FOLLOWING THE WAY OF THE BOW
Taking aim at learning a martial art
Buddha has perfect posture, but I’m awkwardly hunched in the earthen alcove we’re sharing. The street lanterns of Yamanouchi, Japan, don’t illuminate much, so I’m grateful for the bulbs of this shrine. I’ve just travelled 10,844 kilometres, nearly non-stop, but I don’t know where to go from here.
Yamanouchi’s geothermal waters attract people from all over the country, as they have for thousands of years. In a nearby tourist district, visitors are strolling around in yukata robes and wooden sandals, seeking hot springs rumoured to be healing. But in this neighbourhood, I haven’t seen another soul on the street.
My cellphone isn’t working, and my damp paper map is beginning to disintegrate.
The path to my intended ryokan, or traditional inn, is marked only with arrows. I try to convince myself that’s a good sign, since I’ve come to learn Japanese archery: kyudo, the Way of the Bow. Moments later, she appears. The woman is young. Maybe 25. I don’t call out as she passes, but I consider following her back to the train station, where I saw a rotary phone. Before I can adjust the wheels of my rolling suitcase, she’s turned back toward me, the dishevelled traveller at Buddha’s feet. “Can I help you?” she asks. I sputter the name of my ryokan. “I will take you,” she says.
Her kindness feels like a tangible gift, and its weight grows with every block we walk into darkness, in silence. Through narrow streets. Across a bridge. Under a metal arch guarded by snow monkeys.
Finally we reach Uotoshi Ryokan. The stucco-sided building is more traditional than most structures in the area, where even at night you feel the presence of mountains pressing against sky.
“This is where you’re supposed to be,” she says.
Then, without another word, she’s gone.
I inherited my interest in archery from my grandfather, Richard Earl Henion, a retired military man covered in faded blue tattoos. His passion for bows stretched back to the South Pacific during the Second World War.
My grandfather and I never found time to pursue archery together. But years after his death, I started shooting traditional long and recurve bows under the guidance of a neighbour in the Appalachian Mountains. We live not far from where the Hunger Games movies were filmed, and my teacher, a mountaineer who can make bowstrings out of tree bark, encouraged the instinctive shooting style made famous in the films.
Kyudo is one of Japan’s oldest martial arts, and it remains one of the most respected. The samurai warrior practice is closely associated with Zen Buddhism, and it draws from Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto and onmyodo. Its ancient formality runs against my shoot-from-the-hip nature, which makes it all the more important for me to be here. I’m only five-foot-two, but I take up a lot of space. The first word I learned, by necessity, while navigating crowded stations to get here: “Sumimasen.” Excuse me.
My kyudo teacher, or sensei, Kazuhisa Miyasaka, didn’t set out to be an archer — or an innkeeper.
Like me, he’s at Uotoshi Ryokan because of his grandfather.
Miyasaka, a man with bushy eyebrows and unruly wisps of grey hair, studied archery briefly when he was a child. But it wasn’t until much later that he started to take it seriously.
It was around that time that he encountered a kyudo teacher on campus. The sensei told him that — if he was going to return to the ryokan, which uniquely included a shooting place — he should study kyudo and become master of his own dojo.
Ultimately, archery inspired Miyasaka to come home.
“Destiny?” he says of the timing. “I don’t know.”
Miyasaka has changed into the formal kimono he wears for demonstrations. We walk to the shooting hall, which is sided in rusty metal. The entire town of Yamanouchi is alive with surface streams that run alongside roads like veins.
The entryway of the dojo, or training place, is a bridge.
Matos — hollow targets made of round wooden frames and blackand-white paper — line the interior of the shooting hall. One side of the building is composed of garage-style sliding doors. Miyasaka rolls one open to reveal a hidden courtyard. We’re across from a target house, where a roof protects the sand dune that holds matos in place. To reach it requires shooting over a kudzutrimmed pond, approximately 27 metres.
“Almost same as battlefield space,” Miyasaka says.
When Miyasaka first took up archery, he was only interested in winning competitions. At one point, when performing an examination to advance to the next level of kyudo, he consistently made his target. Still, he did not pass. “My teacher said I was hitting very well. But my form was not beautiful,” Miyasaka says. “Body remembers correct action. If we are not thinking, we get the target natural.”
It’s a case of matter over mind. And Miyasaka takes the challenge seriously. Sometimes, as a test of muscle memory, he turns off the dojo lights and shoots in the dark as part of the masters’ night practice.
Twang goes the string. Thwack goes the target.
Still jet-lagged, lulled by the song of the bow, I fall asleep sitting up. Then comes an arrow. My whole body jolts, as if startled by an alarm clock.
