Kanjuro Shibata XX


On-yumishi Kanjuro Shibata XX was twentieth in a line of master bowmakers and a kyūdō teacher of the Heki Ryū Bishū Chikurin-ha tradition. Beginning in 1980, Shibata founded over 25 kyūdōjō in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Career

Shibata served as the Bowmaker to the Emperor of Japan from 1959 until 1994, when his adopted son, Nobuhiro, was recognized as the 21st in the Shibata lineage and assumed the duties of Imperial Bowmaker.

Teaching style

In Japan, Shibata became concerned that his students were too fixated on merely hitting the target, and were treating kyūdō as a sport rather than a meditative art. He felt they were becoming too competitive. Shibata thus represents a view of kyūdō different from the All Japanese Kyūdō Federation and Japanese Budō Association. Rather than as a meditative art, ZNKR promotes kyūdō as a traditional budō art combining equally both physical and mental development. These differences have led Shibata to exclude his tradition from the official Japanese budō associations.
In 1980, Shibata accepted an invitation from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche to come to the United States and teach kyūdō, and founded the Ryūkō Kyūdōjō in Boulder, Colorado; it is now called the Zenko Iba.
Shibata did not rank his students, and there was and is no testing or contests within the schools he founded.

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