It's Taku Time

Over the course of the 2023 Bassmaster Elite Series season, Taku Ito drove 30,000 miles all over America on what for him was the wrong side of the road. Once he reached his destinations, at clips of 200, 500 or 1,000 miles at a time, for days on end he bounced through waves taller than him in his 20’ bass boat in search of little green and brown fish. It was a backbreaking, non-stop Iditarod of competitive angling.

When he returned to his native Japan after qualifying for his fourth straight Bassmaster Classic, he did what he does best: he got back on the water and competed. And that competition back home wasn't some local derby, dudes throwing money in a fruit jar and competing for bragging rights. Instead, it was the Basser Allstar Classic, Japan’s top test.

It’s a prestigious honor just to be invited, but invitations don’t feed Ito’s obsession. Kasumi Lake provided the venue for a painful, grind-out-the-bites affair. After suffering through a fishless effort on Day Two of the event, he battled back in the final round of competition to prevail. It was an exceptionally profitable busman's holiday – adding to his haul and enhancing his bona fides on the pitch.

If it seems that the Allstar Classic took time away from his family and from his efforts to recuperate for next season's slog, you should know that time has an amorphous elasticity for Ito. In another expression of “Taku Time,” he's seemingly able to bend it to his will, to operate fluently in two places simultaneously, and to make the clock and tides work in his favor.

During competition Ito wore a black t-shirt from his TechStard clothing company under his tournament jersey. It’s the “Slow Life Tee,” which seems odd, because lately he’s been in intercontinental beast mode. Taku explains that it’s not necessarily just about slowing down, but rather maximizing the rare opportunities to take a break. “It’s about doing your best even when you’re resting,” he said. Indeed, the shirt is meant to be worn often, because like fine wine – or, as you’ll see later, soft plastic lures – “the more you use it, the more it will get better.”

The professional fishing business is notoriously cutthroat and yet no one seems to dislike Ito. From the commentators and writers who are used to monosyllabic answers, to the other competitors who are not used to getting their butts kicked on the water, particularly by some 130-pounds-when-soaking-wet foreigner, he lights up every room he’s in and every fishery he conquers. He jokes about how he struggles to lift the heavy trophy that comes with the $100,000 winner’s check and they laugh (with him, not at him) and forget that he just beat the ever-loving crap out of them with tackle they wouldn’t use for farm pond bluegills.

On tour, there are times when the pressure gets so great that trust shrivels to a minimum, and yet when Taku wins, they cheer. When Taku speaks, they listen. When Taku is on TV, they watch to see how he's come so far, so fast.

“I’ve covered thousands of anglers,” said Bassmaster commentator Mark Zona. “There’s sort of a cliché that you’re supposed to be an alpha badass. But Taku’s approach is to do the exact opposite. He wakes up happy and goes to bed happier.”

He’s killing them with kindness – fishing’s version of "Thank you sir, may I have another?" It's incredibly jarring because as professional bass fishing has grown in worldwide prestige and earning potential, it has sometimes morphed into a smile-free zone. At one end sit pros constantly vying for Happy Gilmore checks and TV time, and at the other end sit a larger cadre of individuals who won’t be able to pay their mortgage if they struggle at the next tournament.

Don't misunderstand — casting for cash is how Taku feeds his family, which includes his wife Chie, a 9 year-old son and 2 year-old daughter, but he takes immense and contagious joy in the process. That blunts the sting of his killer nature. No one wants him to beat them, but no one is mad when he wins.

Since 2018, Ito has become increasingly Americanized, professing a love for Wendy’s burgers and four-times-a-week ham and cheese sandwiches from Subway. He’s gotten used to driving on the “wrong” side of the road, and his English — formal and idiomatic — has improved exponentially. He still has trouble with some American accents, with the Alabamians’ speech patterns confounding him the most. Notably, two of his best friends on tour, Wes Logan and Jordan Lee, are from Alabama. His other confidante is Matty Wong, the only current Elite Series pro originally from Hawaii.

Historically there was an uneasy balance between the American and Japanese anglers. When the first Japanese pros came in the early 1980s, the locals told jokes at their expense. Bubba-fied Americans rejected the finesse techniques developed on highly-pressured Japanese waters until they got their butts kicked one too many times and realized it might make sense to listen more and prejudge less.

When Takahiro Omori became the first non-American angler to win the Bassmaster Classic in 2004, some bristled at the idea that he took his victory lap with a Japanese flag.

A decade before Omori’s coronation, Ito’s future mentor Norio Tanabe became the first foreign Bassmaster winner when he won the 1993 Kentucky Invitational. At the time, it was a shock, because there were just two very similar models of prototypical professional angers: “both kinds, country and western.”

Part of Tanabe’s quietly revolutionary act was to reveal that there need not be a single mold for pro bassers. You can have any skin color, be built or slight, or even any gender. You can be a Type A hard-driver or someone who lets the game come to you. You can even be a Yankee, God forbid, or someone who hails from a country without bass. Success is partly the result of natural gifts, but what matters most is motivation.

Years after he inadvertently provided Taku with a path forward, Tanabe — through his lure company — would become Ito’s sponsor and mentor. He says that while he was good with fish, Ito is good with fish and people.

Omori was Tanabe 2.0, laser-focused to the point that he built a swimming pool in his Texas backyard, but never swam in it, instead using it exclusively to test lures.

Ito is Tanabe 3.0, or perhaps has skipped a generation and gone straight to 4.0. He’s constantly turning the knob to 11.

