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Thread: Kyudo/Kyujutsu Koryu

  1. #76
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    Sorry, I meant >30 yards.
    Earl Hartman

  2. #77
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    The closest thing we ever got to archer squads were probably the Kentucky Riflemen we used to pick off officers and other high-value targets on the British side. If I recall correctly the Kentucky rifle had an effective range of 100 meters or so, roughly twice that of a Brown Bess. *shrugs* I still think a few good longbowmen would have been more effective. ^_~

  3. #78
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    Those Kentucky long rifles were tres cool. Still, you have to be a very good archer to be consistently accurate at 100 yards. One of the reasons the English longbow was effective against the French cavalry in the Hundred Years War (aside from the fact that it was French cavalry) was its concentrated firepower. The English armies were, essentially, longbowmen supported by mounted and unmounted knights and men-at-arms. When you have thousands of massed longbowmen shooting in volleys from behind a pallisade of sharpened stakes at a close-packed mass of cavalry attacking head on up a hill into the teeth of the barrage, you have a recipe for disaster. How effective individual longbowmen would have been at ranges of >100 yards aiming at individual targets is a good question. But at <50-30 yards (which is what I meant to say upthread; for some reason, I couldn't edit my own post), a squad of good longbowmen must have been better than guys armed with Brown Besses.

    Also,
    Earl Hartman

  4. #79
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    I see your point. The Continental forces would have needed massed longbowmen to have been effective. A unit of 100 couldn't have hurt. Sure would have made things a LOT more interesting and probably would have finished off the American War for Independence a lot sooner. ^_~ God only knows what sort of effect it could have had on the face of European warfare if everyone decided to jack the gun in favor of the bow.

    Regarding the Kentucky Rifle... that this was on fine weapon for it's day. I'm sure more than one British officer had his day ruined while trotting around on his horse issuing orders. Didn't a Kentucky Rifleman take out some British general at some point in the war?

    About editing posts, I know that you have 15 minutes after posting in which to edit your post. You have to contact the moderator after that if you wish to edit something. If you were within' those 15 minutes then I'd chalk it up to the mystical (and frequently annoying) force we know as "the internet." ^_~

  5. #80
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    Ben Franklin did indeed propose longbows. However, the problem would have been finding people qualified to shoot them, as by then, even the Iroquois had largely shifted to firelocks.

    Anyway, some background on military musketry. The Brown Bess, or Tower, musket dates to 1705. It was a .75 caliber flintlock, and the idea was to standardize ammunition issue. Tower muskets remained popular with British generals and politicians for the next 140 years. Reasons included comparatively high rates of fire, relatively low manufacturing costs, and reliability. Yet, as they weighed 14 pounds each, they cannot have been especially beloved by the rank-and-file, especially since the training that soldiers received with the weapons consisted mostly of carrying them about and fixing and unfixing bayonets. Contemporary musketry training was rudimentary at best. Partly this was because military weapons were designed for speed loading rather than accuracy. But it was also because the flash from their pans was so fearsome that soldiers were taught to close their eyes and turn their heads away to prevent eye injuries. For the safety of officers and NCOs, ammunition was only issued after ranks had been formed and the enemy sighted. Viewed this way, close-order drill was actually nothing more than an early form of industrial safety.

    About 1718, the Prussians introduced iron ramrods and funnel-shaped touchholes. These provided the Prussian soldiers a faster and more reliable means of loading flintlocks, and this increased rates of volleyed fire to nearly six shots per minute. Still, using an iron rod and hammer to pound lead balls into a steel tube is a noisy process. So hunters continued wrapping their rounds in greased patches and pounding them home with wooden mallets and ramrods. Which is another reason why European soldiers preferred smoothbore muskets while North American frontiersmen preferred long-barreled rifles. Unfortunately, those rifles were also fragile, meaning that they weren't really suited to handing to privates.

    In 1767, a Prussian study revealed that an infantry battalion could fire five shots in volley per minute, at an average rate of about two rounds per man per minute. While this put as much lead into the air as a modern machine gun, it did not mean that the fusillade hit as much, as during another musketry test conducted in 1813, another Prussian test battalion put just 40% of its shots into a target 6 feet high and 100 feet long at a range of 100 yards.

    This was not just the Prussians, either, as contemporary British tests showed that to hit a target 11’6" high (about 3.5 meters) and 6’ wide (about 1.8 meters) at 200 yards range with a Brown Bess, a shooter had to aim 5-1/2 feet (about 1.75 meters) high. Fired from a rest at 250 yards, 10 shots out of 10 missed. Fired from the same rest at 150 yards, 5 shots out of 10 missed. Effective range against people was less than 40 yards.

