Rokkasho Salmon Festival
Coordinates: 40.9691548, 141.3506651
In the past year, I have found myself doing things I never thought I would do in a million years. Things like coming face to face with my fears, and conquering every last one of them. I guess there's something to be said about moving to a foreign country that makes you just not care anymore about silly phobias.
Which brings us to the Rokkasho Salmon Festival, an event centered around standing in a pool and catching a salmon with your bare hands. The festival is so popular that there was actually a lottery system for the tickets, so in a courageous moment, I signed my name on the dotted line. Or auto-populated my information on the website. Whatever.
Getting instructions and being told multiple times to put our hands up.
I won the tickets, or the ability to buy the tickets, and convinced a couple of friends to go with me. The festival itself was very small and unimpressive, other than the man dressed in drag doing some sort of Moulin Rouge-esque performance. Japan is weird.
After tooling around for a bit, it was finally time for our salmon catch! They handed us a plastic bag, and pointed to a sign in English with a few rules on it. That is probably one of my favorite qualities about the Japanese; they are always prepared for the dumb Americans. So the rules stated that we would have two minutes to catch our fish and if we didn't catch one within the allotted time, a guy with a dipnet would place a fish in our bag. Also, if we were to find a male salmon, we were to put it back. Not like we knew the difference, but those are just details.
We then took our places along the pool. At this point, I started seriously questioning whether or not I wanted to do this, but MC soon started going over the rules once more. Then, they counted down from 10 and we all ran into the water, which was surprisingly not very cold for it being November. Prior to the festival, I had bought gloves from the 100 Yen Store with little grippers on them to make it easier to catch the fish. This proved to be extremely helpful and a key component to my success.
The first fish I went after slipped away, and I began to panic that I wouldn't catch one within the time limit, but literally ten seconds later, I ended up grabbing one and holding on for dear life. Salmon are so much stronger than you would think. Or I'm just weak.
Our friend had a harder time. He basically just punched one in the eye.
After we exited the arena, there was a processing table that gutted and cleaned the fish for us. Since they were female salmon, there were a ton of eggs that workers slopped into a bag and handed each of us. The Americans were not so interested in this, so we all found this sweet older woman to give our eggs to. She was over the moon excited by this, as they are very expensive at the grocery store.
These people interviewed our friend after the catch.
Even though this was one of the smallest festivals we have been to, it was definitely one of the most fun, and an experience I wouldn't trade for anything. Also, the salmon was freaking delicious. Doesn't get any fresher than that.
Props to Sara Williamson for taking almost all of these photos.