Intro episode: What is tenkara?

0:00This is Daniel Galhardo and you're listening to the Tenkara Cast, a podcast about the simple Japanese method of fly-fishing, Tenkara. In the Tenkara Cast we'll be sharing information on techniques, history, philosophy, and Tenkara stories from anglers all over the world. This podcast is brought to you by Tenkara USA, introducing Tenkara outside of Japan since 2009. It's only possible we create content such as this podcast and videos because of your support. So we thank you so very much for purchasing Tenkara USA rods, lines, and flies. I hope you enjoy learning more about the simple method of fly fishing. Hey everyone, this is Daniel Galhardo. Welcome to the Tenkara Cast, the very first episode of the podcast on Tenkara, the Japanese method of fly fishing. This is, let's call it, episode zero. Today I'm just going to do a very brief introduction about what Tenkara is, who I am, what Tenkara USA is doing here in the United States and abroad, and why you should take up Tenkara if you haven't done it yet.

1:11So Tenkara is the Japanese method of fly fishing. It uses only a rod, line, and fly. No reel. The Tenkara rods are typically about, on average, about 12 feet long. and you tie a line right to the tip of the rod and at the end of that you're going to have let's say about four feet of tippet and a fly typically when you're starting off you can picture having this 12 foot rod 12 foot of line about four feet of tippet and then a fly it's really simple fly fishing so as we say it tenkara is the very simple method of fly fishing uses only a rod line and fly. The method originated in Japan. We don't really know a lot about the history of Tenkara because the folks that developed the method were commercial anglers. So Tenkara originated high up in the mountain streams of Japan in the hands of commercial anglers trying to catch fish for a living. I've heard it said before, Tenkara is done by samurai. It's not.

2:13Tenkara was never the domain of samurai. It was really the method of fishing developed by people trying to catch fish for a living. And I love the history and where tenkara comes from because it kind of tells us a couple of things. First of all, it tells us how effective fly fishing can be. So the people that developed the method, they were using artificial flies, tied using a little bit of thread and a feather. and they chose fly fishing to catch fish because it's a very effective way to catch fish especially when you're fishing mountain streams and they also chose to keep it simple well actually i shouldn't say they chose they out of necessity tenkara anglers had to keep everything really really simple they didn't have a fly shop to go buy a bunch of equipment so tenkara shows us that fly fishing is a very effective way to fish and it can be very simple much simpler than you might believe right now a little bit about myself I discovered Tenkara in around 2007 and then in 2008 I got to visit Japan for my first time I should mention that my wife Margaret is Japanese American. So we started talking about going to Japan to visit her relatives. She still has grandparents and some uncles or an aunt in Japan. So we decided to make a trip up there.

3:40And I started researching fly fishing opportunities in Japan. I kind of jokingly told her, you can spend all your time with your grandparents, but I really want to go fly fishing. I had this image in my mind of Japan as these beautiful mountain streams with mossy walls, and I knew that they had a couple of different native trout to Japan, the amago, yamame, the iwana, and I wanted to catch them. I wanted to see what those fish looked like. So in 2007, I started researching fly fishing in Japan. Where can I fly fish was my first question. and very quickly it became obvious to me that in Japan I could pretty much fly fish anywhere I want it's a it's a land in Japan it's roughly the size of California and about 70 percent of the country is covered in mountains and of course when you look at any mountain area there's going to be lots of streams and little rivers all those little blue lines that are going up and down in different drainages. So that to me answered the question of where can I fly fish very quickly?

4:45I can pretty much fly fish anywhere. So I started researching a little bit more, getting a little bit more information about it. And I was like, well, that's kind of interesting. You know, Japan is surrounded by an ocean and there's all these mountain streams. There must be a really rich fly fishing tradition in the country. So I became really interested in that and started looking around trying to find more information about a fly fishing culture that might have developed in Japan as I started doing a little research and I was actually looking for primarily like what kind of flies people might have tied and I knew that Japanese are known for being good craftsmen so it was really interesting also trying to find some interesting fly fishing artifacts. Funny enough, a reel, you know, I had this, one of the first things that I kind of wanted to find out was, you know, some cool looking reels that maybe the Japanese craftsman might have designed. And very quickly, I ran across this little book called Angling in Japan. It was published in 1939 by the Japanese Board of Tourism as a way to educate foreigners about different cultural elements of Japan.

