It's a shame that many people's first encounter with tenkara will be through what is essentially a site built for marketing one company's rods and lines. Chris' site, as well as some of the other great blogs/sites out there (tenkaraonthefly; tetontenkara; tenkaragrasshopper; troutrageous, tenkara-fisher, etc.) provide history, experiences, objective reviews, fishing locations, etc. At this point I won't even include TUSA on a list of recommendations to people who ask me about tenkara (although the original video of Daniel's exploratory trip to Japan is still worth watching: http://vimeo.com/22824065). Tenkara existed in Japan for hundreds of years. There was a tenkara renaissance in Japan in the 1970s (many books - see Soseki Yamamoto's books from the mid '70s - '80s on Adam's site: tenkara-fisher - and many new practitioners). Misako Ishimura introduced tenkara to the US when she brought Dr. Ishigaki, who became Daniel's teacher, to the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum. Certainly Daniel has turned many people onto tenkara, and certainly he can claim to have founded the first comprehensive commercial tenkara gear site in the US, but that's a small part of a bigger story. The fact that Daiwa, Shimano, Nissin, Sakura, etc. have continued to make and sell tenkara rods should provide a clue that tenkara was alive and well in Japan, even if it has been a small niche in an otherwise big sportfishing industry. You can't "discover" something that's been around in modern form for 40 years.
I have high hopes that FAOL will become the host of a truly active tenkara forum. It's only natural, right?
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