Gone Fishing with Atsushi Hasegawa

Atsushi Hasegawa doesn’t know how he found fishing, or how fishing found him, it sort of just happened. Growing up in Nagoya, an industrial city between Tokyo and Kyoto, his father—who had little interest in standing on a soggy shoreline all day in the hopes of catching a trout—would drive him to the nearest body of water and leave. “My dad hates fishing!” says Atsushi, smiling at the memory as his hands piece together a fly in his garden in Somerset.

“I think I would have been maybe six or seven years-old, and he would drop me by the lake and come back for me in the evening. I learned how to fish from reading and by experiencing it myself. Fishing has been a lifelong project; I can’t explain it. Now you have so many online resources for it, but back then you had to go out and meet people and practice and exchange information. It took time to learn it all.”

Having left Japan for Paris and then, later, Frome in Somerset—the hometown of his wife, Alice, an artist—Atsushi has grown to love the brooks and streams that run through this bucolic part of Southwest England. Walking through nearby woodland on a misty late autumn morning, a canopy of brilliant red and orange leaves overhead and gnarled tree roots underfoot, we pause beside a stream of running water. 

"When I lived in Tokyo, fishing was my excuse to go out into nature,” he says, waders pulled up to his thighs. “I was also obsessed with outdoor clothing, so it was an excuse to dress up, too! Some days I would feel more classic, other days more technical. In England fly fishing is different, I think it’s seen as more of a ‘gentleman’ sport.”

“I think my approach to fishing is similar to my music and the other objects in my life,” he says, “I’m drawn to things that require knowledge, care, and experience to understand. I use a bamboo rod, which is more difficult to cast and maintain, but it’s a bit like a pair of selvedge jeans. You want to keep the beauty and respect how you wear and take care of something.”

As a younger man, he would be bothered by the amount of fish he did, or didn’t, catch on any given day, “but now it is more about the peace and the opportunity to be outside You might be in the same river or the same lake, but it’s never the same. The temperature might be higher or lower, the wind different. Some days you’ll catch so many trout without knowing why, sometimes nothing.