Japan’s Gorgeous, Precarious Fishing Poles
While Japanese master craftsmen command up to $100,000 for turning bamboo into a fishing pole, aspiring younger makers can barely find anyone to take them on as apprentices. And this isn't the only time-honored Japanese craft at the brink of extinction. How could this happen in a country that, for centuries, has served as a model of hand-made perfection?
Some years ago, my cousin in Japan, a modest man with a passion for fishing named Tomoki Koharu, told me that he was training to become a maker of Japan’s traditional bamboo fishing poles. The market for them was small, and Tomoki said it was impossible to make a living at it, but apparently he had fallen hopelessly in love with this centuries-old tradition.
The poles that had become the target of my cousin’s obsession are called Edo wazao, because the craft originated in Tokyo, known at the time as Edo. The poles are prized for their delicate lacquer finish and collapsible portable form, which allows them to be enjoyed both as an exquisite tool and as a work of art. Today, a small, but avid group of fishermen uses the smallest versions of these poles to fish for tanago, a freshwater species no bigger than a couple of inches. There is no reel, and the line is dropped, not cast. Like most fishing around the world today, this is a catch-and-release sport. In this case, however, the goal is to hook the smallest fish, not the biggest.
Judged simply by performance, a wazao cannot touch the strength, flexibility, and efficiency of a single piece of carbon fiber, which is the material used for most fishing poles and fly rods today. But a wazao possesses a certain integrity. The essence of fishing, of course, is a day spent outdoors—bonding, if you will, with nature. For wazao aficionados, I learned, it only makes sense to use tools that come from nature.
