I have done Western style fly fishing since I was a teenager. Not well. I can barely tie my own flies, and my casting technique has been flawed. But I stuck with that method and managed to land some decent fish through the years. Then I discovered the Japanese method of tenkara, and immediately threw […]
Most of the my time fishing, in terms of quantity of fish landed, is a utter disappointment here in Hokkaido. Several years back I did get into the high teens on my yamame count out near Akaigawa, west of Sapporo. But most of those were fingerlings barely worthy of that description. I was dying for […]
Our camping season picked up right where it left off last year – three days of continuous rain. Although the rain wasn’t quite torrential, it swelled Hokkaido’s rivers in the Tokachi Subprefecture enough to put the kaibash on any potential fishing we had planned on doing. Instead our camping trip turned into a food tour […]
For the last several months, in addition to my continuing disengagement in Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (the current big three in terms of damage to the human soul), I have been actively avoiding the news. It’s not a total unawareness of current events, but a general decrease in the sources of information about those events. […]
Basically 90% of the media I consume comes from podcasts. I listen to them from the early morning on, and I am always looking out for interesting audio to fill my earbuds as I attempt to zone out on my morning and afternoon commutes. I mix it up quite a bit, sometimes educational, sometimes a […]
The Toyohira River is the major tributary for Sapporo. Although it snakes its way through much of the ugly urban concrete jungle, there are often a surprising amount of anglers on the water, especially on the weekend. I’ve had moderate success landing a handful of yamame in the upper reaches, close to Makomanai Park, where […]
Sometime the weather here in Hokkaido fails to cooperate with our fishing schedule. Rain started early last Saturday as just a light drizzle, but quickly turned to a steady downpour. Although we were ready to push through the rain, to a degree, the small Bifue River’s flows quickly surged and basically kept us from any […]
A recent trip back to ‘Merica has had me really contemplating some of the aesthetics of shopping. One of the primary memories of that last trip was me scouring Super Walmarts (and other like sized storage depots of abundance) looking for a shopping basket. Not a shopping cart. They are everywhere, and getting larger with […]
First fishing trip of the year was a success. Not in terms of fish caught, for there was only one very small yamame which I successfully landed. But my casting was crisp, my equipment was well prepared, and my knots where tied smoothly and without incident. For me that’s a win. During this excursion I […]
“The streets are so clean!” “Such excellent service.” “Public Transportation is quiet, clean and efficient.” “Gift wrapping is included with any purchase?!” “Japanese students clean their own classrooms!” “The streets are safe.” These are the common refrains you hear everywhere about Japan, and I left out quite a few for brevity sake. All these statements […]