop and sort of reflect, but one of the things that stood out is when I got here, there was a considerable amount of rain, so we had to kind of wait a day for the rivers to come down a little bit. And we went to a, it's actually a World Heritage site. It was a village. I don't... Shirakalago. Yeah, and what it's known for is these, what's called gashow, which is like your, which stands for sort of like the shape of like prayer hands. So it's almost like the original A-frame house. and they're really thickly thatched some sort of grass or reed. And it was pretty cool. It was almost like the original kind of apartment tenement house. The one we were in was like five stories high, which was impressive for a wooden structure. And they're beautiful but just so simple in that the reason that they built them like that was to be able to hold the amount of snowfall that's in that area.

9:00And so again, just another example of Japanese design where it's just so, the aesthetics is so simple, but the rationale for it is such a functional rationale. There's such a reason for it. And it's really based on the environment where they're in. Like Tenkara really developed for mountain stream fishing, you know in a way in that place with uh tons of snow and i think they said what they got like 30 feet of snow 10 meters of snow yeah it's just amazing yeah yeah and from there we stopped at a really great roadside ramen place um and so just there's just uh food is is also uh uh so intertwined in everything you do here and so i have eaten really really well and uh so a few notes as well for our listeners before we kind of talk about other things. I mean, perhaps we might run out of time tonight. We might have to have another episode before we finish the trip, which is going to be on the 5th of this month. We leave on the 6th. But I mentioned on my last episode that Dr.

10:06Ishigaki's Tenkara has been getting a little bit more complicated. You know, like when we went to Hokkaido he was using multiple different flies you know like dries and nymphs and we did talk to him about that a fair amount actually we did a video interview that I'm hoping to publish sometime soon and Jeremy was there as well do you recall Jeremy what why like about his fishing like how it's been changing or why he might have tried different flies I think for him it was it was more of a location specific change so he would he he has been changing up more but it was really because of the particular context or what was happening on the stream or wherever he was that was um changing it up but you know i think it's also just another example of how you know people learn different things they try new things i mean when you've got such a simple setup it really does kind of inspire some creativity.

11:07Yeah, and the other thing too with that question to him was, you know, I asked him a few, many different questions, of course, but I asked him, has his fishing, has it changed in the last 10 years? And he said, of course, he has changed a lot. He's had a lot of different experiences. And, of course, part of that has been fishing a lot in the United States. He's come just about every year to come fishing. So he specifically mentioned a trip where I took him to Wyoming we're fishing some relatively tough rivers that I've caught a lot of fish using tenkara flies but on that particular friend we were with our late friend Doug Haggart and Doug had some tiny little nymphs of some sort and after some time of not getting many fish Doug convinced Dr. Ishigaki to put on the little nymph Ishigaki sensei went on caught some fish immediately and I think he kind of saw the value of experimenting or listening to a local uh to the local knowledge so he did mention that he still believes the one flight can work anywhere uh but he said he actually said when in rome you do as if romans do he said that in japanese which is kind of funny to hear and i'm not going to try to say how he sounded but uh because rome kind of sounds the same it was pretty fun to understand uh so yeah so he's kind of a little bit less strict i think in terms of flies he's kind of seeing that there is room for trying different things um although he says that he mostly just believes the size is the important thing so that was kind of a well yeah he told us a really cool well and i'm sure i'll pronounce it wrong or not even be able to pronounce it but he talked when we were one i think it was after breakfast one day at the end where he was talking to you and Margaret and kind of about your guys' relationship and he talked about some sort of master kind of apprentice and that oftentimes an apprentice will sort of copy the master but then it's important that the apprentice make it their own. And so I think that's something that he was really talking I think maybe to you about like how this is what I'm doing but I think you're at the point now where you can do your sort of own thing.

13:23And that's actually a note that I took when he mentioned that and I was really happy that he mentioned that the term was actually shuhari. So it roughly means that you learn enough that you eventually develop your own style. You learn enough about traditional stuff and you protect it and you preserve it but then you break it and you develop your own style. So the term shuhari S-H-U-H-A-R-I. Shu actually means roughly preserve or protect, usually protect a tradition. Ha means break, and usually in this context it would be to break a tradition. And then the to, or sorry, the di, the last part, is to part ways. And maybe that's kind of where we are starting to get. um you know i've known and been learning from sensei for 10 years uh but right especially in hokkaido when i did my last episode of this podcast and i mentioned that you know he was trying different flies and i was really trying to keep my flies and i was catching fish with them and i started realizing right there and then that i kind of tend to value simplicity a lot more i mean he's really a dedicated angler that's what he does with all his time i fish a lot but as you I also do a lot of different things.

