About Tenkara Tanuki
Tenkara Tanuki is a San Francisco tenkara rod company founded and run by Luong Tam, an industrial designer and software engineer who designs every rod himself. The rods are built in a Chinese factory chosen for hand craftsmanship over machine work, whose engineers were trained by two Japanese rod-making masters, one of them a retired Shimano rod designer who still oversees design and quality control. Blanks use Japanese Toray high-modulus carbon fiber, and the brand's four stated design values are balance, ease of casting, ergonomics and sensitivity. In 2022 it received the Fly Fishing Show Consumers Choice Award, the first tenkara maker to do so.
The catalog is a single line of individually named rods rather than series. The core all-rounders are the numbered Tanuki 275, 325, 375 and 425 (9' to 13'11"), with the Snow Tanuki 375 as a white-finish variant. The Ninja II (11'6", 2.2 oz) is the best seller, a dry-fly and kebari rod with a narrow grip. The Pocket Ninja family (240, 290, 320 and 335) packs to about 13 in for travel and backpacking. The Kunoichi 310 and 360 and the bamboo-textured Sabi 360 are the newest small-stream and open-water rods, tuned to protect 6X and 7X tippet. At the long end the XL-1, its counterbalanced successor the XL-Sport 405, and the Barebones Kebari 405 all run 13'3". The Shinobi 395 and Barebones Nymphing Pro 360 and 380 are contact-nymphing rods, developed with Dr. Robert Worthing's ultralight fishing input, most with a pure carbon grip. Several models are limited editions or artwork editions with panels by Charles Jardine and Anthony Naples.
Rods sell direct through the brand's own store, with spare sections sold for every model. The company also runs Tanuki-U instruction, a tenkara boot camp and the annual Tenkara Bug Out gathering.
What Tenkara Tanuki is known for
The Ninja II is the best seller: an 11'6", 2.2 oz dry-fly and kebari rod with a narrow EVA grip. The numbered Tanuki 375 and 425 are the all-round and open-water mainstays, and the Pocket Ninja rods (13 in closed) are the travel choice. The brand is known for Toray carbon blanks with a Western backbone and a Japanese-style flexible tip, for its pure carbon grips on the Shinobi and Barebones nymphing rods, and for counterbalanced end caps on the XL-Sport and Barebones Kebari. It won the 2022 Fly Fishing Show Consumers Choice Award. In this catalog it sits with Tenkara USA and the Japanese makers Nissin and Suntech.