From The Editor

Social media can be an ugly place. While it’s the medium that is mostly responsible for tenkara’s introduction and rapid rise in the west, it can also be one of the places where it most frequently comes under attack. Unfortunately, the criticisms and pitfalls can come from many directions. External detractors make fun of tenkara, essentially calling it an effeminate form of fly fishing. Retailers seem to focus more on multi-species applications rather than its trout & char-based origins. “Tenkara” has become a catch phrase, marketing tool, punchline... an abstract.

If you read enough online, you might even get discouraged to the point where you choose to put your tenkara rod down and pick up a spinning or fly rod, or try to find the next form of niche fishing to keep yourself on the water, such as ultralight baitcasting. I’ve seen more than a few friends leave tenkara behind to go this route over the past few months.

While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a well rounded angler, I personally feel as excited and enthusiastic about tenkara today as I did ten years ago when I saw Tenkara USA’s very first video. Yes, it has come under fire from rod and reel purists. Yes, with the uniquely United States' “innovation” of taking tenkara rods to both warm and saltwater it has sort of morphed into something it’s not. Yes, our community, similar to many others, can be really good at nitpicking, infighting, and being stubborn. But damn if there isn’t a lot of good out there to be had if you’re motivated and know where to look.

Tenkara-Fisher has a long library of interviews with Japanese masters… Discover Tenkara publishes high end instructional materials (both free & paid) on the regular… the Tenkara Guides bring Masami Sakakibara to the United States each year for oneon-one instruction… YouTube features a subtitle translation service on most foreign language videos that help you understand beyond the scenic visuals… 10 Colors Tenkara oversees a forum which frequently hosts deep dives into nuances of the sport you simply will never find in a Facebook group… and one cannot say enough about Google Translate browser extensions for surfing Japanese websites.

Much like prior issues, this Fall edition of Tenkara Angler continues to document our larger community’s participation in both tenkara & the larger category of fixed-line fly fishing. I hope in reading some of the more tenkara-centric stories about gettogethers in the mountains, anglers generously learning from each other, and even a look at its application in a honryu setting, it rekindles a little bit of that fire everybody originally felt when they picked up a telescoping rod for the first time.

Michael Agneta

Editor In Chief