14:45And when it comes to my fly fishing, simplicity probably trumps everything else. And I want to have the least amount of headaches, the least amount to think about, and still catch a lot of fish, of course. But that's really important to me. So I think for probably the first seven years of Tenkara USA, I've been really focused on preserving, protecting the tradition. For the last couple of years, breaking it a little bit, perhaps. You know, maybe going after bass, which Dr. Ishigaki said he doesn't think it's tenkara, even if you use all the same equipment. So I've kind of been breaking things a little bit. But now we possibly start parking ways to some extent. I mean, our fishing is still very similar, of course. But, yeah, it was an interesting new term to learn this time. Yeah, and I think it's sort of, you know, I think the method inspires kind of, like I said before, creativity and you kind of making it your own. And I also think probably when I got to fish with Dr. Ishigaki, which was amazing to watch him a little bit and then have him instruct me, but I think also when he's instructing people that don't have as much experience, he is teaching them sort of like some standard kind of traditional rules.

15:56He's kind of moved beyond that and trying new things because he is even a professor. I mean, he's an educator and likes to learn things. but when he's teaching new people you know that simplicity and I was probably a bad student because we did get to go fish for a little bit and I was not probably listening to the rules all the time but I think he he's just such a happy guy that likes to get people interested in Tenkara you know probably my guess is fishing with so many people over the years that you know it's important to promote and protect and sort of pass on the traditions, but then also, you know, get people, you know, it's about having fun too. Yeah, and the teacher part too, like, one of the questions was, you know, about learning from Dr. Ishigaki, like whether he's fishing exchange, whether he learned new things. And he is really good at kind of seeing things that he can still learn, Even after all this time, he's very interested.

17:01He's a very curious person. And I think at one point, years ago, he mentioned, if you don't have curiosity, you don't have anything to live for. So that's just his personality. And it kind of matches, I think, Jeremy and I very well as well. And the cool thing about it is, like, you know, we're fishing. And Jeremy's kind of doing a slightly different technique, like a slightly lower, a slower kind of drag on the fly. And he caught a couple of fish. Dr. Ishigaki does not think that's wrong. He learns from it. And there's this saying, it's a Chinese saying, and I actually forget what the Chinese term is, but you say whenever there's three people, there's always a teacher. And it just kind of means there's a circle. You always learn from the people around you, and that's always important. And I think in my own tenkara too, as I mentioned, breaking away, is learning from people that are adapting it. I think in the past I might have come across as a little bit very dogmatic and that was probably my first phase in the shuhari I was really focused on preserving it really kind of understanding it really kind of getting all the essence, all the foundations down before I could ever feel like I could break it and possibly I'm getting there but if I've ever come across as a little bit too dogmatic, purist, traditionalist that was never my intent And I do see value in trying new things, even though for me, as I mentioned, one of the biggest, I think, things that I value is not changing flies a whole lot.

18:34So I keep my fly fishing super simple. Yeah, well, you've got to learn the rules to be able to sort of break them. And I think that's a pretty common saying and a lot of different, you know, from lots of different hobbies or just disciplines, things that you're learning. And I think for, you know, for you're a very open minded person. So it's like, you know, that's you would never close your mind to something, you know, on purpose. But it's mostly just like, hey, you focus in on something, learn how it works before then you can figure out how to sort of riffle on that. And I think that's what's kind of happened. yeah and i think the focus for me has been okay how little can i get away with you know the idea of one fly okay can i make this work in a huge amount of conditions and you know i spent seven years eight years nine years doing that um so it's uh yeah it's uh it is interesting to experiment with things but yeah i've got to remind myself as well not to be too dogmatic you know it's just fishing it's just fun and yeah and we've gotten to do some fishing and um the the rivers have been a little high, but they've started to be a little bit more clear. And so, yeah, caught my first trout. I thought it was the yamame. Ended up being an Amago, but it was fantastic. And yeah, they've been kind of slow, but it feels like when we found some pools, we've pulled a few trout out of them and hopefully more to come. All right. So we got to wrap up. We got to go out for dinner.

20:02Tell us really quick, how was the fishing today? What'd you do today for fishing? Fishing, we woke up early um what time uh what did we wake up six yeah we woke up at six right we had our breakfast was at eight uh probably should have made breakfast at 8 30 um there was a stream what was the stream uh forget what the name of that river is but we probably shouldn't share it anyways because it's true and it was yeah it was right behind um the uh rio con where we stayed and um Daniel and I just popped over the road that just led down there. And like I said, the river was up a little bit. So we fished mostly pools kind of on the edges of the stream and had a little luck. Yeah, yeah. Actually, some flies on the top worked as well as putting some in a plunge pool and getting it down deep. So everything worked. Yeah, it was good. It was good. All right, everyone. We're going to wrap up. We got to go join some friends for dinner right now. uh but uh stay tuned we're probably going to do one last episode if not any in between tomorrow maybe yeah maybe tomorrow but we'll try to do at the very least one more at the end of the trip but uh stay tuned we might be able to publish another one while we're here we got two more days of a lot of fishing uh so stay tuned for that and until next time on the Tenkara Cast and I'd like to extend a special thanks to Niko Gawa 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