Is Sanpei Still in the Hinokinai River?

Do you know Tsurikichi Sanpei?

It is an old manga. A boy named Sanpei fishes his way through mountains and rivers. It was drawn by Takao Yaguchi, who was born here in Akita, in a village over toward Yokote where the snow comes down in unbelievable amounts. So the rivers and mountains in that manga were never scenery from somewhere far away. They were Akita itself.

I did not go to the river because I read that manga. It was the other way around. I was already at the river almost every day, and that is why the manga hit me the way it did.

Back then, once summer came, the Hinokinai always had somebody in it. You could be under the bridge catching something and nobody got angry. You could be swimming and all you got was watch yourself.

There was one kid who was brilliant at catching sculpin bare-handed, and the rest of us copied his method. Whoever caught something took it home. It turned up at dinner. That was simply how it worked.

Now I drive across the bridge and there are no children in the river. Not one.

I have been wondering why.

Part of it is simply that there are fewer children. The number of babies born in this town is a fraction of what it was when I was a boy. On that alone, the number in the river falls.

But I do not think that is all of it.

Back then, what you caught in the river led to dinner. Sculpin, dace, which we called zakko, whatever it was, if you carried it home it went to the kitchen. Fishing was not a hobby. It was part of daily life. That is exactly the world of Sanpei. Beyond the act of catching, there is always a place where the thing gets eaten.

Now fishing stands on its own as a hobby. There is equipment, there is technique, there is a season, and it is complete within itself. I am not saying that is a bad thing. The Hinokinai has been kept as an ayu river by the people of the fishing cooperative, who release young fish every year and look after the water, and that is why there are any fish in it at all.

But a hobby needs equipment, technique, time and money. That is not the door a child can walk through. The old door, the one you entered by dragging a sculpin out with your bare hands, sat at ground level. Somewhere along the way, that low door stopped being visible.

Children disappearing from the river, and the river being cut off from the kitchen, are probably two sides of one single change. Nobody is at fault. Nobody chose it. And still, what was lost is lost.

It leaves me feeling low. That is why I am writing this.

From here on, I am writing to the kids.

You probably think the river belongs to the adults who fish. That you will be shouted at if you go in. That you need some kind of permit. That perhaps you are not allowed there at all.

You are wrong. Let me be clear about that much.

Swimming, wading in, getting into the water. That is free. No procedure, no permission, nothing at all. The river belongs to everyone.

Turning over stones to look for insects is free too. Freshwater crabs, loaches, dragonfly nymphs, none of it needs any permit.

A permit only comes into it when you are catching certain particular kinds of fish. And even then, for a child it costs almost nothing.

That is as far as I go. I am not writing more than that.

Which fish are covered. What it costs. What size is too small to keep. When the closed season begins and ends. All of it is properly decided, the cooperative will tell you if you telephone them, and it is printed in the pamphlet the prefecture puts out.

Go and find that out for yourself.

If somebody lines up all the answers for you and you simply follow them, you will probably get bored fast. Sanpei always looked things up himself, walked there himself, checked for himself. That sort of person does not run on knowledge handed to him by someone else.

If you really want to go to the river, you will look it up. You can get an adult to make the call with you. That is part of going to the river too.

One tip.

If somebody is fishing, do not get into the water near them. That alone will keep you out of trouble. Those people spend hours going after a single fish, and one splash ruins the whole thing. Which also means that if you keep a little distance and say hello, there is no reason for anyone to be angry.

I suspect most people who stay away are staying away purely on the strength of imagining they would be shouted at. I have never actually heard of a child being shouted at by an angler here.

One last thing, and this one I will not make you look up. I will simply tell you.

I nearly drowned under Unosaki Bridge.

The water was not high. It was an ordinary day. The base of a bridge pier gets scoured out until there is a hollow in the riverbed. I went into it, and the water down there was turning in circles, and my body was pressed against the pier. I could not get out.

I thought: this is it, I am going to die here.

I thrashed without thinking and somehow got clear. Not because I was a strong swimmer. I was lucky. I still believe that.

The base of a pier gets scoured because the current strikes the structure and digs into the bed, and it happens at any bridge anywhere. It is nothing peculiar to the Hinokinai, and you cannot see it at all from above. Often, the calmer a spot looks, the truer this is.

So promise me three things.

One. Go with an adult. Not alone. Not with only your friends.

Two. Wear a life jacket. You may think it looks uncool. There are situations where it is the reason you come home.

Three. Do not go after rain. It can be clear where you are standing and still be raining upstream, and the water will rise. A risen river is best thought of as a different animal altogether.

Takao Yaguchi also supervised beginners' fishing books for children. A man who drew the fear of rivers as well as he did still wanted to teach children to fish. Not keep them away because it is dangerous, but teach them because it is dangerous. I think that was the order of it.

I learned about the hollow at the foot of that pier by nearly dying in it. If someone had told me first, I would never have had to go through that. So this is the one thing I will not tell you to look up.

Eating a fish you caught yourself, in your own house. It is good.

Something about it is decisively different from eating something you bought. I cannot put it into words properly, but it is different. I suspect that is what Sanpei was so obsessed with.

The Hinokinai River is still flowing right there. There are still fish in it. There are still sculpin. And the rules are not shutting you out either.

All that is left is to look it up, and go.