Kasagake
笠懸Japanese mounted archery focused on technique rather than ceremony. Against yabusame it has freer targets, freer dress and continuous shooting during the ride.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About Kasagake
Kasagake is Japanese mounted archery, and in this catalogue it stands beside yabusame as its technical counterpart. The difference between them lies not in what the rider does but in why he does it: yabusame is a Shinto rite with a prescribed course and prescribed targets, whereas kasagake developed as a game and an exercise — as training in a skill. Everything else follows from that. The targets are not uniform and their types vary; shooting is allowed continuously during the ride rather than only at set points along the course. The dress differs too: the archer wears hitatare, the formal samurai costume with wrapped leggings, but the cuffs are left untied and the arm bands are omitted — a practical adjustment fitting a training exercise rather than a ceremony. Neither founder nor year of origin is recorded here. The word appears in sources as early as the eleventh century, and although tradition credits kasagake to Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147–1199), there is no evidence for it. In the Kamakura period kasagake was one of the "three arts of mounted archery" that made up a samurai's training. After the fall of the Kamakura shogunate the practice all but disappeared, kept alive only by the Ogasawara and Takeda families. It was revived in the Edo period under the patronage of the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune. Both schools maintain it today and perform it at festivals, among them the Kamigamo shrine in Kyoto.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.