    Similarly, the Russians began to make muskets at the Tula Arsenal in 1712. The weapons made at Tula were rifles rather than smoothbore muskets, and they were accurate to about 100 yards. In this case, accuracy meant hitting a target seven feet in diameter most of the time.

    Pennsylvania rifles, on the other hand, could put five bullets into a 2" group at 100 yards, and knock down horses at 400. Pennsylvania rifles also weighed half as much as Tower muskets, and used less lead and powder. But they remained expensive, fragile, and subject to problems with fouling.

    Rifled muskets were introduced to North America about 1709. The early weapons were brought by Swiss and German settlers, and they were more accurage and pleasant to shoot than were Brown Bess (Tower) or Charleville muskets. Pennsylvania Dutch gunsmiths began making these rifles locally around 1725. British settlers and hunters called these new weapons "long rifles" or "Pennsylvania rifles," and buying large numbers of them during the 1750s. Prior to that, most Americans trained with pikes at militia drill, and used snares and traps to do their meat hunting.

    Both Tories and Continentals used long rifles during the American Revolution, as did Kentucky and Tennessee volunteers during the War of 1812. (Indeed, the weapons received the name "Kentucky rifles" following their use by Kentucky volunteers during the Battle of New Orleans.) In Europe, while the Germans raised a few rifle companies, the British did not begin seriously experimenting with them until 1800. Supposedly this was because rifles were slower to reload than muskets. But this wasn’t true, as a good man with a Ferguson rifle could fire four shots a minute while walking or six shots a minute while standing. Furthermore, rifles required no more cleaning than any other firearm. So more likely reasons were that the weapons did not take standard cartridges, of which there were millions in existence, and that their stocks were too fragile to use for butt-stroking.

    One thing to consider is that archers generally require a little space between shooters. Musketeers, on the other hand, stand shoulder-to-shoulder. This may sound silly, but standing shoulder to shoulder presents a solid wall to horses, and horses won't happily charge an unbroken human wall. Watch police horses during riots, and you'll see what I mean. John Keegan discusses this in Face of Battle, I think it is.

    I keep coming back to the smoke and noise, though. Why? Well, in 1780, a Tyrolean clock maker named Bartolomeo Girandoni manufactured some 20-shot air rifles for the Austrians. While they worked well, these technologically advanced .56 caliber weapons were withdrawn from service in 1801 and banned outright in 1802. In theory, this was because the weapons were fragile, but in practice it was more probably because the roar of a flintlock musket was too thrilling to give up for mere range and accuracy. The noise and smoke of firearms has also been suggested as a reason why firearms replaced crossbows during the sixteenth century. As a 14-year old Los Angeles gangster of the 1980s told a reporter about the lure of automatic weapons such as MAC-10s and AK-47s, "Man, them booms made you happy. Boom! Boom!"

  6. #81
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    Default Kyujutsu/Traditional Kyudo questions.

    First off, sorry I'm a bit behind on this one--I caught the train a little late, obviously.

    I would like to get some more info, from anyone who may have some, regarding Chikurin-ha Heki-ryu (or any other trainable Heki-ryu for that matter). Above it is mentioned that "Chikurin-ha is still active in Nagoya and other places." If anyone has any contact info, or a name, it would be greatly appreciated.

    Also, I found some [potentially dubious] information regarding a Heki-ryu ha called Yoshida-ha. Now, I know that the Yoshida family was responsible for carrying on Heki's teaching, but I can find no other info regarding this line of Heki-ryu.

    Finally, and in summation (I suppose), anyone who has ever picked up a book about ancient Japanese warfare in general, or ancient Japanese bow-work in particular, will note that there is a veritable cornucopia of stories telling how insanely adept these archers were at their craft: giving birds a pair of horns in mid-flight, leaving a business card in the eye-socket of an opposing lord's guard at a hundred yards, that sort of thing. I have dabbled a bit in kyudo, and seen a helluva lot of demos, and I have no doubt in the veracity of the skill of anyone of higher level that I have seen. [Insert 'However,' here.] I am a bit reticent to accept that anything any kyudoka I have seen do has any practical connection to the traditional archery of Japan (and rightly so, I'm not arguing that). I am interested in fieldcraft, as well as actual Robin Hood accuracy. I do have full appreciation (for my level of experience) for the deeper spiritual emphasis that is put on modern kyudo, but it just does not interest me exclusively with regards to this art.

    I am fully appreciative of any questions, comments, criticism and advice that anyone in here can supply--and from what I've seen in this place, that should be a pant-load.