In kyudo, the sound of a pierced target is meant to awaken the archer from a dream-world clouded by ego and cultural conditioning, revealing the interconnectivity of self, nature, everything. When I realize that I’ve had a literal awakening, I chuckle quietly. Miyasaka notices.
“Japanese archery is serious,” he says.
“You have to have poker face at all times.
“If enemies can read your face, they know what you might do next.”
He invites me to shoot an asymmetrical yumi, or bow, for the first time — not at an outdoor target, but at the traditional makiwara, a rice-straw bale positioned at eye level. Unfortunately, I’m adept only at dropping my arrow.
When I’m finally able to hold it correctly, I hit the straw bale’s centre. “Lucky,” Miyasaka says, pointing to a hole near the ceiling. “Sometimes, beginners do not do so well.”
Sore from hours of archery practice, I take a break to explore the surrounding mountains. Locals have long called this place Hell Valley. Now, it’s sometimes referred to as Paradise of the Monkey.
Jigokudani Monkey Park, within walking distance of Miyasaka’s dojo, was founded by an outdoorsman who saw that human development had pushed Japanese macaques into agricultural and resort areas where they weren’t welcomed. The wild animals now relax in their own man-made onsen, or hot spring.
A resident macaque wanders over to me, and we sit together for a while. When he falls asleep, I study his heart-shaped face. Another macaque is facedown in the onsen, sipping water.
In an attempt to capture the scene, I crouch with my camera in hand. Then, suddenly, a blur of fur and pink hands reaching. I fall backward, and the human crowd takes a collective step back from the flying monkey that almost landed on my back. Then the onlookers begin to laugh.
I’m poised, ready to shoot during my last scheduled lesson. But I’m not looking at the target as I’m supposed to. I’m looking at Miyasaka. “Why?” he says. “No one is going to help you! I cannot know what is in your mind. Only you!”
That’s what worries me.
“Make the target, don’t make the target. It doesn’t matter,” Miyasaka says. “Action is the same.” I nod and go through my forms again. When I release, my arrow comes so close to the target that the ping of the string is followed by a hollow knocking. I’ve grazed the mato’s wooden rim.
Miyasaka’s tone softens. “I’m sorry I teach you so strongly,” he says. “I do this because I know you can do well. You have problems, but you have the ability to clear them. I know, because you accept everything. I’ve been watching you. You are better than some Japanese students. How, I do not know. I thought you would hit the target. Lessons, everything too compressed.”
I wasn’t expecting this apology, folded into a compliment.
We had not talked about the fact that when I asked him to introduce kyudo in just a handful of days, I was making an impossible request.
“Too little time,” Miyasaka says. “I beg of you, stay one more day.”
The next morning, Miyasaka and I take our positions. His sweeping hand instructs me to pick up arrows. I play my forms out in my mind before I take a step. If I lead with my left, it’ll all fall into place.
My projectiles hit sand, nearer and nearer the target. Until — thwack — I pierce paper. The target is so far away I’d need binoculars to see exactly where my arrow rests.
I’ve achieved an obvious goal. But my release felt no more important than my stance, this arrow no more special than the one sent before it. I arrived in Japan hoping to understand why hitting a target isn’t the most important part of this tradition. Now, I know the closest I’ll come is the realization that it doesn’t matter to me whether I hit it.
From Miyasaka’s dojo, it takes a handful of trains to reach Tokyo’s Meiji Shrine. As soon as I enter the grounds, a jungle crow swoops so closely that I can hear the thwa, thwa of its wings. Together, the bird and I move toward the planned location of a Momote-shiki Shinto ceremony. When I step from pebbled path to soft earth, I notice that the crow has dropped a feather.
It marks the field where ceremonial archers will enter.
We’re surrounded by a 69-hectare, human-designed forest. It’s composed of diverse tree species that were sent from all over Japan to honour the spirits of Emperor Meiji and his wife in the early 1900s.
Today, traditional culture is on display as part of the shrine’s annual fall festivities.
The ceremony is being overseen by the Ogasawara-ryu school of archery. Its headmaster, Kiyotada Ogasawara, is in attendance to witness the manifestation of lessons whispered by his grandfather, great-grandfather, great-greatgrandfather — on and on for more than 850 unbroken years.
Despite kyudo’s patriarchal origins, roughly half the archers participating are women. Through the Way of the Bow, they’re claiming their cultural ancestry.
When the event’s last arrow has been sent, I head out for a mounted archery, or yabusame, demonstration that’s scheduled elsewhere on the grounds.
There, masters on galloping horses will shatter clay targets that discharge confetti.