Omori has hoisted seven Bassmaster trophies over his head. Perhaps he was foreshadowing Ito’s need to do the same. There’s a difference between them, though. Omori built his angling chops stateside in the 1990s, with a lesser support system. He’s respected across the globe, but he fishes not just in an American style, but like a Texan — big baits, big wins, occasional big whiffs. Conversely, Taku has built his brand on a distinct form of code switching — he used finesse tactics from Japan for his 2021 Bassmaster win on the St. Lawrence River, and when he won the All Star Classic he used “Americanized” techniques.

Tanabe, who Taku reverentially calls his “master,” won three Basser All Star Classics, so Taku has work to do to catch up. The morning after winning, when other champions might’ve been sleeping off a bender, he was back at the dock with a photographer. He would’ve rather been working toward the next victory, but he understood that success has a long tail, and he’s not one to rush anything.

While Taku seems to be everywhere at once, aware of when to speed things up, Ito also knows how to stretch time, to exercise discretion among the push and pull of internal and external demands. Remember that t-shirt extolling the value of rest? If he’s getting any, it’s hard to see when, because he’s so mission-driven that there seemingly isn’t time for anything else.

Over four years he’s become one of the world’s greatest smallmouth bass anglers even though he’d never fished for bass other than largemouths previously. It’s as if your 5’8” cousin Larry from Albuquerque picked up a basketball for the first time and dunked it, or you exposed him to a chessboard and months later he became a grandmaster. There’s a special gift that can’t fully be explained. He’s fishing’s Amadeus, allegro when necessary, adagio a second later. He’s at his best performing slow motion acts sandwiched by 70 mph boat rides.

Part of the reason that he’s become so good with smallmouth is because of the amount of patience he has,” said Brandon Palaniuk, a two-time winner of the Bassmaster Angler of the Year trophy, the sport's toughest title. Palaniuk is 21 months younger than Ito, but after 13 years on tour he's been through the wringer and no longer embodies his earlier "Prodigy" nickname. “Even compared to me, it’s something special. He’ll tell me, ‘Let it sit one minute, two minutes, three minutes. NO SHAKE!’ Even if I know that’s how he’s having success, I don’t think I could go that slow.”

That patience stemmed from his family’s business. In the garage that now stores Ito’s Japan-based boat and tackle, his father and grandfather sold eggs for 70 years. It’s a perfect metaphor — all about waiting and timing and stages of life. Nothing sold before it’s ready, but wait too long and the opportunity vanishes. In the same way, Ito has his own special incubator.

Deep in a nondescript storage park in Georgia, among sheds filled with Grandma’s photo albums, abandoned tools and hangars full of would-be eBay items, he stores his U.S. tackle. That includes a chemistry lab of bins full of soft plastic lures that are marinating in a special compound. He has vintages of sorts, prepared in stages. First he puts them in sealed containers with a dash of ebi (shrimp) scented Nories Bitebass Liquid. When they’re appropriately infused, but not a second earlier, he removes them, restores them to their original packages, adds a dash of ebi flavored Nories Bite Powder, and only then are they ready. He will sell no wine before its time. There’s never a need to rush because he’s planned ahead.

The seeds of Ito’s passion lie in Nintendo, specifically the 1994 game “Super Black Bass.” At 7 he dragged his father — an occasional angler — to the lake as often as possible. That would be unsurprising if he’d experienced immediate success, but he did not. Zero bites, no fish slime on his hands. For two years he labored fruitlessly, without a single bass, never considering giving up. After those two years he was rewarded with his first bass.

Imagine being obsessed with basketball and not making a basket for 24 months, or fashioning yourself the next Ichiro Suzuki and consistently failing to make contact — and nevertheless remaining utterly obsessed.

He was in full Taku Time mode even then, knowing that his day would arrive. It all looked so simple when it finally happened, but no one except a few confidantes understood that it had been light years from instantaneous. That first bass, a plain Jane 2-pounder that inhaled a buzzbait, gained added significance when Ito won the Basser All Star Classic on that same body of water, Lake Kasumi, three decades hence. It was part of the plan, and worth the wait.

The scary thing is that he has ample runway ahead of him, years to get better at the things he’s still learning. The key will be to retain the greatest level of Taku-ness, the ability to claim a moment and to milk every ounce of joy from it.

“It’s not just what he learned since he’s been here, it’s what he didn’t learn,” Zona said. “The day I met him he was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met, and he hasn’t become jaded at all. Today he’s equally as happy, if not more.”

The deeper you dig, the more Taku Ito’s story befuddles you. He’s a Japanese diasporan who doesn’t miss his homeland’s cuisine, but instead craves sandwich artistry. He fishes a “Japanese” style in America and an “American” style in Japan. His love of the outdoors was a product of video game mastery. He’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery encased in a dye-sublimated jersey.

None of it makes sense, until you realize that the Ginza-bright smile — the very first thing that you noticed about him — is all that you ever needed to know. The joy is both the fuel for his success and the end game.

Pete Robbins is an attorney as well as a Senior Writer at Bassmaster . He has written extensively about the bass tournament scene for nearly two decades but in recent years has expanded beyond that niche to include adventure travel and bluewater angling. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife Hanna and their Australian Shepherd Rooster, who is now banned from their bass boat for pressing too many buttons at inopportune times. The Robbins family calls the Potomac River their home water, but they (minus the dog) have also fished in Africa, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Alaska, as well as most of the United States. Pete and Hanna blog daily about fishing travel and fishing culture at www.halfpastfirstcast.com