02: Making rib of suge hat with bamboo stick

06: Braiding Itaya Minnow with itaya sticks and fuji

04: Fuji tree bark (right) and inner part of the tree (left)

02: Collecting nemagaridake for making Itaya Minnow

03: Young bud of Karamushi

Karamushi, or a Ramie, which has strong and shiny characteristic fiber, had been cultivated in various parts of the country as to use as the materials for high-grade Karamushi weave. The main producing center has now narrowed down to Fukushima and Okinawa prefecture. In the Showa village, Fukushima prefecture, Karamushi thread has been produced and supplied as the material for Ojiya-chijimi and Echigo-jyofu, important intangible cultural properties in Niigata prefecture, by cultivating and extracting fiber of Karamushi.\n01: Burning fields to cultivate Karamushi

03: Measuring the cormorant that has been caught

02: Cormorant that has just been hooked and caught

Most of the wild Japanese cormorants used in cormorant fishing, a traditional fishing technique now found mainly in western Japan, are caught in Jyu-o Town, Ibaraki prefecture. Cormorants in flight are lured into a little hut located on a precipitous cliff facing the Pacific Ocean, by using several cormorants as decoys. They are then hooked with a long bamboo pole, placed in bamboo cages with their bills fixed with a little wooden implement called a hashikake, and sent to cormorant fishing sites all over Japan.\n01: Decoy cormorants placed in front of a catching hut

03: Tarai boat has been originally used in the seashore fishing

02: Tarai boat made by craftsman