Japanese Sports

2. Martial Techniques

2 Martial Techniques ARCHERY According to the most authoritative Western scholar of Japan’s martial arts, “Archery was the first of the traditional Japanese combat techniques to become modified into a sport form.”1 In part, this is probably because it was easier for archery to make that transition. The bow and arrow was used for hunting as well as combat, and the substitution of inanimate targets for live ones was not a complicated procedure. Millennia before the dawn of history, inhabitants of the Japanese islands hunted with bows and arrows and used these implements as weapons. Like the hunters and warriors of other cultures past and present, they must have challenged one another in tests of skill. Archeologists have found obsidian arrowheads from the Stone Age,2 but the earliest documents relating to archery as a sport date from late in the seventh century a.d. Both the Kojiki and the Nihongi “firmly link archery and its accessories . . . with the deities and their descendants, the rulers of Japan.” The mythical Jimmu, the first of these rulers, was said to possess “heavenly-feathered arrows” as one token of his right to rule. In 682, Emperor Temmu (d. 686) had his courtiers perform a ceremony at the Nagatsuka shrine in which they shot at targets from horseback.3 Although the Japanese gripped the bow in the Mongolian fashion, with the thumb wrapped over the bowstring, they used the long bow derived from Southeast Asia rather than the much shorter Mongol bow. The long bow, which measures over 2 meters, is still used to this day and is still gripped as it was in Heian times, with two-thirds of the bow’s length above the archer’s hand.4 42 Archery, like sumō, became incorporated into the annual calendar of ceremonies performed at the imperial court “designed to preserve harmony between Heaven and Earth and secure the political order.”5 In the Dairishiki (833) and other chronicles of the court for the years 646 to 930, archery matches far outnumbered all other ceremonies.6 Archery was divided into two main types, standing and equestrian, both of which were subdivided into several kinds. Standing archery first appeared as a court ritual in the form of jarai (the shooting ceremony), which was performed in the middle of the first lunar month of the year. Twenty noblemen, including imperial princes, were selected to participate. Another group of archers was selected from the palace guards. On the fifteenth of the month, the two groups practiced separately. Two days later, the archers presented themselves to the emperor at the Burakuin (Court of Abundant Pleasures). Standing on mats made of calfskin, aiming at deerskin targets, the nobles shot first, followed by the guards. A gong rang once to indicate that an arrow had hit the target’s outer ring. The gong rang twice if the arrow lodged in the middle ring, thrice if the innermost ring was struck. Whether or not the concentric rings were the basis for quantified results is uncertain, but equality in the conditions of competition, another characteristic of modern sports, was not present. Members of the imperial family aimed their arrows at a target some 20 percent larger than the one provided for the nobility.7 After an archer had released his arrow, a herald announced the result along with the contestant’s name, rank, and office. Prizes, consisting of bolts of cloth, were given for degrees of accuracy, but the event was not a direct competition producing winners and losers. The archer’s rank influenced the prize he received: the higher his rank, the more lavish his reward, a form of inequality characteristic of many premodern sports.8 Although archery contests of some sort occurred at the palace as early as a.d. 483, the first reference to jarai is from 647. Jarai became an annual ceremony late in the seventh century at approximately the same time that Japan’s first unified state took shape. At jarai, all the top government officials gathered before the emperor and displayed their skill in archery. In the early tenth century, punishments were set for nobles who failed to show up for the ceremony. Participation in the ceremony served a political purpose similar to that of court sumō. Shooting with the long bow symbolized the archers’ inclusion in the state and allegiance to the emperor. In the early years of the ceremony, bankyaku (visitors from areas outside the emerging state) also...