American Fisheries Society. 129 
The ayu takes the fly readily, and is caught for market in 
various kinds of contrivances, but the most interesting fishery is 
that carried on with trained cormorants. Most of you have doubt- 
less heard of this fishery but perhaps you have thought, as I did, 
that it was a good deal of a myth. With us cormorants are about 
the most useless of all water birds; but from a very remote an- 
tiquity—certainly for 1,000 years—the Japanese have employed 
cormorants for catching ayu on some of the clear mountain 
streams. 
At the time of my visit to the most celebrated of the cormo- 
rant fishing villages, in the outskirts of the large city of Gifu, 
the outlook for fish was not good and the fishermen had decided 
not to go out that day; but the governor of the province had been 
notified of my coming by the central authorities in Tokyo, and 
did something which would be quite unthinkable on the part of 
a governor of one of our states—he ordered the fishermen to fish, 

and they did so! He also had taken for me an excellent and 
unique series of photographs from which the illustrations have 
been made. 
The most expert of the cormorant fishermen and trainers, 
whose ancestors for many generations had engaged in this fishery 
in the same locality, attired himself in the peculiar dress of the 
profession for the purpose of giving a special exhibition of his 
birds and the method of handling them. In preparing the birds 
for fishing, the first step is to put a cord around the lower part 
of the gullet, so that the fish which they catch may not pass be- 
yond a point whence they may be resurrected. You ean readily 
understand that it is a delicate operation, as too tight a cord will 
injure the bird and too loose a one will enable it to swallow the 
fish. The cormorants are controlled by a cord about 14 or 15 feet 
long attached at the back of the neck, the first part of the cord 
consisting of a stiff piece of whalebone upwards of a foot long, 
the function of which in preventing the tangling of the cord is 
easily understood. 
The boats are of a special type, being long, narrow dugouts, 
propelled primarily by paddles, but when en route to the fishing 
erounds a sail is often used. Unfortunately for the photog- 
rapher, the fishing is done at might, and you can see on the screen 
not the real operations but only imitations. Late in the after- 
