Taking Line to Another Level
September 18, 2009
Imagine, for a moment, a Japanese-American businessman – an avid angler but not an established member of the industry – who finds out about a technologically superior fishing product and decides to take what had previously been an avocation and make it into his bread and butter.
If that sounds like the life history of Gary Yamamoto, it’s because that’s pretty much what happened to the founder of Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits.
But now, decades later, there’s another angler-slash-entrepreneur who is following in those same footsteps. His name is Don Kuroye and he’s the head of Blackwater International (www.blackwaterinternationalinc.com), the company that is bringing Toray Fishing Line to the American public. If things work out as planned, expect to hear more about Toray’s products in the years to come.
By his own admission, when he travels to Japan, Kuroye, who’s lived in Southern California since he was in grade school, is “stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
“In Japan, they treat me like an American,” he said. “Even my family and relatives who live over there. But I need to be here in LA. We have beaches, smog and earthquakes. I love it!”
Despite effectively being a member of the Japanese Diaspora, Kuroye retains certain Japanese sensibilities. You won’t see his picture accompanying this article because he refused to give us one, citing traditional Japanese cultural values of modesty and humility. He wanted little of the focus to be on the man, and most or all of it to be about the products that he sells. But you can’t quite tell the story of Toray line without understanding Don Kuroye, where he comes from and what he holds dear.
“The most important things are your honor, integrity and pride,” he said. “Your word must be law. Our parents beat that into us.” The other thing that derives from his heritage is the urge to tinker. “The Japanese take a made product and they modify it to make it better.”
Toray has already captured the majority of the Japanese high-end fishing line market, and they’ve been represented in lines branded by other companies in America, but now the real deal is here….and they’ve tinkered up some good stuff.
“We make the best product for each specific individual fishing application,” Kuroye said. His background, at least professionally, isn’t in fishing. He’s been in the fabric and clothing industry for nearly four decades, making the most chemically advanced products for expeditionary-caliber wearables. That’s where he first crossed path with the makers of Toray, who extruded the byproducts of oil for similar purposes, as well as for fishing line.
Their cross-industry work allowed them to trump the competition. While the average line manufacturer’s finesse fiber is 75 denier (a denier being a unit of measurement of the linear mass-density of the fiber), the Toray crew could bring it down to an ultra-fine 10
denier. With those finer fibers, they can create a line that is more manageable, more abrasion resistant, less visible and stronger in a diameter similar to the mass-marketed lines.
While this advanced technology doesn’t allow the line to be cheap, it’s a matter of getting what you pay for. Even if it costs a certain percentage more than some of the competitors if you don’t lose fish and don’t have to change it nearly as often, the result is a wash in terms of cost, or possibly even a savings. It’s also great for less experienced anglers who may want to turn to fluorocarbon but may have been turned off by the difficult handling characteristics of some of the more readily-available brands.
Kuroye’s promotional efforts have been limited to date, as he carefully stakes a claim to a share of the market, but he noted that there has been “a tidal wave of ground support” for the products, which include not only various fluorocarbons, but also a braid that feels smoother than any other braid on the market. Their saltwater product line contains additional thrills, including hollow braids that allow for a knotless main line to fluorocarbon leader connection.
While his transition into the fishing industry hasn’t been entirely devoid of speed bumps, in some respects it parallels Kuroye’s early exposure to saltwater fishing. He’d fished mostly freshwater as a young man, but 11 years ago his cousins took him albacore fishing off the coast. “I got gravely ill,” he recalled. “It was so bad that I prayed to God to take me away.” But then a funny thing happened – they gave him a seasickness patch and he began to catch some fish, nine in all on the day. “This is what I’ve been missing for a long time,” he told himself. “I stopped getting seasick after that.”
The parallel, for anglers who’ve been frustrated by mainstream fluorocarbons, according to Kuroye, is that the wait is over. The days of your line making you sick are over. With the newest generation of fluorocarbons, you get the low stretch invisibility that has been touted all along, combined with the easy handling of the best monos.
If things work out as planned, Kuroye’s next chapter will steal a page out of Gary Yamamoto’s book, as he takes a superior product and makes it a household name.