    Domo.
    Matthew Snowden
    -The only way to learn is be aware and hold on tight.

  7. #82
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    Hi,

    A quick question. Is there any link between kyudo/kyujutsu and hunting?

    Thanks,
    Jairaj Chetty

  8. #83
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    Default Hunting.

    That's a good question. I would assume 'yes.' But then again, I am under the impression that the Japanese did not eat a whole lot of meat once the Feudal Era began. I'm just going off of Archaeological and some historical info. Bows have been around about as long as fire, and that is also the case for Japan. Unfortunately, given most contexts, it's hard to assertain whether the bow was used for hunting or ceremony or war. The rule of thumb for Archaeology is that if you don't know what it was used for, it was ceremonial.

    So, I would imagine that if anyone was so inclined to actually hunt for some meat, they would've wanted to get the best shot around so as not to waste too much time or energy. It stands to reason that (in later periods) those shooters would be archers (as opposed to regular guys who could shoot a bow if they really needed to). Most of my info comes from primary sources in Archaeology and like second-, third- or fourth-hand sources in history (due to my complete lack of Japanese). The historical stuff gets a bit dicey when it comes to budo (generally speaking), as with most historiographic writing, there is oft times an agenda. And as far as I have ever read, no one writing about kyujutsu or pre-kyujutsu archery has ever broached such a lowly practical subject as meager hunting.

    There are numerous higher-grade types in here who can answer the question far better than I from the bujutsu side, and maybe even the historical side, as well. But a level of nerdy common sense would tell me that a shooter is a shooter, whether it's stationary targets, fleeing game or someone charging you, sword in hand, in armor. I suppose at that point, it would ultimately come down to what the shooters preference was.

    Jeeze that was wordy, sorry. Hope that helped... I would be interested to hear any other answers to this question, too.
    Matthew Snowden
    -The only way to learn is be aware and hold on tight.

  9. #84
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    Default Kyudo/Kyujutsu Koryu

    Hi, all. I wasn't sure where to put this since it seems we do not have a kyudo section. There's a discount book store right by my work and I often see great martial arts titles and sometimes post here about them. Anywho, they have several copies of Kyudo by Feliks Hoff for sale for about $6 American. Not sure if the Hoff book is any good but FWIW.

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  10. #85
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  11. #86
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    Default Kyudo/Kyujutsu Koryu

    What's the difference between kyudo and kyujutsu? Does anyone have any links where I can watch online video clips of kyujutsu? Also, I have heard of a kyudo ryu which has no dans. No exams. Is that approach common? Is there any like that around Tokyo or Saitama? Anyone have any opinions on the matter? To me that souds less ego or competition oriented, which I would reckon may tend to be more in line with "do".
    Thank you
    Justin
    Justin Woodland

  12. #87
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    Dear Mr. Woodland,

    I don't know much about kyudo ryu, but I understand there is a Heki-ryu kyudo branch in Satsuma that teaches the old method of shooting in formation and in full yoroi. I think they require a high dan rank in modern kyudo before allowing entry though. I think a lot of modern kyudoka also learn the various koryu methods. You may want to do a websearch on Takeda-ryu. They teach mounted archery. In many koryu groups, not just kyudo, there is no test for ranks, if any are even given. Many still issue densho. In Jikishinkage-ryu after part of the school is learned the headmaster would just give you a scroll. Yagyu Shinkage-ryu issues no scrolls or ranks at all, you just show up and train.

    Good luck,
    Christopher Covington

    Daito-ryu aikijujutsu
    Kashima Shinden Jikishinkage-ryu heiho

    All views expressed here are my own and don't necessarily represent the views of the arts I practice, the teachers and people I train with or any dojo I train in.

  13. #88
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    Default Kyudo/Kyujutsu Koryu

    Being completely unfamiliar in the practice of Japanese archery, I was wondering if it is also kata based instruction. If so would a ryu have a number of different kata? I understand that there are a number of different ceremonies that are performed at specific times. Would those be the equivalent of kata?

    thanks
    Jeff
    Jeff Brown

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    Beer Embu: Kyodo - Riga Taikai 2009

    YouTube user Aektan has uploaded two archery clips from the Riga Taikai 2009.

    Clip one

    Clip two

    While we are on the subject, are there any ryuha (left) that practices archery in full armour?
    Fredrik Hall
    "To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous." /Confucius

  15. #90
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    Don't know much about Kyujutsu really, but Satsuma Heki Ryu 薩摩日置流 practice in full armour and also do group exercises in formation.

    You can see them here
    Alex Bradshaw

    bradshaw.jp

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