Why did not the Japanese, who were so adept at producing weapons, tools, and artifacts of the highest quality, and are rightly renowned for their skill and ingenuity, never get around to developing a horseshoe? It seems incredible, frankly. Were the Mongol horses shod? If not, why not?
I don't know enough about horse culture worldwide to do more than hazard a guess on this, but I wonder if the practice of shoeing horses was really all that common? If this was a near-universal practice, discovered independently by horse-riding in lots of times and places, then the question of why the Japanese didn't figure out how to shoe horses takes on some significance. But otherwise, the real question is why did Europeans come up with this rather bizarre idea of nailing metal frames on the feet of their mounts?
Don't forget, BTW, that Japan was never much of a horse culture. Horses were used for some transport of goods overland, and for plowing fields, but they weren't used much for riding, outside the military. Unshod horses were probably fully equal to the demands placed on them in all these usages, so there would have been no real need to develop something like a horseshoe.
from your description, it sounds as though Japanese armor for horsemen was not only quite heavy relative to the strength of the horse, but extremely clumsy and poorly designed. Again, perhaps the Japanese, due to the terrain of their country, never felt the need to develop the kind of cavalry tactics in use in other places, or that such tactics would not work. Or, perhaps they just didn't have the one basic tool they needed: good strong horses.
I don't think that oyoroi deserves the label "poorly designed." It was, in fact, an outstanding design for the purpose for which it was intended: archery from horseback. It offered superb protection in this arena--and was steadily improved on over the years. But it also had weaknesses, as does most military technology.
As I noted in my earlier post, political, cultural and geographic factors all played a role in determining the sort of tactics and technology used in early medieval Japanese warfare. They didn't fight like the horsemen of the steppe, but then again, the Japanese never saw this kind of fighting, and many of the peoples who did--such as the European knights or the Chinese--never adopted steppe warrior-style tactics either.
While the Japanese bow may have been inferior in power to the Mongol bow, it sounds from your description that the main reason Japanese horseback archery was conducted from such a close range is that the Japanese horseman was well armored enough that arrows were useless unless they struck an unarmored area. Was this because the bows were too weak or the armor was too good? A symbiotic relationship if there ever was one, it seems to me.
"Symbiotic" may not be quite the right word here, but that seems to have essentially been the situation. Japanese bows were relatively weak, largely because of the materials available for making them, and Japanese armor was designed specifically to protect its wearer from arrows. The combination meant archers had to get very close, and had to target gaps and weak points. This is just another example of the universal dialog that goes on between offensive and defensive technology (and tactics).
I am still interested in finding out more about the raw firepower specs of the Japanese bow. The short distances you mention seem more related to the armor of the warriors involved as opposed to the actual strength of the bows. Just as an aside, I was talking to someone at a kyudo rank test in Japan recently, and he told me that the record for flight shooting in modern Japan is around >300 yards. I don't have any information on medieval Japan, but considering that modern kyudo archers shoot much weaker bows than those used in war, I think that it is reasonable to assume that the medieval archers could probably shoot just as far or farther.
Modern kyudo bows are much more powerful than those available in early medieval Japan. Most of the material I've been able to dig up on Heian and Kamakura era bow construction is relatively vague on the timing of new developments in bow construction and on pull weights, but the standard disclaimer is always that bows were fairly weak--particularly in comparison to their continental counterparts--until the late Kamakura or early Muromachi period. One of the problems historians face in answering this sort of question, it appears, is that few actual bows survive from early times.
The earliest bows, called maruki yumi, were made from natural branches and displayed concentric rings in cross-section. By the early Heian period the standard bow was the ki yumi, made from a single piece of wood, albeit a big one (the rings of the wood show up as curved horizontal stripes, when the bow is viewed in cross-section. Both maruki yumi and ki yumi were straight bows--that is, they have no curve unless strung.
From around the 12th century we start to see references in the sources to a two-layerd, recurved (i.e. curved even when unstrung and bent against the natural curve when stung) composite bow, made by bonding a layer of bamboo to the "front" (i.e. the side opposite the string ) of the bow, and called a fusetake yumi. Fusetake yumi were originally developed by Heian court nobles, for court ceremonial archery; it's not clear if they were ever used by warriors for battlefield work.
At some point during the late Heian or early Kamakura period, warriors developed a three-layered laminated bow--essentially a sandwich of wood between two slats of bamboo--called a sammaiuchi yumi. It's not clear when this first appeared, but the earliest extant examples (on display at the Oyamatsumi Shrine in Ehime) are said to date from the 1330s and 1360s. In any event sammaiuchi yumi are believed to have been the standard bows of
the Muromachi era. By the sengoku period the samurai had added two more slats of bamboo to the wood core (such that the bamboo formed a box around the wood), to produce the shihotake yumi.
The higo yumi of the early modern era and beyond, are a further improvement on these, with a core of 3-5 rectangular slats of bamboo set parallel to the direction of draw, perpendicular bamboo slats laminated to the front and back of the bow, and slats of wood laminated to the side. Higo yumi are quite powerful, but most experts on this say that they were designed more for competition archery (such as the toshiya distance-shooting competitions you mention) than for battlefield usage.
Karl Friday
Dept. of History
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602