Fish A Japanese Obsession

I found this amazing documentary on YouTube about the Japanese obsession with fish. From start to finish it is very fun, tongue in cheek, and culturally informative. I had a great time watching it and dreaming of visiting and fishing all these places, but I couldn’t help but notice they left out Japanese bass fishing!

You don’t have to watch all nine parts if you don’t want to, but I put some descriptions and quotes in so you can get right to what sounds most interesting to you. However if you do, and I hope you do, watch the whole thing I guarantee you will learn some amazing things about Japan.

Part 1 of 9 : Here we meet the host and his team of local Japanese people that will help him through out his journey. Most of all we meet Aki, his guide. The first Japanese fishing experience is a restaurant with an interesting twice. There you can fish a pond in the middle of the restaurant and have your catch for dinner. The next day they head to to the Tsukiji fish market in search of Bluefin Tuna.

In the west we try to get as far away as possible from the idea that our pray was once alive. And in Japan they celebrate it.

Part 2 of 9 : We continue inside Tsukiji fish market where we witness and auction for a 190kg Bluefin Tuna. The host discusses his curiosity in wondering how will Japan will be effected by the decline in Bluefin Tuna, and possibly their extinction. To relax the host and his friend Aki travel by train to Ichiga, which is a train station, but also has an outdoor fishing pond. There you can pay to fish for one hour, the pond is full of carp and if you catch more than 7 kilos in one hour you get to fish for another hour for free. How great is that a fishing arcade at the train station!

Ichiga is both a fishing pond, and a train station.

Part 3 of 9 : Back at the hotel Aki describes some of the seedier things around Japan including prostitutes and sex hotels. It’s also here that he decides to play a prank on the host by ordering some live prawns off the internet and eating them live. The next day they head to a market place to meet some legendary “Tuna Rockers”. From there they take the bullet train north to the home of the Koi carp.

Oh my god that’s enormous… To my huge relief what I thought might be internet porn, turned out to be internet prawn.

Part 4 of 9 : The team explore the world of the Japanese Koi. Visiting farms and fish markets, passing by millions of dollars worth of fish in an afternoon. Later they explore a bizzare Trout fishing method where they exploit the territorial nature of the fish by using another fish, but not as bait. But that’s not that most impressive thing about this video, they also explore cormorant fishing where trained birds catch the fish for their master.

It’s just a drug, it’s an obsession..

Part 5 of 9 : They continue on with the cormorant master and head out on a night of fishing by torch light. A good portion of this video is muted unfortunately due to the copyright of the background music. Luckily the uploader included subtitles. Next they meet the sea ladies, women who free diving for pearls, clams and have done so for hundreds of years. As it turns out because women carry more fat and it’s distributed more evenly over their body they are much better divers than men. The women even talk about and enjoy the spirit of the diving and battling of nature.

Where these strong confident women are making the most of their biological superiority.

Part 6 of 9 : Next is a trip to the Nara era for some funasushi. Funasushi is actually the opposite of sushi in that it is not raw, it’s fermented. The team explores the entire process from start to finish. The proprietor of this funasushi business is absolutely hilarious! This one even deserves a casual watch as the man, of his own accord, pretends not to know his own mother for the entertainment of the show. The taste testing doesn’t go so well, what happens after that cannot be explained.

I still have no idea what a flying panda or a waving tiger has to do with funasushi..

Part 7 of 9 : Back on the train we head south to explore the culture of whaling. To understand whaling, one must first eat whale and that is where we begin our journey. Later we learn about captive bluefin breeding and the enormous efforts scientists have gone through to produce farmed bluefin. Before the next skip we are given an introduction to yet another iconic Japanese fish, fugu (blowfish).

Some people where I come from think it’s terrible to eat a whale and I want to know what you think..

Whale? I prefer dolphin..

Part 8 of 9 : Here we explore the delicacy and deadliness of the fugu. It takes about 3 years to learn how to prepare fugu, but prepare it wrong once and you’ll be dead. There is no machoness to eating fugu and no amount of the poison can be injested with out death, in fact the emperor is forbidden from eating it. Not far away we learn of a small town that suffered mercury poisoning caused by a local industry, so much so that the disease is named after this town, Minamata.

Does the manufacturer of this washing machine know that you’re using it to wash fugu? Do you think that will void the warranty?

Part 9 of 9 : The team head to the far southern islands of Japan for some underwater ballet of net fishing with some gentlemen over 70.

As the shoal of fish rise to the surface they perform one last act in the moment of their death, they change from gray to bright fiery red.