Kyudo The Japanese Art of Archery. William Acker

      WHEN I ARRIVED IN JAPAN I had already every intention of studying the archery of Japan, for I had long been a devotee of the English long bow at home. My first few months in Japan passed busily without my doing anything about it, and it was not until May of that year that I went to the Butokuden, the Hall of Martial Virtue, next to the Heian Shrine in Kyoto to see the archery there. I had been in Peking during April for a short visit and had there visited the famous Bow and Arrow street where I acquired several Chinese bows. This really started me on my investigations into Oriental archery so that when I got back to Kyoto I made a point of visiting the Hall of Martial Virtue at once.

      On the day of my first visit I was allowed to come in and sit in the hall from which the archers shoot and watch the shooting going on, as tourists are allowed to do. Since I spoke Japanese I was soon busy asking questions and answering those that they asked me concerning American archery. But when I said that I would like to learn to shoot Japanese style, there was a general shaking of heads. A foreigner might try, of course, but the consensus seemed to be that he wouldn't get far!

      One man there, however, Mr. Toshisuke Nasu who, perhaps just for the sake of argument, took my side and declared that in his opinion any man with the necessary intelligence and patience could learn, no matter whether Japanese or foreign. Then and there he generously offered to begin teaching me the very next day in order to prove that Japanese archery could be learned and practiced by a foreigner.

      Shortly afterwards we left the Butokuden together and went to his house where we had ceremonial tea and talked a while, after which we proceeded to a fletcher's shop where he ordered arrows for me, first, a blunt featherless practice arrow, for it would be a long time, he assured me, before I would be able to shoot at a target with real arrows.

      At that time I had rooms in a small sub-temple within the walls of the great Zen-Buddhist Monastery Shōkukuji, north of the Imperial Palace grounds. The priest who lived there was retired and let his spare rooms to students—and I had been fortunate enough to get one. The place was wonderfully quiet, and my room looked out on a garden beyond which stood a deep grove of tall bamboos. For the next few months my friend and instructor, Mr. Toshisuke Nasu, came almost daily, early in the morning, and taught me the art of Japanese archery.

      He lent me a weak bow of his own to begin with and brought his own makiwara or straw-tub, a great cylindrical bundle of straw tightly bound together and sometimes fitted into a tub, into which the beginner shoots end-on from a distance of four or five feet, using a blunt featherless arrow until his form is so nearly perfected that he can be trusted with real arrows.

      It was hard work. Months slipped by, and still I stood before the makiwara ceaselessly discharging arrows (the featherless variety) into it, and pulling them out again, while Mr. Nasu stood to one side commenting freely on each shot. Some days everything would go wrong. Some days he would note a considerable improvement. Gradually, very gradually, I learned to keep the grip on the bow so relaxed that the bow on being released began to show a tendency to turn in the hand. Day by day this tendency grew stronger. Soon the string would describe a half circle and the bow would fetch up with the back facing straight towards me; and all the time Mr. Nasu saw to it that I did nothing with my hand to help it turn. The turning of the bow in the hand is not prized so much because of its beauty but because it is a phenomenon that naturally occurs when the grip of the bow hand is exactly as it

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