Japanese Wood Plugs

[bulldog1935]

When I was 19, caught my first big bass, 6-1/2 lbs, on a Jitterbug at rest (the pattern was black/yellow coach).
A tediously slow retrieve, with more time at rest than moving. She ate the lure sitting still.

I've always liked topwater lures that still create action at rest. A few Yahoo snags along the way.
So much of the good stuff in "Japan underground" is sold by reservation in advance, and resale on Yahoo is our avenue from this side of the big pond.
Most of the underground tackle brands are lure makers first, BP Baits, Frog Products, Ninna - they're so far down the Isuzu and Ebisu reel and Bright River rod production queues, they only get rod/reel stock to sell a couple of times/decade - wood lure making is their bread and butter.



Zeal was a prolific wood lure maker for 3 decades, and went out of business in the last decade.
They produced so many, they are easy finds, and good Yahoo buys.
With so many out there, they have their own category on Yahoo



I even have a salt niche for a few of these. There's a small first-light window in flats and sloughs where a surface wake takes big redfish and specs - I picked these for combination of Z-wake and first-light mullet markings.
Wood lures make great wakes, because they're less buoyant than hollow plastic, and ride low on the surface.



Headhunters lure shop is one of the largest in Japan, they have several shops, and have the lead on all the wood lure makers.
Chrome (settings/languages) will let you read this website in English. The top-right toggle will let you see In Stock only.
https://www.headhunters.jp/SHOP/8882/list.html
on each listing, search toggle pops up their inventory


A couple more lure shops to nose around. Unlikely to score from Oh Chuck!. but great photos.
http://oh-chuck.com/
I did manage to add this BP Baits finesse frog to a noppin cache - broker Masamichi had to call him to check stock and place order.


Another shop to search brands - http://sawamura777.com/?mode=grp&gid=2475868
I've found the best way to search Yahoo is toggle your Chrome language back to japanese, and copy the Japanese ideograms to paste in your search argument.

[bulldog1935]

ps - if you have old wood lures and good stories to go with them, feel free to add them to this thread - they don't have to be Japanese.


Japan is just where most wood lure-making has moved in recent decades.

[John G]

Great post. Thanks for sharing.

[bulldog1935]

Thanks John

[Cracker]

Great story!
I own couple of similar plugs, never used them yet, don't have any confidence they are going to outproduce modern lures.

[bulldog1935]

Thanks again.
Wood plugs are the oldest bass lures.
In his tome, Book of the Black Bass, 1881, Doc Henshall reported that wood plugs were dog-walked in Florida for bass before the American Revolution - before the advent of reels.
They used an 18' wood rod, which later gained the name Paw-Paw rod.
In his book, Doc didn't call it dog walking, but called it "the bob"

"Walking the Dog" was coined in 1918 by Moonlight Bait Co. of Paw Paw, MI



c. 1910 Chubb Henshall bass rod and same-age Bluegrass 33