In western archery, the modernization of bow equipment has already progressed considerably, such as the bow made of FRP, synthetic fiber string, sight, stabilizer, clicker, and so on.

Junji Miyata had to develop his own Kyudo equipment, if necessary, in order to compete with the high accuracy of world-class archery players. Finally, Junji Miyata created the prototype FRP bow made by shaving Uchi-Take and To-dake parts from a bamboo bow and attaching FRP to solve the problems of traditional Kyudo equipment for the archery contest, but at first, he made thoroughly research of traditional Kyudo equipment. Then I found to problem of traditional Kyudo equipment as below:

  1. Incompatibility between long shot and hitting accuracy
  2. Durability and Weatherability
  3. Uniformity

Kyudo Equipment researched:

Bow (only bamboo bow at that time):

・Number of bows used: 40

・Bow length: Nami-sun (221 cm) to 6 shaku 6 sun zumari (200 cm)

・ Draw weight: 18 kg to 31 kg

Arrow:

・Bamboo arrows (Ichimonji, Mugi-Tsubu, Chikurin [arrows for Dosya]: made by Sone, Masayasu)

・Aluminum arrow (shaft: made by Easton)

Yugake:

・Kta-Boushi (Hard type)

・Yawaraka-Boushi (Soft type)

String:

・Hemp string

・Synthetic fiber strings

Junji Miyata summarized the report on the results of his original research on Kyudo equipment and shared the information with the participants of the training camp for the World Archery Championships 1967.

I will get into the detail in the next article.