Ukai

With a blazing bonfire hanging from its stern, the long and narrow fishing boat glides past us with five lines cast over the side nearest to our boat.

They’re fishing lines – after a fashion – that are neither baited nor hooked. At the end of each line, flapping and diving into the Uji River, is a live cormorant.
For it is summer in Japan’s Kansai region: the season of the Ukai Matsuri, or the Festival of Cormorant Fishing.

The Japanese used birds for fishing for around 1000 years. Called “Ukai”, it is done with cormorants on leads attached to a necklet that constricts the bird’s gullet and keeps it from swallowing the larger fish it catches.

These larger fish are removed from the bird’s throat by the fisher, who then throws the bird overboard to catch its next fish.

Ukai isn’t a commercial fishing practice today. Instead, it is done to entertain the tourists and sightseers during the summer months and the Ukai Matsuri.
This festival takes place in many parts of Kansai, and, as I’m travelling between Kyoto and Nara, I decide to stop half-way, in the city of Uji.

For in Uji, they cast their cormorants upon the waters every night for almost all of summer, from mid June through to late September, just upstream from a bridge that has its very own goddess and in a river that has an important place in Japan’s literature.

But more about that later...