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Japanese Archery (Kyudo)

Kyudo means "way of the bow" and is the Japanese art of archery. Notice my use of the word "art" there. Unlike the standard types of archery that we see practiced in the UK, Kyudo is much more to do with meditation and seeking a natural release, whilst shooting to hit the target. For that reason, it takes many hours of learning the meditation side of things before you would normally pick up a bow. So, our little attempt at Kyudo would only be a very basic, fun demonstration.

On our final day in Kyoto (day 11 of my trip), Mark and Sayaka took me along to a little place just outside of the Kiyomizu Temple. The lady instructor handed us a bow and we were told to sit down facing the wall, as if on a horse, and hold our bow at 90 degrees to shoot down the tunnel.

The Japanese bow reminded me a lot of a standard long bow. However, it was a lot taller and the grip used on the arrow was different. When pulling back on the string, we had to partly hold the nock of the arrow onto the string and then pull the string back right the way past our ear. Also, we were told to twist the bow with our left hand as we pulled back with our right. It was quite tricky to get the hang of, especially with me being used to a standard recurve bow and string grip.

Photograph 1 shows the 'archery cave', as I have named it. A series of mats placed on a long seat, with targets in the dirt in the distance. Impressively, this archery cave dated back over 150 years, to the Edo Period. The lady instructor had been doing demonstrations herself for over 30 years. As you will see from the first two photographs, there are people's names on boards and pieces of paper attached to the walls all around the room. These are the names of people who have successfully completed the challenge (getting 3 arrows in the targets from 10 shots).

It was great fun to try this different form of archery. However, it was also quite tricky because the equipment wasn't of terrific quality. The strings on the bows were quite worn. The feather flights on the arrows were very old and I noticed, when looking down the arrows, that many of them were very bent. I guess Mark could use that as his excuse for shooting his first 5 arrows off to the right… nearly hitting my target and Sayaka could use it as an excuse for shooting several arrows into the hay in the roof (I hope there were no birds nesting in there!). 

In the end, we all managed to hit our target once. But, to be honest, that didn't really matter as it made for a fascinating experience anyway.

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Comments (1)

Dec 15, 2009
Vicky said...
wicked!!!

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