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THINGS JAPANESE: Otogawa Yana

One of the more odd pastimes you can follow in Japan is fishing with your bare hands ("yana"). Not common, you might say, not something you do every day. We went to Otogawa with a group of students on the Discovery program. The origins of yana are lost in the very brief marketing brochures, which seems to suggest somewhere around the 1960s. However, it probably started a lot longer before that.

The basic method is to funnel the water of a river to pass over a small weir, less than a meter high. A bamboo platform is built below the weir, so that the water has to pass through the gaps in the bamboo floor. Of course, if you place the poles close enough together, any fish washed over the weir will be trapped and flip around on the raft to be picked up.

The process is simple, but of course there are only so many fish in a river. Funnily enough, whenever there are people on the raft, there seem to be dozens of fish flapping all over the place. When there is no one there, you hardly see one, if any. Odd, too, that everyone seems to catch eighteen fish exactly. Until you see the person on the bank upriver frantically stuffing fish from a bucket down a tube that runs under the river to the weir. The disillusionment. But guaranteed fish.

Being Japan, and since it was summer, there is a barbecue. We were outside, after all. Shame to waste the opportunity. Rather gruesomely, you skewer the fish through the mouth with a sharp kebab-stick. Luckily, of the discovery tour group that went, there was only one vegetarian. With the fish, there was a selection of sashimi, meat and vegetables. Not far away too, you can reach Otogawa in a couple of hours from Yamasa, or join one of the weekend tours.