My recent coverage of the traditional Japanese Archery event described last week in "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer’s Shot" has so far covered mostly the guys (such as with the previous post, "More Badass Japanese Archery"), but there were about as many gals as guys.

Most of the time I was at the event was while the guys were shooting, so when I was out and about in the greater temple area, the women were in preparation mode. They were plentiful and very, very colorful.

The guy's wardrobe was pretty standard across the 1,000 who participated, and was [...]

During the Japanese-Archery event last week that I've been posting about, after the 2,000+ young adults did their thing, a few dozen instructors also got to shoot. I don't know how they were chosen to participate... perhaps it's only the instructors of the kids who hit the target?

Anyway, as last week's "Total Discipline: Anatomy of a Japanese Archer's Shot" describes, the goal is not simply to hit the target, but in mental and physical perfection with each step, akin to how the whole tea-ceremony thing not really being about having something to drink.

So, while on the shooting [...]

Continuing with the rite-of-passage Japanese-archery event I've been posting about (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) , after being driven out by the oppressive crowds at the shooting range, I spent some time with the more-manageable crowds in the greater temple compound.

I took the three shots above before having ventured into the scrum at the shooting range, but after coming out I broke out the Nikkor 300mm f/2 lens for some experimentation. (With its all-manual 7kg ultra-thin depth-of-field, any use on my part is "experimentation".)

The entire eastern side of the temple property is a 500-foot-long covered-and-columned walkway in brilliant vermilion, so it [...]

In my post yesterday about Japanese archery, I concentrated on the short moment each of the 2,000+ archers got during Sunday's day-long event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple. Except in the world of calm and concentration that they brought with them for that moment on the shooting platform, the event was an absolute madhouse, with way too many people packed into way too small an area, funneled through an even thinner bottleneck entrance path connecting the archery area with the main temple grounds.

It was absolutely ridiculous, and at one point early on I felt so bad for friends [...]

As I mentioned in yesterday's "Traditional Archery Like a Boss" post, I made my first visit to the annual tooshiya archery event (第62回 三十三間堂大的全国大会) at the Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto, a half-hour walk from my place.

Japanese archery, kyuudou, is a discipline -- neither purely sport nor art -- comparable in one sense to karate or tea ceremony in that the result is not nearly as important as the perfection in the steps taken toward the result. Yesterday's event was my first introduction to it (the only other archery I've seen in Japan is the yabusame mounted archery event I [...]