Hideo “Joe” Morita shrugs. “I never liked fishing until I saw the lodge,” he says. “I’m a skier more than anything.”

When Morita’s seaplane dropped through the clouds, and he saw the blue-and-green spread of northwestern British Columbia below, he knew he’d found a special place in King Pacific Lodge, which he expanded into one of his signature five-star wilderness retreats. What he didn’t know back in 1997 is that its fish-rich waters would turn him into a passionate fly fisherman who considers the sport the world’s best antistress therapy.

Stress comes with the territory if your father happens to be Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony. Joe grew up shuttling between Japan and New York as his father developed the company, and spent his summers at a nature camp in Maine. Now, the 56-year-old son of Sony practically lives on his Gulfstream IV, which jets him around the planet so he can conduct meetings with the 600 employees of his suite of international enterprises, which include three other lodges: the Arai Mountain & Spa Resort near Japan’s Nippon Alps, the Telluride Ski & Golf Company in Colorado, and a $2.5 million nonprofit dolphin park in Palau off the western cusp of Micronesia. His travels are punctuated by regular stops at the family headquarters in Nagoya, Japan, to see his wife and 12-year-old triplets.

“My first time at King Pacific, I stayed there four days,” Morita recalls, apologizing for his English, which is, in fact, excellent. “We went trolling for king salmon in the channel not far from the lodge, and I just fell in love with the peacefulness and quiet. To hear the fish jumping in the ocean, the sound of the whale—I don’t know how to say it: I was hugged by nature.

“Then Michael introduced me to fly-fishing,” Morita adds with a laugh.

Michael Uehara is president and managing director of King Pacific Lodge and a close friend of Morita’s. “He is a great fly fisherman. He has a great cast and was a very good teacher.”

Delivered by the lodge’s helicopter into the heart of the surrounding coastal wilderness, they fished remote virginal streams where indigenous trout and steelhead still hold in the pocket water and deep pools in numbers as high as they were a century ago. They rise to the fly with the greatest of ease, a rarity that continues to make King Pacific’s catch-and-release fly-fishing packages one of the lodge’s main draws. And it doesn’t matter which stream or mountain the guide chooses—there are no best fishing spots. “If you go where the fish haven’t seen human beings in their whole life, then those fish have never seen a fly. They go for anything,” Morita says.

From late May through most of August, the channel in front of King Pacific is packed with Coho salmon. The Coho disappear by the end of August, so anglers stop trolling for them out of boats. By September, they go to the mountains where it’s all wading and fly-fishing.

In the quietude of the coastal temperate rainforest, Morita discovered what many other frazzled executives have also learned: A trout stream is one grand decompression chamber, and fly-fishing can be a bullet train back to balance. As Morita puts it, “Lots of sports help you relax, but fly-fishing lets you be part of nature.”

He also found fly-fishing to be a very effective problem-solving tool.

“My business problems are never solved when I keep them in my brain,” he explains. “I have to take problems away from my brain, then bring them back. And then the answer is there.”

This is why he generally fishes alone. Morita’s work requires him to spend a tremendous amount of time associating with other people, but when he’s at the lodge, he prefers to be by himself or with his loved ones. “I want to be impressed by the fish, amazed by nature.”

Eventually, the Shinto-Buddhist executive recognized the deeper gift of fly-fishing: that just casting a fly line is one of the world’s most powerful meditations.

“Casting is like talking to the air. It is a skill, and I have to concentrate very hard to try to cast the line the way I want, but it’s more like a mental conversation with nature. You have to concentrate on the small feelings of the line, the tension in your hand. When you concentrate on that, you ultimately go right into nature. You feel the wind, hear the sound in the stream.…”

He smiles.

“I don’t know whether fly-fishing is really concentration or deconcentration. Ultimately, it’s part of Zen, part of meditation—whether concentrating or not concentrating—either way it’s the same thing: It fixes your brain.”