Studying Japanese Another book post

In just about 3 months I will be heading to Japan to learn the intricacies of tenkara. For 2 months I will be living in a fairly remote village, by the Maze river (Mazegawa) with the sole intent of learning more about different aspects of tenkara, while picking up more Japanese. I do not currently speak Japanese, and so far have been relying on my wife, on my good friends Masaki and Chikara. This time it will be a bit different, I’ll be staying in an area where hardly anyone speaks English, and for the most part I’ll be on my own. I’ll be renting a car to get around (aiii, a bit scary I confess). I’ll be going to different areas and will be fishing different streams with tenkara masters. SO, I MUST LEARN JAPANESE!

I’m not a novice when it comes to learning foreign languages. My native language is Portuguese (I was born and raised in Brazil). In addition to having learned English, along the way I have picked up 3 more languages with decent fluency – though I am as quick to forget them; I’m still okay with Spanish, but German and Chinese are quickly fading. But, for some odd reason my past attempts at Japanese were met with disappointment. I’ll blame it on my previous jobs, which left little time to study it. This time it is different, not only do I have a very strong motivation, but I’m able to dedicate a lot of time to it…

…okay, maybe instead of writing this I should be studying more. But, I’m really excited about something. I just went to the central library here in San Francisco to look at the kids section on foreign books. They have a pretty good collection of Japanese books for kids. Among them I found the book pictured above. It is a kids book showing the life of a trout – Yamame – and talking about fly-fishing. It is a pretty neat book. I picked it up to become better with my recognition of Hiragana (one of the Japanese syllabaries) , and hopefully pick up a little more fishing vocabulary. What really got me excited about this book, however, is the fact that during Dr. Ishigaki’s visit to California he had a small towel with the same image. It must be a famous book, I just emailed him this picture to see what he says. Here is Dr. Ishigaki with Chris “Tenkara Bum” Stewart  with the said towel.

About learning Japanese. So far I have been focusing on two things: deconstructing the language and learning the syllabaries (there are 2, Katakana and Hiragana…there is also Kanji, the Chinese characters that represent an entire word, luckily my background with Chinese will help a bit with that, but not by much).  I have enrolled in classes 2x a week, but have been spending about 2-3 hours a day watching Japanese tv (little kids shows and sumo wrestling have become my favorites), reading kids books, and opening the pages of a couple of grown up books on tenkara and my favorite, Tsuri Kiji Sanpei comic books. We’ll see how far I can take this, I feel good about it this time.

Book Review: Tenkara – Radically Simple, Ultralight Fly Fishing

It’s official, the first book in English about tenkara has been published! This is the great work of tenkara enthusiasts Kevin C. Kelleher, MD, and Ms. Misako Ishimura, and marks a huge milestone for tenkara in the US. It is an indication of the growing popularity of tenkara, and demonstrates once again its appeal to people with decades of fly-fishing experience like Dr. Kelleher and Ms. Ishimura. The book illustrates tenkara’s potential to introduce newcomers to fly-fishing via its “radically simple” approach, and shows how this method of “ultralight fly-fishing” has great appeal to backpackers. The beautifully illustrated work of Dr. Kelleher and Ms. Ishimura will do much to introduce people to tenkara, though it does blend some of the western notions of fly-fishing with tenkara, and shouldn’t be considered a definitive work on “pure tenkara”. The book is now available for pre-orders (though it seems to be already shipping) via Amazon and other retailers. Please read our review below.

Tenkara, Radically Simple, Ultralight Fly Fishing, is a nicely illustrated book that will do much to help introduce people to tenkara, and thus to the simple sport of fly-fishing. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that it is a blend of information about tenkara and western fly-fishing concepts, as opposed to a guide to “pure tenkara”, i.e. tenkara as it is and has been practiced in Japan. It unfortunately leaves out information on few areas of tenkara as it is practiced in Japan, in favor of western fly-fishing notions. Thus, it should not be considered the “definitive guide to tenkara” or the “tenkara bible”, but rather as a general introduction to tenkara and fly-fishing…

Field & Stream Fly Talk by Kirk DeeterFly Trends for 2011

Kirk Deeter and Tim Romano at the Fly Talk blog by Field & Stream magazine were some of the first to tell their readers about tenkara fly-fishing [though they have not yet talked enough about it]. Today I was very pleased to read their “Fly Trends for 2011”. The comments that particularly caught my attention were:

2011 will be the year of the small stream. Companies and shops are going to press the virtues of those small waters… the value of catching wild fish, though they might be modest in size, over the stocked mutants in crowded tailwaters.
So get out the 2-weight, the fiberglass wand, or the Tenkara rod, pull up the hip waders, and get ready for a small stream rededication.

In line with what many people have been saying (Mr. Gordon Wickstrom, for example), I think tenkara is at the forefront of a trend towards simplification, less reliance on unnecessary gear, and yes, mountain stream fly-fishing and small stream angling. We’ll see if this holds true; we were pleased with how some of the 2010 predictions made by anglers for Midcurrent came true.

The creation of a new product categoryTenkara fly-fishing in a graph

Tenkara USA created a brand new category, a new market, in the fly-fishing industry: tenkara (you may also call it “simpler fly-fishing”, “mountain stream fly-fishing” and a “great fly-fishing method for backpackers”). I suspect tenkara has probably been the most blogged about fly-fishing topic since our inception, and definitely one that has created a lot of discussion (sometimes pretty heated) among fly anglers. I can say that because I have a good finger on the pulse of the industry and, as a former market analyst, I have done a lot of research on my end (before I left my previous job and as I continue to grow Tenkara USA). But, hard data that I can share is hard to come by. As a proxy, and for something I can share with you, I decided to take a look at the historical searches on Google for the terms “tenkara”, and “fly-fishing”. I knew there would be virtually no searches for tenkara before we opened our doors, and wanted to see what kind of impact we had in creating this brand new product category.

While I’m typically not one to brag, it’s really cool to see how we have indeed created a new category in the fly-fishing industry and how the awareness of tenkara is slowly growing through our efforts and through the word-of-mouth of passionate new tenkara anglers. Before we “opened our doors”, tenkara was virtually unknown outside of Japan and the term basically never searched for. Few people even knew about it in Japan (see our radio interview with Tokyo radio station). Now, the number of people searching for the term “tenkara” is steadily growing. Take a look at the graph above for a search pattern graph, please note, this report only shows search patterns on a scale of 0-100, not the number of people searching the terms. Timeline: I first learned about tenkara in early 2007, and learned that “Tenkara Bum” Chris, was researching it at about the same time (thus the little bump in 2007 on the graph below). I then started seriously studying and developing Tenkara USA in September/October 2008 (suppose it takes at least 2 people to register on the search patterns). And, then “opened the doors” of Tenkara USA in April 2009. At this point I started working very hard on increasing the awareness of tenkara, and educating the public on the method. Bloggers have really taken an interest in tenkara and contributed much to its introduction. The big peak on the graph was in September, 2010, when an article on tenkara was published in the New York Times.

After seeing this graph I became curious to see how the searches for “tenkara” would compare to “fly-fishing”. Of course the absolute numbers for tenkara searches are a tiny fraction of the searches for “fly-fishing”, but it’s widely accepted the number of fl-fishermen has been declining. Do you want to see something very interesting? Look at the longer-term searches for “fly-fishing”. Research by one of the major fishing companies in Japan (which produces equipment for all types of sport-fishing) has shown that fishing in general has long been in decline in Japan just as it has been here, but tenkara has been the one category to have actually grown in Japan in the last few years. Through tenkara we hope to introduce many new people to the simple sport of fly-fishing.