Ice fishing in Japan

Short news clip of people in Hokkaido camping on an ice-covered pond, fishing for tiny smelt, then grilling and eating them on the spot. Link

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

Kyle Armbruster

Those little fish are eaten pretty regularly over here. I don’t like them, but that’s not uncommon. They seem to be a love/hate kind of food.
tmccartney

Them ain’t food. Them’s bait.
peapodrecordings

popular pastime in maine, wisconsin, much of the northern US. smelt are amazing to eat right out of the water, and many people don’t bother cooking them.
RugerRedhawk

We go smelting in the NY Finger Lakes. Using nets in the streams that flow into the lakes you can catch them usually at night. It’s been a while, but I remember them being pretty tasty. We would catch hundreds of them and clean them, and fry them in batter.
mscir

When my dad took me fishing as a kid he taught me to whack the fish I caught in the back of the head – where the spine meets the skull – with a sharp blow, using the back of a knife or something similar.

This will stun or even knock out the fish so it doesn’t suffer as much. These people are throwing the fish onto the ice or even grilling them without stunning them. While I love eating fish I have to say that this looks like easily preventable suffering to me.
zuzu

This will stun or even knock out the fish so it doesn’t suffer as much. These people are throwing the fish onto the ice or even grilling them without stunning them. While I love eating fish I have to say that this looks like easily preventable suffering to me.

Not a fan of Seom, I suppose?