I received my first true tenkara rod in January or February of 2008. I had been playing around with crappie rods trying to recreate the British loop rods during the summer and fall of 2007. I first learned about tenkara sometime in the fall of 2007 and immediately switched my interest from loop rods to tenkara. As far as I recall, a google search on "tenkara" in 2007 or 2008 would yield two hits outside of Japan. One in the US posted on some forum by a guy called Steelieman who had hurt a shoulder or arm and found that he could not cast a fly rod but he could fish tenkara (still around and still doing tenkara) and one in Canada, the details of which I have forgotten but I think was in Labrador fishing for brook trout. There was also a Tenkara Rod company (possibly also in Canada) that had nothing to do with tenkara rods, just like the Loop rod company in Sweden has nothing to do with loop rods. I know that Ed Van Put, (who wrote ?Trout Fishing in the Catskills? and worked for the NY Department of Environmental Conservation) had received a tenkara rod from the Japanese Ambassador about 15 years ago and loved fishing with it. To my knowledge, he never wrote about it though.