skills. Unlike in Western Europe, in Japan the aristocratic warrior class
considered the bow a warrior’s weapon.
This emphasis increased in the feudal period, especially when Mi-
namoto no Yoritomo gained the title of shôgun. He standardized the train-
ing of his warriors and had the founder of the Ogasawara-ryû, Ogasawara
Nagakiyo, teach yabusame(mounted archery). During the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, civil wars raged throughout Japan, and the techniques
of shooting were refined. Heki Danjô developed a new devastatingly accu-
rate approach to archery he called hi, kan, chû (fly, pierce, center), which
was quickly adopted. His school, the Heki-ryû, spread into many branches,
and these “new schools” continue to this day. Use of the bow peaked in the
sixteenth century, just before the Portuguese introduced the gun into Japan.
By 1575, Oda Nobunaga used firearms to win a major battle, beginning
the bow’s decline.
This decline was temporarily halted by Japan’s self-imposed period of
isolation, and during this period as well as the following Meiji period and
the modern period, the art of kyûdô has developed as a mental and phys-
Archery, Japanese 19A young woman aims at a barrel of straw to practice the style of her archery, at the Tsurugaoka Hachiman Grand
Shrine in Kamakura, Japan, 1986. (Robert Downing/Corbis)