Last Sunday was the eighteenth annual Tokyo area one near-far target shooting competition.  You get eight arrows at each at a 60m(far) and 28m(near) target.
Having never shot further than 28m before, my fellow archers were a little concerned for my score (read: their safety). Â They kept saying stuff like “Oh, you need to raise the bow more so that your arrow reaches the target. Â Maybe you should raise it extra high just in case.”
It was kind of cool, because the tournament was at the Tokyo Budokan, which is a big complex hosting tons of Japanese martial arts. Â As we waited for the venue to open at 9am, there was apparently also a junior high karate competition. Â Another bonus of using the Budokan was … air conditioning! Â Made the waiting and watching so much more pleasant.
In Japanese martial art-time, everything starts ten minutes earlier than they say it will. Â You might think things start at 9:30, but really…you’ve forgotten to factor in the time it takes to line up before the 9:30 bow-in and announcements. Â After scrambling to get my stuff (bow strung, arrows in the arrow box) in gear a few times, I’d learned to (gasp) be early. Â “Hurry up and wait,” floats through the mind quite often. Â Goodness knows it never actually starts late.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, I hit a record of ZERO arrows out of 16. Â A personal low. Â But I was air conditioned and hadn’t really expected to hit any of my long distance arrows, so I ended in a surprisingly unflustered state of mind. Â The awesome rationalization machine that is my brain even said I did rather decently, considering my arrows were nicely clustering together rather than scattering, like they sometimes do. Â Duplicability is a good thing.
