Your company transfers you to another country. You marry a foreign spouse and move abroad. Or you’re overcome by wanderlust and just go off to see the world. You’re an expatriate in a different land with a culture to discover and a language to learn. It’s a time for exploring your own nature and the new land around you. Your travel rod is packed, and the first thing you consider is what the fishing will be like.

It begins before the plane lands in one of the major cities, whether it is Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, or Bangkok; from the porthole window you see the verdant rice fields, the mountain topography and the blue ribbons of river systems. Of the angling destinations around the world, the Asian countries are the least recognized and the least written about. It’s a matter of starting over.

You must first become a naturalist before you can be a capable fisherman and your innate knowledge is taken for granted. In the area where you grew up, you know the land and the flora and fauna and how it is all masterfully connected. But here the outdoor world is different and the ways people interact with it are different. There are trees and birds you cannot identify and somewhere in the hills roam animals you have only read about. The foliage looks different and you do not know what is edible if you got lost. The fish are different but vaguely similar to the ones you caught back home and the local fishermen catch them in a different way than you would go about catching them. You set yourself to the task of getting to know your newly adopted natural world because it’s the right thing to do.

Seven years later. I’ve used my home in South Korea as a jumping off point to other Asian countries and to cast my line in more foreign and unknown waters. Some of those expeditions were hopeless from the start. In Esquire magazine, Scott Carrier wrote a travel essay titled, “The Greatest Fishing Story Ever Told.” It was about his exploratory angling trip to China that ended in failure, not to just catch a fish, but to even find a reasonable place to cast a line. Fraught with scant information, vast geography with difficult transportation and language barriers—this was a story that epitomized common angling misadventures in the Far East.

The learning curve takes time. For the angler, it’s the matter of learning new species of fish and where they live and what they eat. Unlike the American and European genre of angling literature, writing about fishing encompasses a small niche and is mostly of the how-to variety in the extreme. In a Japanese fishing magazine I came across, I discovered it featured a stream I once fished. The photographs of the hotspot had diagrams pointing to specific boulders and pools. Attached to the article was a map showing exactly where to stand and cast. In one of the world’s most densely populated countries, even secluded fishing spots are not sacred and I shuddered at the inevitable crowds.

I’ve often wondered if there is an Asian equivalent of the Compleat Angler. There are images and words that you come across that hint at the angling tradition of old in the Far East. The ancient scroll painters of Japan, Korea and China often depicted a fisherman as part of the misty mountain motif—the idealized place where the cloud-shrouded peaks tower over a mountain stream that runs past a thatched roof house and a fisherman with bamboo rod walks along the bank.

There is the Fisherman’s Calendar, a slim book penned by Yun Sondo, an exiled Korean poet from the seventeenth century. He captures the rhythm of a fisherman’s seasonal thoughts in a haiku-like form and he might have known Thoreau in another reincarnated life:

Autumn comes to the river village;
The fish grow fat.
Weigh anchor, weigh anchor!
Leisurely hours spent on broad waters.
I look back
on the world of men: the farther off the better.

With a dearth of information, it’s a matter of becoming an angling autodidact, and on each outing, I sometimes feel more like an ecological detective, rather than a man set on catching fish with a fly rod. Time is spent seining for aquatic insects or cupping a minnow in hand for a digital photograph, carefully noting colors, times and temperatures. A leaf from a tree I’ve never seen before is pressed in my field journal for later identification because I feel foolish if I can’t name the trees where I fish. I watch a fellow fisherman, a rare hooded crane, stalk the shallows but I had to refer to my bird guidebook to check its markings. I’m the stranger in this part of the world attempting to make the land and waters familiar. And then there are the times when I’m sadly analyzing the scum pouring out of a drainage trough. I wonder if the industrial progress hailed in the national newspaper is having a sinister and unchecked effect on the river before me.

There are obstacles but the rewards are new and deeper. One day out, I realized that I might be in a small group of Westerners that landed a cherry trout on a fly. Oncorhynchus masou masou is also known as landlocked cherry salmon and bears a resemblance to the Golden trout of American streams. When I published an angling story about the Mandarin fish, Siniperca scherzeri, I realized that I was the first person to pen a written account of fishing for it in the English language. Upon sending pictures of fish to friends and family back home, I feel obliged to explain to what it is, since nobody knows just what exactly it is that I’m catching in the opposite hemisphere I’m living in. Every time the line gets tight, you are never sure just what might be on the other end when you are still learning about what lives in foreign waters.

The angling ethics of the West has for the most part failed to reach East Asia. Catch and release fishing is a demented concept for a mountain villager in Manchuria. The idea of a fair chase and that the angler should allow himself to be handicapped for the sake of pursuit is unfathomable to most. In this part of the world it is more of a matter of efficiency for the killing success. When I have inquired about fishing, I was met with strange looks as if I was idiotically missing the point: Why cast a funny feathered hook when ten rods placed out with live bait is so much better? And if that doesn’t work, you can always wade out and toss out throw nets, set trot lines, or place fish traps. With some species of fish in Japan, Korea and China, it is difficult to tell if they are known as threatened, endangered, or on the verge of extinction. In some regions, there are no bag limits, size limits, seasonal restrictions, or bulldog game wardens to enforce any sort of conservation measures, and you approach the water with a raised eyebrow, a frustrated heart and a cynical outlook.

Regardless of how the fish are eventually landed, they are admired just as much. Nearly all go into the cook pot, and trophy fish carry the same accolades as they do in the West. Anywhere in Asia you will be hard pressed to find mounted fish hanging on a wall. In part, it is a matter of the taxidermy art not making the vocational leap across the Pacific Ocean, and also because of the cultural barrier: fish are for eating, not an artistic wall hanging that will remind you of your appetite. In Japan, you will see fish prints called gyotaku (literally, gyo is fish, taku is rubbing or impression). It is an angler’s art form where ink is applied to one side of the fish and traditional mulberry paper is pressed against the fish, capturing every scale and fin of the prize catch. The angler’s name and date of the catch are written in calligraphy and the natural elegance is sublime.

So now that I’ve walked on each ends of the earth looking for fish, I’ve come to learn that the sporting code and ecological ethics is something that is carried with you and you cannot expect that fishermen on the other side of the world will have the same outlook as you in the pursuit of their quarry. A new school of lure and fly anglers in Asia are the vanguards of the practice of catch and release. With imported tackle, rods and techniques, freshwater stewardship is making small steps in the angling world.

With some of the differences, there are universal notions shared among worldwide anglers. There is a Korean expression, “son maht,” which translates to “hand taste.” It refers to the delicious feeling of the rod becoming electrified in your hand as a fish is hooked. When I first heard the expression, I reminisced back over the fish I recently caught, and indeed, my hands relished the sensation.

Copyright © James Card.