Bamboo and Action of Japanese Fishing Rods

Bamboo and Action of Japanese Fishing Rods

Why do many traditional styles of Japanese fishing use whip rods? 

How do they deal with hooked fish without reels?

This article answers these questions.One of the simplest answers is that we have had different materials available for fishing rods. This difference of materials has developed completely different requirements for rods and it results in completely different tackles. To start to explore it, let us see the most important material, bamboo.

Distribution of bamboo

Bamboo is a very accessible plant in Asia. But it seems it does not have a long history in Europe. 

Distribution of bamboo; Iowa State University site

For other resources

Bamboo: Origin, Habitat, Distributions and Global Prospective | SpringerLink

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329041533_A_Review_on_distribution_of_Bamboos

Bamboo is a very familiar and locally available material, with its usefulness as materials for various purposes. Japanese people have been utilizing it a lot. You can see how Japanese people valued it from this link; https://www.takemata.jp/en/about/

Characteristics of bamboo for fishing rod

The flexibility is one of the most significant features of bamboo. Once you touch the top of bamboo, you immediately feel its flexibility like a whip. It is flexible but also resilient to some degree. It bends smoothly with a smooth curve, but it springs back to its original straight shape. Our ancestors found it useful for fishing rods. 

This characteristic works as a cushion to save fishing line from its breakage. As we have had a weak fishing line (made from silk, braided horse tail or something else), this cushioning feature is very useful. Additionally, flexibility is so high that it works like a virtual reverse winding of a fishing reel. With bamboo, Japanese people have had no need for fishing reel to deal with their target fish. Of course, it may be a case that their target fish are smaller compared to those of the West. 

Because anglers required this cushioning function in fishing rods, the length of rod had to be supple to have enough margins to absorb the shocks. This was one of the reasons why traditional rods tended to have longer length (often 4.5m or 5.4m as a popular length) than modern style rods.

On the contrary, in the West (European oriented cultures), people had no access to bamboo as a fishing rod, and woods were the choice. Since flexibility of the woods was lower than bamboo, to deal with the hooked fish, anglers had to think about the way. Their solution was to invent reels, to release and to wind their fishing lines. Another solution was to use flexible lines as you could see in pole fishing, in the UK. Probably, advanced machine braiding allowed them to have a longer main line, which was made possible by the industrial revolution. In Japan, one of the first mass production of silk thread started in 1872 (Tomioka Silk Mill) while Europe invented machine production of cotton thread and cloth in the middle of 17th century. The first fishing reel was invented from the technology of “spinning” of threads. Naturally, this invention was not long after the mass production of thread appeared in the world. 

For this, western style fishing rods tended to be shorter than Japanese ones, except for that there were other special reasons.

The word of a fishing “rod”,in western fishing terms, does not necessarily have a meaning of flexibility. Rather, “rod” has the meaning of something straight.  One the other hand, Japanese word for fishing rod is 竿 (sao) and it originally means something long made of bamboo. In this sense, this Japanese word for fishing rods entails the feeling of flexibility.

Characteristics of fishing rods in Japan, in comparison with ones in the West

From a traditional Japanese fishing style’s perspective, rods in western fishing styles look very stiff in general. However, please note that the spread of game fishing has made this view different recently.

The categorization of rod actions in the western style is as below.

Rod actions in West

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It is very simple and easy to understand the concept instinctively. 

For Japanese rods, the basic concept of rod action category is similar to the western one.

This figure is from this site; https://www.happousyumi.com/entry/keiryuusao-the-first-one

As you can see in the figure above, there are three basic actions; 先調子 (Saki Choshi, fast action), 中調子 (Naka Choshi, middle action), 胴調子 (Dou Choshi, parabolic or action). The figures shown by the side are showing the position where bending starts. For Saki Choshi, it has “8:2” and it means the bending starts at about a 20% distance from its tip.

Here, you may be puzzled by this. I imagine the bending curve does not appear to be a fast or slow action, for your eyes. The bending starts in the middle of a rod even in the Saki Choshi (fast action) rod figure. 

Since you read the history of rod material in Japan above, you can guess the reason why our categorization of rod actions is like this. Yes. One of the basic functions of a Japanese fishing rod is to absorb the shocks to save the fishing line. And it requires a rod to bend from the position much closer to butt.  

As Japanese anglers see actions in this way, one of the joyful moments in fishing is having a beautiful bending like below (all from this page; https://www.ukifukase.net/tackle/rod.html)

This is a rod with parabolic action (5:5).

This is a bending with fast action (7:3).

This preference of bending curves forces manufacturer to prepare the bending chart like this. 

(Figures of Daiwa Ayu fishing rods, from this site; https://ayu-okano.co.jp/?mode=f3 ) 

Please try to touch Japanese whip rods, when you visit shops in Japan. It may be interesting if you can feel the difference, to enter the joy of bending curves!