Towada Horse Archery Festival

A while ago I went to this festival with Aaron, Jade, and her oldest daughter Reo. This actually happened back in early April, but again, I fail at updating this in a timely manner. Oh well, I'm here now, so hush, it'll be alright. ^-^

The title of this post is fairly self-explanatory, but let me add a little bit more detail and history to that one sentence description. Towada city is about 45 minutes away by car, and has a long history, as does most of this area actually, for breeding spectacular war horses many hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately, this awesome history has since turned into a more.... epicurean one, as Towada is now renowned in the area for their delicious horse meat. While that is unfortunate, there is still at least one tie to the good old days: The Towada Horse Archery Festival.
At this festival, people from all around Japan come and dress in traditional clothing, and while riding their horse down a straight track (with no hands!), compete by shooting a wooden bow and arrow into three separate targets. This festival dates back from the war horse era, where warriors often engaged in this type of event for fun and training. Nowadays it's been spruced up a bit, with the traditional festival stalls selling food and sweets, and pony rides for the kiddies. The picture above is Reo partaking of that particular service, while the picture below is of her participating in another cool little event: children's horse archery practice. Pity the horses were of the stationary variety, I'm pretty sure she could've handled the moving kind.

The coolest part of the day was definitely the actual horse races though. I couldn't get any clear pictures of them, since they were moving so fast, so I had to resort to taking videos. I apologize for the plentitude of them below, as well as the white noise (it was incredibly windy that day) but I assure you they are quite worth watching. They are all different riders, but the videos only show the third target, since that is where I was standing. Be aware that they already shot at two separate targets before they even got to me. We did other things on this day too, but that is for the next post, as I'm out of space with this one. Without further ado, I present the following videos, in no particular order. Enjoy!