Search for big bass

Hajime SUZUKI is betting it all on the whim of a cold-blooded animal. His girlfriend, Yoshie Ishii, sits beside him aboard a yellow Ranger boat, hands clasped at the tip of her nose, praying he hooks a big one. The promise? If he gets a 10-pound fish, he’ll propose marriage on the spot.

The couple spent $2,500 to travel from Japan to Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet to catch the fish that could change their lives.

“For me it is bass or die,” says Suzuki. “I have bet my life for bass.”

This is not as singular a passion as it might seem. Each year hundreds of anglers like Suzuki head for the other side of the Pacific to Bass Central. They know U.S. fishing hot spots as well as they know Disneyland and the Grand Canyon: Lake Fork, Texas; Lake Okeechobee, Fla.; and Lake Casitas, northwest of Ventura. They come alone or in groups, sometimes with family or on a honeymoon, always with big dreams and pricey tackle.

Suzuki’s obsession began long ago at a small pond near his home in Kawasaki. Stooped old men fished for carp with long poles and spewed contempt for upstarts who used aggressive tactics to catch largemouth bass.

Suzuki, then 13, would sneak into the pond before it opened. Crankbaits, jerkbaits, topwater lures, it didn’t matter what he threw, bass mauled everything. The police chased him away, but it was too late. The fish gods had claimed his soul.

Yoshie just laughs, says Suzuki. “She thinks I’m stupid, crazy for bass.”

It’s 6:40 a.m. Dawn breaks cold and mist floats on green water. Guide Art Berry presses the throttle and the boat blasts across the glassy reservoir in a roar of cheek-stinging horsepower. Within minutes, he cuts the motor and the boat glides to a halt over a sloping, submerged point. Bass have been chasing shad and spawning. Suzuki grabs his $750 combo: a Megabass Destroyer rod and a Shimano Conquest 100 reel.

The first fish, a 3-pound chunk, falls to Berry on his first cast. “Yeah, baby, yeah!” he hollers while reeling.

The guide is boisterous, jovial and stocky. Suzuki, 35, is slight, stoic and determined. He heaves a 9-inch Osprey lure akin to a deformed rubber trout across the point. But another bass boat cuts by, spooks the fish and kills the bite.

Nowadays the restaurateur doesn’t tell customers about his consuming passion. In Japan, bass are a nuisance, alien invaders targeted in some places for eradication. Anglers must choose: fish or friends.

“Japanese bass fishing has an image problem,” Suzuki explains. “Japanese people think bass are a very bad fish. I feel guilty when I fish in a Japanese lake. I don’t like to talk about my hobby.”

Rogue invaders

Largemouth bass are the street brawlers of lakes. They have thick, muscular bodies, gaping maws and the charm of a pit bull. They’re green on top, with white beer bellies, and thrive in trashy neighborhoods of slack water, dark crevices and flooded brush. Bass don’t nibble lures; they try to kill them. They’re tough to hook and they fight like chain saws.

This rogue slipped into Japan when businessman Tetsuma Akaboshi collected a reported 400 fish on a trip to California in the 1920s and released them in Lake Ashinoko near Tokyo. Others later smuggled bass in coolers and dumped them into lakes, ponds, even the moat surrounding the emperor’s Imperial Palace in Tokyo. Anyone caught transplanting bass today faces six months in jail and a hefty fine.

But sportsmen in the island nation that popularized sashimi embraced bass fishing, one more export of American culture absorbed into Japanese society. Satoshi Ito, now of Long Beach, was a 7-year-old koi fisherman when he encountered a bass while visiting his grandmother’s house at Lake Ashinoko. He cast a gold Rapala minnow and twitched it.

“I remember it was floating there black and gold in water,” says Ito, 28. “The fish just came out from nowhere, and he took it and jumped a few times. It was unbelievable compared to other fish. My knees were shaking, my heart was pounding so fast. I took the fish to my parents to show it off. It was a huge thing in my life.” He worked in a tackle store, then moved to California and now guides for Japanese bass anglers throughout North America.

Largemouths whipsawed not only the staid social order of fishing in Japan but also its native species. Authorities say bass threatens ayu, chub and crucian carp. Though anglers can bass fish at Tokyo-area lakes Ashinoko, Kawaguchi, Yamanaka and Saiko, authorities in some regions require them to keep, rather than catch and release, bass to reduce its numbers. In others, they try to contain the fish to specific water bodies or eradicate them.

