There is an ever growing number of hybrid sports out there such as chess-boxing, cycle ball, foot golf, pickleball and slamball. Some of them sound pretty cool and interesting whilst others just seem totally bizarre and ridiculous. As for a combination of horse riding and archery, that surely can’t be real can it?

Surely such a sport is just the work of fiction!

Well actually it is, and it has a long history dating back to 10th century Japan before becoming more established and famous in the Kamakura Period (1192-1334). Whether yabusame (horseback archery) is actually a sport is debatable as it seems more like a cultural demonstration ritual but lets not let small matters like that get in the way of  promoting this post as a sporting one!

Whilst searching online last year for information on all sports action taking place in Japan I eventually came across what I thought was perhaps the nichest. Sports unique to Japan include sumo, kendo, auto-race, kyudo and yabusame among others. For some reason, I liked the sound of the last one and began to mention it in classes (when discussing popular Japanese sports or whatever) from time to time as a kind of joke to see what students knew about it. The answer was very little really.

Culture Day is a national holiday on November 3rd each year and there were a variety of events and demonstrations taking place at Meiji Jingu Shrine Autumn Grand Festival over a few days including bunraku (traditional Japanese puppet theatre), noh (classical Japanese dance-drama), kyogen (traditional Japanese comic theater), sankyoku (Japanese chamber music), kyudo (archery), obudo (old Japanese martial art), aikido (modern Japanese martial art), momote shiki (Japanese ritual archery) and yabusame (horseback archery) itself. I can’t pretend that I know anything about some of those!

No idea what this sword demonstation was all about!

Meiji Shrine is a vast area and goes much further beyond the well-worn tourist track between Harajuku station and the shrine itself. This event was not at all advertised it seems as my wife searched deeper on the net in Japanese language than I’m able to and still couldn’t find much at all. Even when in the grounds of Meiji Shrine, there was nothing promoting it and no signs pointing people in the right direction. However, when we did eventually find the area hosting it all a sizeable crowd was present with the majority of them from overseas. I really do wonder how they all knew about it!

There were many people sat down at the front who had presumably arrived early enough in the day to claim their spot. Behind them were a few rows of people standing and jostling for position, and I managed to join them for a rather restricted view of the spectacle. After a while, the horses and their samurai-armour wearing riders were paraded along the course which was roughly about 250 metres in length.

Post-event research tells me that yabusame actually featured in ‘The Last Samurai‘ (2003) and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series from 2012 but I cannot recall those particular scenes at all. Watching it in the present day just confirmed to me how arduous this activity is. Individual sports like archery and horse racing are tough enough on their own but combine them and you have something even more difficult.

The yabusame ritual began at 1:30 pm as the five horses and their skilled archers took turns to speed past a crowd of hoisted cameras. It seems the riders control the horse with their knees as they race at high-speed before then firing an arrow at a fairly small target. Three judges were sat very close by in what seemed like a quite dangerous spot. I guess the archers are professionals though and to be trusted with their accuracy. To be fair, the arrows are blunt and round-shaped rather than the much sharper ones in regular archery.

My view wasn’t so great as you can tell by the fairly substandard pictures in this post! Once I’d watched the first two rounds I departed as it was very sunny, I was hungry, my wife was waiting (she’s sadly too short to have been able to see any of the action!) and to be fair I had seen more than enough. I’m not sure how lonnger it went on for but my curiosity had been satisfied, and I can now say that I’ve seen it which is not something many Japanese can even say!

Bonus: Back in the summer I had my first taste of archery down in Yumenoshima Park in Koto-ku. I actually had tickets for the archery in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics but of course the global coronavirus pandemic put paid to that. Whilst this event was far removed the glitz and glamour of the Olympics, it still gave me an idea of what it was like to see it. To be honest, it wasn’t so exciting as without the help of the TV cameras zooming in, it really is difficult to see the arrows and the target so well.

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