5:56And this little book, it's about maybe 100 pages long. It's got some beautiful black and white photographs, and it's written in English. It was translated by somebody. And in one page, it showed an image of somebody fishing a mountain stream, the kind of water that I really like to fish. And you could see in his hand, he had a long rod. I couldn't really see the detail on it, but it didn't look like he had a reel. And then on the next page, he had a very short paragraph about the Japanese angler using flies to catch the native yamame. And I think there was something to the effect of him not using a reel. The Japanese anglers not liking to use a reel. So I was like, oh, that's interesting. It kind of seems like they have their own method of fishing. And I started doing a little bit more research. And somehow, soon after that, I came across the term tenkara. and discovered that, yes, Japan has their own method of fly fishing. As I suspected, with so much fly fishing opportunities, they must have developed their own method of fishing.

7:01And so I did the research in 2008, in August or September. My wife and I went to Japan, and sure enough, I stopped in every tackle shop that I could, and I got to see the tenkara rods. Bought one, brought it back, started fishing with it. absolutely fell in love with the method it was incredibly simple i had this rod which i might have mentioned early in the episode is telescopic by the way so you have a 12 foot long rod that telescopes down to about 20 inches i put that in my backpack i put a spool of line tip it some flies and that was it it was like my whole fishing kit was incredibly small i love the simplicity of it There was no line to manage. There was a lot of stuff that really made me feel like I was unencumbered by the gear. And all of a sudden, I was really focusing a lot on the experience. At the time, too, I was really involved with the fly fishing club, the Golden Gate Angling Casting Club in San Francisco.

8:03And I noticed that there's a lot of people interested in taking up fly fishing, but a lot of people would come in, maybe take a class or talk to some of the members. and go away completely baffled, really intimidated, kind of scared of even trying to take up the sport because they saw in their minds it's expensive, it's complicated, I've got to learn Latin, I've got to learn physics to do all of that. And with Tenkara, I saw a really good opportunity to tell people, no, you don't really have to learn all of that. It's much simpler than that. You have a rod, you can tie a line to the end of it. It takes about 40 seconds to set up. casting you can learn in literally about one minute and just fish you know it's really not that hard so i decided to create tenkara USA to introduce the japanese method of fly fishing called tenkara outside of japan and that was in 2009 uh march april 12 2009 is when i started the company became the first person to kind of take this method of fishing that i like to think was hidden in Japan for decades or centuries and exposed people outside of Japan to that.

9:17A lot of people have asked me, by the way, what tenkara means. Nobody knows exactly what the word tenkara is supposed to mean. It's primarily used to describe this very specific method of fishing. But when you read the word tenkara, if some of you might speak Japanese, ten is heaven or skies kara means from so ten kara means from heaven or from the skies and my favorite story behind the name there's a lot of different theories and different stories about why the name ten kara for this method of fly fishing but my favorite one is that one day there was an angler and he was up in the mountain streams of japan and he's catching fish after fish And most people that are used to fishing, especially at that time, they would have been using bait. So they would have caught a bug or caught some worms, put that on the hook, and every bite that they got or every fish that they took, they would have to replace that bait because it would be eaten or taken out of the hook.

10:24So all of a sudden this passerby, he went by, and he was like, watched the angler catching fish after fish. and he was using the rod, you know, like a bamboo pole, line tied to the end of that. And the passerby stopped and he was like, how could you be catching so many fish, fish after fish? I never even saw you changing your bait, not even once. And then the Tenkara angler replied, well, if you look right here at the end of my line, I have this little fly that I've tied using a little bit of thread and a feather. It's made to look like a buck. And when I cast it, the fish sees the fly coming from heaven and he takes it. So that's my favorite story behind the name Tenkara. But of course, nowadays, it's really used to describe this method of fishing that uses rod, line, and fly. So that's kind of Tenkara in a nutshell. It's a simple method of fishing. It uses rod line and fly telescoping rods that extend out anywhere between approximately nine feet all the way to almost 15 feet long at the end of the line at the rod you can tie a length of line of tenkara line the lines are specifically designed for tenkara the line can be a little bit shorter than the rod or as long as twice the length of the rod but it's going to be a fixed length of line at the end of that and then again you have tippet and a fly the tenkara flies are very unique by the way before we go any further and explore tenkara more in depth in future episodes i should mention that you can use any fly with tenkara it works great with dry flies really because you have no drag on the system the long rod and very light line that you're using allows you to keep the line off the water so you don't have to be manding and that kind of thing and you have beautiful drag free drifts. So you can use dry flies, you can use nymphs. It's a really effective way to use for nymphing because you have a very tight line. So you have a real nice direct connection with the fish. But there's some traditional tenkara flies. There's a huge variety of tenkara flies out there.

