Carp on the Ginza

Postwar Tokyo has had a passion for fads. For many years, it was pachinko, or playing the pinball machines. Then came the chubby plastic dakkochan dolls (TIME, Aug. 29, 1960) that clung to girls' arms and shoulders. The latest craze is angling parlors, where patrons can drop a line into a pool and, be mused by background music, fish for carp. The fad caught on last year when the angling parlors mushroomed from a few score to a present-day 539 in the heart of the city. One parlor was installed in a former bar with the pool behind the counter and the bar stools used as perches for fishermen. Saburo Kamekura, manager of an air-condi tioned establishment on the Ginza, To kyo's Fifth Avenue, claims 1,000 cus tomers a day. There, pretty young girls in Bermuda shorts cry "Sugoi! [terrif ic!]" when customers land a big one. Kamekura boasts that he is performing a badly needed service: "When it comes to doing away with the strains and stresses of big-city living, there's nothing more effective than fishing. And you can fish right here in Tokyo without battling your way through impossible traffic to the sea or mountain brooks." For 170 yen (470) a customer receives a bamboo rod baited with either a fly or an earthworm. He is then entitled to an hour of fishing, and may either sell back to the management any carp he catches or take them home in a polyethylene bag provided by the house. As an added inducement, some parlors offer prizes, ranging from cases of beer to cash, for those who land more than five fish per hour. To help anglers pass the time, other managements supply free movies, some of them erotic. Members of the Japan Anglers' Association, purists all, call the craze an "insult to the noble sport." But the police have not yet found any law to prevent it. About the only sufferers seem to be the carp, which bear the scale scars of many a near miss, and have to swim through water mixed with a dye to make it look deep. The fish are tiny --3 in. to 10 in. long--but some parlors compensate by renting out bamboo poles so flimsy that they often snap in two when a fish is hooked. Some observers have linked the fishing fad to Japan's recent economic recession. Said one: "The people have much time to spare but little money to spend, and the parlor is just the thing for them to use much of the former and little of the latter."

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