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Do As Tokyo Does Bows and Arrows
(Entered Jan. 08, 2009)
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Remember doing archery back in summer camp, or maybe from your school days? They gave you those red plastic bows and cheap arrows and let you fire them into styrofoam targets and for the first time in your young life you felt like a MAN! (or a woman of course if you were a girl, no sexism on this site). Fond memories indeed, and since I remember always being quite good at archery (no modesty on this site either) I've always been keen to do it again, but never seemed to have the time...
Recently though, while having a good discussion about archery with a student of mine, I was sufficently motivated to take up arms once again!
Following the directions of my student, I headed to an archery range in Hikarigaoka Park with Kumi, Jason and Aya. When we got there we were greeted by the friendly staff who got us outfitted with bows, arrows, quivers, arm, chest guards, finger guards and what have you. Renting equipment and shooting time is surprisingly cheap, only about 400 yen per person!
Here's our archery sensei below stringing our bows for us. No cheap little bows here, the ones we used (on the right) were fairly nice compound ones. On the left you can see some some bows used for Japanese traditional archery known as 'kyudo'.

archery sensei

On the range at last! We had to start out on the beginner targets (10 meters) to warm up because we were, well, beginners. However I eventually moved up to the 30 and then 50 meter targets due to managing to get four arrows out of five into the yellow bullseye. I did ok on the 30 meter target but 50 meters proved a little challenging... In other words most of my arrows buried themselves in the dirt.
Jason and I prepare to do damage to some tatami mats.

archery mike and jason

Here's the grouping that allowed me to advance. Not sure what happened with that one arrow in the blue, guess I let my zen-like concentration slip.

archery best grouping

Kumi and Aya did quite well considering they've never done archery before.
Aya looks on as Kumi prepares to hit a mosquito at 10 paces.

archery kumi and aya

This place was full of archery fanatics, all with their own super expensive and fancy bows decked out with futuristic equipment which seemed to do everything for you except pull back the string. Where's the fun in that? Our bows were pretty plain, but having an old-fashioned long bow would have been even better.
As you can see, the 10 meter targets look pretty wimpy when you compare them to the ones on the right of the picture, which were 90 meters. Needless to say, we never got up to that level.

archery collecting arrows

Clear skies, fresh air, friendly people, a bow in one hand an an arrow in the other, what more could one ask for? Will we be back again for more arching? Don't doubt it!

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