Ukai is a Japanese practice in which trained birds catch fish and are prevented from swallowing the big ones. It has been going since the 7th century.
Ukai is a Japanese restaurant and bar with fifteen hundred reviews and a 4.3, and its name refers to a fishing method that has been practised in Japan since the seventh century.
It involves cormorants. It is still done. And when you understand the mechanics, it is difficult to think about anything else.
How it works
A fisherman – an usho – works at night, from a wooden boat, with a burning basket of pine hanging over the water to attract the fish.
He handles up to a dozen cormorants on leashes. The birds dive, and they catch ayu – sweetfish – and they surface.
Around the base of each bird’s throat is a snare: a loose ring or cord, tied so that small fish pass through and are swallowed, and larger fish cannot.
The fisherman lifts the bird, and the bird disgorges the fish it could not swallow, and it goes back in the water and does it again.
The arrangement
The birds are not wild and they are not exactly captive. They are worked with for their entire lives – fifteen or twenty years – and they are known individually, and the masters speak about them with real affection and are buried, in some cases, near them.
The birds get the small fish. The man gets the big ones. It has been running for thirteen hundred years and both parties have, in some sense, agreed to it.
The Prat’s employment desk has read that sentence back several times and would like to note, without further comment, that it is also a description of a substantial portion of the modern labour market.
Why it survives
It is not economic. It has not been economic for a very long time. A net is faster.
Ukai survives because it is beautiful, because it is protected, and because some of the fishermen on the Nagara River hold an official appointment under the Imperial Household Agency – which means their job title is, technically, Fisherman of the Imperial Household.
A handful of men are employed by the Emperor of Japan to catch fish with birds, at night, by firelight, using a method from the seventh century, and the fish go to the palace.
The restaurant
Twenty to eighty pounds. Serious Japanese cooking, a proper bar, and a sake list that is worth engaging with.
And – as we established at Moto and at Kioku in Covent Garden – the rule is: cold, or room temperature. Not hot. Ask them what to pour and drink that. It has never once failed in two hundred and forty-five articles.
Verdict
Excellent food, real sake knowledge, and a name commemorating an arrangement between a man and a bird that has lasted thirteen hundred years and which is, on inspection, slightly troubling.
The costume
One detail, because it is the one that sells it.
The usho still wears the traditional dress: a dark indigo linen kimono, a grass skirt to keep the sparks off, straw sandals, and a headpiece.
The grass skirt is not ceremonial. It is a fire precaution. There is a basket of burning pine hanging over the water a few feet from him, all night, and things fall out of it.
Everything about the outfit that looks like folklore is, on inspection, a piece of safety equipment – which is true of a startling proportion of what we now call tradition.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
