Fishing Gear & Bait

As far as fishing gear, most of the younger internees who were in their teens and pre-adolescent years generally had little money to spend on equipment. It has been reported that most of kids or teenagers started off with real primitive gear. Some would use various types of tree branches out birch or willow. Ken Sakuda was 12 years old when he was in camp and cannibalized his "shinai" a split bamboo replacement for a Japanese sword that was use in "kendo" to make a split bamboo fishing pole. Most of the kids started using sewing thread and safety pins. Some were lucky to acquire "hand lines" made of rayon which included a wooden bobber and metal hook wound around a wooden frame that look like popsicles sticks.

As for the adults, some had previous knowledge of the Owens Valley and Eastern Sierra and had come prepared with leader material made of silk worm gut, split shots, and hooks. In the case of Mike Nishida, Jiro Matsuyama and a few others, they had the resourses to buy actual fishing equipment from either the Sears and Roebuck catalog or the Montgomery Ward mail order catalogs.

A popular rod was a steel telescoping rod that extends into three lengths to just over 9 feet. It was capable of being converted to either conventional reel or fly reel by reversing the handle while it was connected to the telescoping rod portion.

In the case of Jiro Matsuyama whose equipment is featured in the photograph above, he had a complete outfit which included: 2 rods, a fly reel, a conventional reel, various bait containers, fish creels, leader wallet, hooks, sinkers, snake bite kit, folding drinking cup, gloves and sleeping bag not shown. For main line, they purchase braided silk or rayon. For leader material it was made from "silk worm gut" which had to be soaked before using because it was very brittle while dry. Incidentally, "gut" leader looks very much like today's monofilament and it actually came in transparent shades that looks very much like the current day monofilament and came in different lbs. test strength just like monfilament. The best "gut" was produced in Japan or Spain and was purchased through the mail order catalogs mentioned above.