Tenkara fishing...

[Deleted]

It was originally a way of earning a living? If so, did it trump the worm? Mostly available world wide and with built in manipulation  

[Paul G]

Japanese mountain streams would generally have been quite a trek from nearest significant settlement - so if you are hiking up there, you don't necessarily want to have to gather bait before you can fish. Any time not spent with a hook in the water was time wasted

You can re-use a fly for hundreds of fish captures; you generally only get one or less per worm/natural bait...

[dbl]

I once talked to an old Welsh hill farmer, whose method of fishing the tiny, very steep and bewooded stream was to use a short spinning rod with a worm on a hook tied to the end of the line. The basic arrangement of the stream was (is!) pool, waterfall, pool, waterfall; each feature being no more than a metre or so in diameter or length. The unweighted worm was cast into the bottom of the fall so it plunged into the pool. After no more than one or two casts the fisherman moved up to the next pool and repeated the procedure. Like the tenkara fisherman this was about food not fun, though he loved doing it! Good, dinner-sized, fish (that is, over 3/4 of a pound or so) would be found singly in the occasional pool. He said that the pool would usually soon host another good fish!
Having said that, I can think of several reasons why worms would not be a good choice for a full day's fishing.
They are a pain to dig up and to carry.
They look really dead when they die, which is quickly in fast currents.
They are often nipped off by trout taking short.
Or they end up in the trout's gut and the hook is hard to remove.

Maggots are much better for all these reasons, and I seem to remember that anglers often added a wriggly maggot to their artificial fly to give that "manipulation"! Maybe some still do?

[cm_stewart]

A few thoughts:
1) There aren't many worms in mountainous regions, so worms would be harder to acquire than feathers.
2) As Paul suggested, feathers say on a hook much better than bait does. Hundreds of fish per fly may be a bit much to ask for, but certainly considerably more than with a live nymph or caddis larva.
3) I don't believe for a minute that ancient anglers in Japan did not use bait. Currently, keiryu bait fishing is considerably more popular than tenkara, and I see no reason to believe it would not have been used hundreds of years ago. However, bait fishing by definition is not "tenkara" so ancient "tenkara" anglers didn't use bait (or rather, if/when they did they weren't tenkara fishing). I am sure that they knew of nymphs and larvae in the streams, and that any terrestrial insects they found would have been taken by fish. They were subsistence fishermen, not purists. We know that ancient anglers used multiple flies, floats and weighted flies. Perhaps the only reason researchers have not found reports of bait fishing is that they haven't looked, or if they found them, did not report them since it wasn't tenkara.