Ever heard of Yabusame?

I hadn’t, until a report in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye.

It is about as far from the Olympic sport of archery as it can get. The bow is taller than the person shooting it and, to the uninitiated, it appears lopsided and unbalanced. There are no sights and no high-tech stabilizers.

And it is done on horseback, at upward of 65 kilometers per hour, or 40 miles per hour.

It’s called yabusame, and it is the sport of the samurai.

Each year, archers in feudal shooting gear climb on their decorated mounts for a lively competition on the beach of Zushi, a town just south of Tokyo, galloping in the sand as thousands of onlookers cheer and shout. The first competition was held here in 1199.

The scene is like something out of a movie by the great Akira Kurosawa. Banners flap in the ocean wind, marking the beginning and end of the shooting runway. Little boys in bright robes and black hats scamper about collecting the arrows and the debris from the wooden or clay targets destroyed by each hit.

“There is nothing like this outside of Japan,” said Ietaka Kaneko, who heads the Japan Equestrian Archery Association and the Takeda School of Horseback Archery, which traces its origins back more than 800 years.

The targets, held about 2 meters, or 7 feet, aloft on small poles or scaffoldings, are roughly the size of a mounted opponent’s chest. There are three along the runway, which is only 150 meters long, giving the archer just enough time to raise his bow, load and shoot – three times – while spurring on the horse.

When the dull, turnip-shaped tip of an arrow strikes just right, the board explodes in a blur of splinters. But as often as not, the arrows miss, sailing past the targets and thudding into the canvas behind them.

In battle, hitting the target was the whole idea. But yabusame has from its origins been almost as much an art as a sport. In many competitions, hitting the target is almost an afterthought – archers are judged, if they are judged at all, on the beauty of their run and the form they display as they release each arrow.

There’s a lot more information at the link.

My curiosity aroused, I looked for more. Wikipedia has a good general article on Yabusame, but without much detail. (The photograph above was drawn from the public-domain pictures on Wikipedia.)

An Internet search located an excellent article on the Pacific Islander blog, describing the author’s visit to a Yabusame festival (if that’s the right word) at the Kashima Jingu Shinto Shrine. He has great background information, lots of excellent pictures, and a video clip of an archer shooting in heavy rain. Recommended reading. I took the liberty of borrowing the picture below from him, illustrating the turnip-shaped heads of the arrows used in Yabusame. I haven’t been able to find one showing them so clearly anywhere else.

Further searching produced a number of video clips of Yabusame action. Most of them, unfortunately, were either low-quality, or ruined by some idiot’s decision to insert a completely inappropriate sound-track. (Why do so many who post on YouTube and elsewhere degrade their clips by adding pop or rock music? It does nothing for the presentation, and can seriously detract from the visual impact.)

Here are two of the clips. The first is a BBC report, giving some additional background.

The second is a clip of the Takeda Ryu school of Yabusame, filmed at a beach course. Love the traditional Japanese music! Now that’s a soundtrack that adds to the visual impact!

Fascinating! It’s great to discover something new like this.

I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to gather masters of mounted archery from the great warrior cultures of history – the Parthians, from whom we get the term, ‘the Parthian shot‘, shooting behind them as they gallop away, as illustrated below:

the Mongols:

the Native American tribes of the USA:

and others – and compare their skills in a competition like this. We read so much about their almost mythical ability to hit opponents at seemingly impossible distances. The Yabusame practitioners shoot at very close range, which I would think is far more realistic in terms of actual combat – at least, if one wants to hit a specific target. To simply lob an arrow into a mass of enemy soldiers at a distance is, of course, a much easier proposition.

Peter