Demon’s Game – New Book Teaches the Oni School of Tenkara Fly Fishing

Masami “Tenkara no Oni” Sakakibara – the Tenkara Demon – is widely recognized as one of the world’s top tenkara master anglers. For over a decade, the crew at Tenkara Guides LLC (Erik Ostrander, John Vetterli, and Rob Worthing) worked to share Masami’s style of tenkara fly fishing with the world. Their main event was the Oni Tenkara School. Each year, the Tenkara Guides hosted Masami and his wife, Coco, on the Blue Ribbon trout waters of Utah to teach his unique, highly effective tenkara style. Schools with Masami were both incredibly instructive and a heck of a lot of fun, but it couldn’t go on forever.

Eventually, travel to the United States became too much for Masami, so he passed the torch to Erik, John, and Rob. Robert M.C. Worthing, M.D., is a certified fly fishing guide and founding member of Tenkara Guides, LLC. An avid outdoorsman, academic physician, and Navy veteran, he has appeared in a variety of fly fishing magazines, books, television shows, and events at regional, national, and international levels. A devoted member of Team Oni U.S.A., Rob is one of only three students in the United States to earn Masami Sakakibara’s approval to instruct the Oni school of tenkara fly fishing.

Now, Rob Worthing has published a collection of lessons learned directly from Masami in a book called Demon’s Game: The Oni School of Tenkara Fly Fishing. “I set a lot of goals for this book”, Rob told Tenkara Angler, “but the biggest one was to honor Masami’s fly fishing legacy.” The book reads like a sort of syllabus for the Oni Tenkara School. It starts with a new look at the history of tenkara in Japan and Masami’s place in it, outlines a philosophy for Oni tenkara, and dives into technical chapters on trout, the water they live in, and the bugs they eat. Then comes the meat of the book – a comprehensive outline of the Oni school of tenkara, including fundamental and advanced fly presentation, movement and dissection of water, strike detection and hook set, playing and landing fish, and more.

“I didn’t want to try and speak for a master angler like Masami”, said Rob. “Doing that would be disrespectful. I had to write the book from the point of view of Masami’s devoted student. I’m a technical kind of angler, so a lot of the book is technical. There’s a lot of science, because learning about nature and then applying what you learn on the water is a big part of what makes fly fishing beautiful to me, and I think to Masami. There aren’t a ton of basics in this book, like how to tie knots. There are plenty of good tenkara books for that. What we were missing was the advanced stuff.”

The book is dense with useful facts. Technical chapters benefited from review by a host of experts, and the book includes sections on rods, lines, flies, and troubleshooting topics like casting, wind, and floating or sinking the fly. And all of it is beautifully illustrated by Jim Tignor.

“This is the kind of book I hope people will read multiple times, go back to and reference. Masami and his Oni tenkara are the stars, but the book is really filled with stuff that everybody in fly fishing needs to know, whether you’re fly fishing with a tenkara rod or not. It’s the kind of book that can make you a better angler.”

Demon’s Game: The Oni School of Tenkara Fly Fishing is available direct from the publisher and on Amazon.

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