Hi all. First post here. FWIW, I was reading the rough translation of Soseki Yamamoto's "The World of Flyfishing" on Adam Trahan's tenkara site (the book with short profiles of several fishermen, published in 1987) and noticed that almost all of the fishermen profiled used 3-meter (just under 10') to 3.6-meter (11.8') rods. These guys between them have (had) hundreds of years of experience and study of tenkara and none of them seemed to need anything longer than 12', so maybe your "short" rod is actually normal for traditional tenkara?