Ogasawara-ryu
小笠原流A Japanese school of mounted archery, horsemanship and etiquette, documented since the Kamakura period. Besides yabusame it teaches nine ways of bowing.
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About Ogasawara-ryu
Ogasawara-ryū is a Japanese traditional school teaching three fields: horsemanship (bajutsu), archery (kyujutsu) and mounted archery (yabusame). To all three it adds a fourth that sets it apart from every other martial school — etiquette, in Japanese reihō. It was founded by Ogasawara Nagakiyo (1162–1242) in the Kamakura period. The decisive moment is the year 1187: the shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo then dedicated yabusame as a rite to the Tsurugaoka Hachimangū shrine in Kamakura and appointed Nagakiyo to instruct his samurai in archery. The school has no founding charter, so no exact date of origin is recorded here. The teaching of etiquette is not an appendix. It describes nine different ways of performing a bow and reaches as far as how to eat correctly, how to conduct oneself at a marriage, and how to open and close a door. Its logic is the same as the logic of shooting: correct posture arises from order in movement, not from effort. The school's present head sums it up by saying that etiquette is the basis of the yabusame posture, not the other way round. As warrior life receded the practice declined, and mounted archery was revived in 1724 by Ogasawara Heibei Tsuneharu. In the twentieth century, in the 1960s, Tadamune Ogasawara opened the teaching of etiquette to a wider public under the name Ogasawara-ryū reihō — and it is in that form that the school is best known in Japan today.
Similar styles
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