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Thread: Group training and the battlefield

  1. #46
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    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

  2. #47
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    Hey Aaron,

    Once I got used to the Mongol pony gait, it actually was a lot of fun. They have fantastic endurance and you can cover a lot of ground on them. Yes, I'd imagine that Mongols had a higher-protein diet than East Asians, certainly -- all that milk and curd and meat. I've met some of their wrestlers.

    Regarding the blanket, I meant in the singular, not plural, but was referring to folding it thick. The blankets I brought back are hefty but I had to fold them to make a good fit for the saddle -- the ponies had really bony withers, and the blanket helped even out the "terrain" from withers to rump. Those of us who still have Western Butts appreciate that.

    Changing horses was the main trick. A really good bio of Genghis Khan I read spends the better part of a chapter describing the logistics. The vastness of the distances covered required it, more than the routes of the US Pony Express. Mongolia sure knocks your eyeballs out for vastness. I was content to cover 20 miles a day on one horse -- a sorry comparison to what the Mongol warriors are said to have covered.

    BTW, I trained my Morgan myself. When she was young, her gaits actually were a lot like those of a Mongol pony. But she's trained for rough trails and terrain, not the steppes. I had to cultivate a smoother gait in her to deal rocky, hilly trails. She's retired now at 28, but was an excellent endurance trail-ridin' horse.
    Cady Goldfield

  3. #48
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    Dr. Friday:

    Thanks again.

    Regarding bows, since I practice kyudo, I have made it a point to familarize myself with the development of the bow in Japan, so what you say is familiar to me and follows what I have read elsewhere.

    What I meant by modern kyudo bows being weaker than their ancient counterparts is that even though the old technology was certainly inferior to the later higo bow, for reasons of efficacy in war, I am assuming that the actual draw weight of the bows must have been greater than that in general use today, not that the older bow technology could produce a stronger bow than the later higo technology.

    Most modern kyudo archers, for reasons of style, the technical considerations of modern kyudo, and the fact that most modern kyudo archers do not train anywhere nearly as strenuously as their earlier counterparts, shoot relatively weak bows in relation to the body strength of the archer. The proper weight is considered to be half of the maximum strength one can draw: that is, if a draw weight of 40 kilos is the outer limit of your strength, the correct bow strength for you is 20 kilos.

    There is no doubt that the higo bow, because of its construction, is capable of greater strength than the maruki, fusedake, sanmaiuchi or shihodake bows. However, even assuming the inferiority of the old technology, I cannot imagine a bow of the strength drawn by modern kyudo archers, which ranges from 18-21 kilos (about 40-46 lbs.) for men, would be able to do much damage even at fairly close range unless, as you say, an unarmored area was struck. I mean, even the modern FEMALE Mongol national champion shoots a 50-60 lb. bow, thus putting Japanese kyudo archers to shame, if strength is a determination of "manhood". I must assume that even though the technology was inferior, the old Japanese archers must have been able to find a piece of wood that would produce a bow of a greater draw weight than a mere 45 lbs. Such a bow is nothing more than a toy, and would certainly have been as good as useless against Mongol bows of upwards of 80-90 lbs. draw weight with a range of upwards of 300 yards.

    In addition to that, the modern kyudo draw is considerably different from how the bows must have been drawn in war. In the modern kyudo draw, the arrow is drawn so it rests against the cheek at roughly the level of the mouth with the elbow of the string hand slightly to the rear of the shoulder joint and the plane of the body. Thus, the string, since it is held in the crotch of the thumb and forefinger, is nearly 6" behind the ear. This is impossible if you are wearing a kabuto since the fukigaeshi will interfere with the string. Pictures of Heki Danjo Masatsugu, considered the "father" of ryuha kyujutsu (some say he was a mythical figure) show him drawing the arrow to the breast, similar to the draw used in continental Europe with the short bow. It is assumed that the military draw was done in this way, or the arrow was drawn to the chin, much like in Western archery. Even the Satsuma Heki Ryu uses a more modern kyudo style draw, and in their demonstrations they wear eboshi as opposed to kabuto, probably to make it possible to draw the bow in that way.

    As you say, the toshiya acted as the motive force for rapid and far-ranging developments in archery equipment and techniques. If you look at the records of the toshiya throughout the Edo period, the rapid increase in the number of arrows shot and the number of arrows to successfully carry the length of the shooting area is incredible. I don't have my books in front of me, but the first archer recorded was only able to get one or two arrows to carry the length of the hall. A little more than a century and a half later (if I have my dates right) Wasa Daihachiro was able to shoot more than 13,000 arrows in a 24 hour period with more than 8,000 of those shots carrying the required distance. The higo bow, special flight arrows with light points, and the shooting glove with a stiff, reinforced thumb and wrist support, are probably more responsible for these advances than anything else. Of course, by that time, schools of archery concentrated on achieving success in the toshiya, which was an artificial situation with a very specific set of conditions, so the technique of toshiya shooting was not the same as battlefield shooting.
    Last edited by Earl Hartman; 30th August 2001 at 19:58.
    Earl Hartman

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