Kyujutsu (Combat Archery)
弓術The collective name for pre-modern Japanese combat archery. It differs from kyudo in purpose: hitting in battle, not form and inner discipline.
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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 Kyujutsu (Combat Archery)
Kyujutsu is the collective term for pre-modern Japanese combat archery rather than the name of a single school. It arose as the professional training of the military class once the samurai came to power at the end of the Heian period; the bow was then their principal weapon, and the expression kyuba no michi, "the way of the bow and horse", simply meant the warrior trade. The oldest documented tradition is Henmi-ryu, credited to Henmi Kiyomitsu in the twelfth century; from it descend Takeda-ryu and Ogasawara-ryu, both centred on shooting from horseback. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came Heki-ryu, founded by Heki Danjo Masatsugu, which is built on foot archery and on the principle hi-kan-chu, "fly, pierce, hit"; it later split into the Chikurin, Sekka and Insai branches. Technically kyujutsu differs from today's kyudo above all in purpose. Shooting was done for speed, for distance and in armour, often from a horse or from behind cover, and the criterion was penetration of the target. The asymmetric yumi bow stayed the same, but stance, tempo and quiver work followed the battlefield rather than ceremony. The shift to the modern form ran between 1895 and 1933. In 1896 Honda Toshizane merged the war and ceremonial styles into Honda-ryu; from 1919 the word kyudo took hold in clubs, and by 1933 the term kyujutsu had vanished from ordinary use. Today kyujutsu survives inside koryu schools, most visibly in yabusame, shooting from a galloping horse.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.