12:32On the next magazine that we're going to release, by the way, we have the Tenkara Magazine, an annual publication where we have different tenkara stories. We're going to have quite a bit about tenkara flies in there but there's some traditional tenkara flies most commonly are the ones that are most characteristic to tenkara have this reverse hackle the hackle faces away from the band of the hook it's called a kebari kebari literally means haired hook so that's the the tenkara fly right there and a lot of people use the term kebari to refer specifically to the reverse hackle tenkara flies which if you were to specify it it's a sakasa kebari sakasa means reverse and then kebari is the artificial fly what else is there here well so i'm gonna just sum it up right here keep this episode short our introductory episode by saying that tenkara is a real simple way to fly a fish but it's not very simplistic anybody can pick it up in a few minutes it's really easy to learn the knots the rigging how to cast and everything like that but i do like to think and i like to say that tenkara is one of those things that it's really simple to learn but it might take a lifetime to master i have personally been doing tenkara for right almost it's coming to seven years now and I still go back to Japan and I have several different teachers that I learned under and I always am always mesmerized by how much I can learn in terms of technique as well as some of the history and culture of Tenkara but primarily technique.

14:15Tenkara has this kind of two facets to it because it's a real simple method of fishing in terms of equipment, it becomes something that you have to learn and kind of hone your technique over time if you really want to get good at it. So in future episodes of the Tenkara Cast, we're going to be exploring in depth all the different facets of Tenkara. And the idea behind this podcast, by the way, it's something that I've wanted to do for years, and I just kind of kept putting it off because once I get into it, I want to commit and making sure that I provide you with some good content on a regular basis um so tenkara you know there's all this stuff that we're going to be sharing like in terms of history philosophy uh how to's techniques i'm also going to be talking about destinations where you know tenkara is a really good tool to use in terms of destination by the way i should mention that uh the place where tenkara shines the most is going to be mountain streams uh in mountain streams you you have all this current and it's uh and it's really tricky to fish those places because you have to be mandating that kind of thing with a regular rod and reel setup but with tenkara you just cast and you have the most beautiful drag-free drifts anywhere um so mountain streams and we're going to be talking about destinations in particular about Japan, Italy, many places in the United States, and so forth.

15:44What else is there to talk about Tenkara? We'll see. I do have a very long list of podcast episodes that I'm planning to release here in the coming months. We'll try to release a new episode every one to two weeks. Just stuff that I find that you're going to find relevant. but maybe i'll close it also by talking about why anybody might want to consider tenkara the the number one reason people tell us they like the idea of tenkara is the simplicity you have rod line and fly you're you know you're replacing your fishing vest with a tiny little pouch that carries everything you need to fly fish but the second thing that people mention is the Just the beautiful drag-free drifts, especially when they're fishing in places that have currents. And of course, we have a huge following in Tenkara with backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts.

16:45A rod packs down to 20 inches and you don't carry much weight. You're carrying literally about five to six ounces of gear total to fly fish. And that's kind of hard to beat. So backpackers love Tenkara. we also kind of develop in this campaign called Tenkara Plus, which is the idea of that you can do fly fishing with any activity. So if you're going to go mountain biking, strap a rod to your bike frame, put your little bag on your saddle and fish if you see water. If you don't see water, just keep moving. If you're going to go rock climbing, very often there's going to be a little bit of a stream nearby. You're going to have to take a break at the end of the day, have a rod with you and that kind of thing. So, you know, trying to tell people because Tenkara is so simple and anybody can fly fish, you can also do it alongside other activities as well. In any case, if you want to learn more about Tenkara right away, visit us on the web, tenkarausa.com. We have a lot of great information, well over 100 videos right now that are posted on our website and our YouTube channel.

17:51you can connect with us on facebook facebook.com for slash tenkara USA there's a little bit of confusion with different tenkara companies out there right now but tenkara USA is our brand and that's a point that i should probably clarify tenkara is the method of fishing tenkara USA is the brand that i've been developing to introduce tenkara outside of japan we produce our own rods all of the rods that we produced are branded tenkara USA so you're going to see the name on the rod. And that's a little bit of something to help differentiate the method from our brand, you know, the first and original Tenkara rod company in the United States. So again, if you want to learn more about Tenkara, visit us on the web, Facebook, pick up a copy of our magazine, watch some videos, and stay tuned for the next episodes of the Tenkara Cast. Thank you very much for listening to the Tenkara Cast. I'd like to extend a special thank you to Nick Ogawa, also known as Takenobu. Check out his music at takenobumusic.com We'll be posting links to any references we made in this podcast, such as Takenobu's music, on our website www.tenkarausa.com forward slash podcast And until next time on the Tenkara Cast