Some also vilify anglers who pursue bass.

“Japanese bass angling is a ‘dark fishing’ and cannot be called a sport,” says Minoru Sato, managing director of Zennai Gyoren, the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Assn. “Bass anglers are very bad-mannered -- parking a car on a plowed field, interrupting the traffic, cutting off lures if gotten caught in fishing nets. It is a lawless situation regarding a foreign fish. No wonder bass anglers are flying to the U.S.”

Yet bass are irresistible to a generation of Japanese anglers -- as many as 3 million, according to the Japan Sportfishing Assn. -- many of them under 30.

Teens play bass fishing video games in Tokyo arcades. Men invite women on bass-fishing dates (women reportedly prefer lures to messy bait). Young people board crowded subway trains with a rod in one hand and bento box lunch in the other to reach lakes. Japanese companies manufacture gear used on the U.S. tournament trail: Lucky Craft jerkbaits, Fuji rod guides, Owner hooks and Shimano reels. A fishing college opened in 1998.

TV stars Takuya Kimura and Takashi Sorimachi are bass fishing boosters. Five Japanese magazines, including Basser, publish big, glossy action photos to portray bass fishing as an extreme sport. Fans wait in long lines for autographs from top bass anglers at the annual tackle show in Tokyo, which attracts 40,000.

All these bassers want what they can’t find in Japan: big dawgs, a wide-open bite, the 50-fish day. For that, they hop the Pacific.

Takahiro Omori came to America against his parents’ wishes. He was the only member of his class to skip college. He washed dishes at night so he could fish Lake Kawaguchi by day. He bought a boat, won some tournaments, sold everything and moved to Texas, where he placed 304th out of 308 anglers in his first U.S. tournament. Twelve years later, he’s a professional angler with several big tournament victories and more than $1 million in prize money and sponsorships. He zooms from lake to lake in a motor home.

Shinichi Fukae, 32, of Osaka came to America this year to fish the Wal-Mart FLW Tour for the first time. (FLW stands for Forrest L. Woods, founder of Ranger bass boats.) He faced top U.S. anglers in the prestigious tournament. He beat them all at Lake Champlain, N.Y., last month to claim Angler of the Year honors on the FLW circuit, the only fisherman to do so on both sides of the Pacific. He received $25,000 and a new boat, and his picture will appear on special-edition boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the U.S. later this year.

Japanese anglers, some say, share the gift of economy.

“Their presentations are so precise. Each 40-foot cast has to be perfect. Their casting skills, pitching skills, are just dead on target, no wasted motion,” says Jerry Puckett, editor of Inside Line magazine. “The average Billy Bob fisherman would be a dead man” against a Japanese fishermen.

On ‘the pattern’

Suzuki is no hick basser.

By 8:45 a.m., the sun cuts through the clouds and the bass begin to chase prey. Suzuki’s casts are graceful and precise enough to impress a fly fisherman -- a seamless motion as he threads nooks and crannies on the rocky shore.

Fidgety, as all bass anglers are, Berry motors the boat to an immense boulder-covered dam, where Suzuki switches to a jerkbait that mimics a wounded baitfish. He casts toward the edge of the riprap, gives a few sharp twitches and whooosh! A big bass inhales it and vaults out of the water on its way to the boat.

“Many, many big fish!” Suzuki yells. “Drop lines, drop lines quickly.”

“Yeah, baby!” Berry cheers.

But it’s not big enough to tip the matrimony scale.

The would-be bride is working a slime-green Senko in 20 feet of water and nails a plump fish. The trio is on “the pattern,” the magic blend of the right bait at the right place at the right time. The couple traveled 5,500 miles for this moment.

Suzuki drills another, bigger than the others, and his rod noodles as the fish grinds toward the stony bottom.

“I told you, man, I told you we’d go out for dekkai bass!” Berry hollers, using the Japanese term for big fish.

The fish tires, its color showing as it nears the surface. It’s a big one, but not wedding-ring big. Call it 4 1/2 pounds. It’s as close as Suzuki comes to getting hitched.

Rie Sasaki of The Times’ Tokyo bureau contributed to this report.