Japan for Anglers & Fishing Travelers

About this book

Japan may be the most thoroughly fished country on earth — and the hardest for a foreign angler to enter. Its rivers are kept by cooperatives and fished by ticket, its boats sail before dawn onto grounds a pier could never reach, its rock shores demand a ferry, a life jacket and a master's patience, and its frozen lakes grow villages of tents each winter. English writing about fishing in Japan stops at a few famous bass lakes. This book goes everywhere: 200 entries in eight parts read the Japanese fishing journey as a whole. It begins with the institution itself — the yugyo ticket, the cooperative, the managed pond, the charter boat, the tackle shop, the tide table — then travels the country region by region: the phantom ito and ice lakes of Hokkaido; Tohoku's ayu rivers and gorge inns; Tokyo Bay's fleets, the Fuji lakes and the Izu islands; the Nagara's decoy ayu civilisation and the deep bays of Chubu; Lake Biwa and the Inland Sea; and the warm south of the Shimanto, the Goto rock pilgrimage, Amami's mangrove rivers and Okinawa's reefs and payao boats. A final part is the practical handbook: tickets and rights, closed seasons, catch and release in its proper local sense, invasive-species rules, and the safety of rocks, rivers, surf and ice. Fees, rules and seasons change from water to water, and this book never freezes them into promises: every entry closes by pointing to the official source, so your day on the water is confirmed before it is trusted. For the angler planning a first Japanese cast, the specialist chasing a single wild fish, and anyone travelling with a family that fishes.