Carly Born brings Kyudo to Carleton

If you were on campus in early August 2025, you would have seen people from all over the world, wearing kimonos and walking around Northfield with seven-foot-long Japanese long-bows — because in August 2025, Carleton hosted that year’s International Kyudo Federation American Seminar.

Kyudo is the martial art of Japanese archery. Kyudo seminars are like an academic conference, sports competition, and cultural practice wrapped into one event. They include formal instructions from the sensei, one-on-one mentorship, rank examinations, and opportunities to shoot alongside practitioners of different styles.

Carly Born, American Kyudo Renmei president and academic technologist for digital learning experiences at Carleton, notes that Kyudo is not just about hitting the target — it’s a discipline that demands perfection in every action surrounding it.

“It’s a matter of aesthetically mastering this ritualistic posture,” added Jay McKinney, Kyudo practitioner and associate professor of cognitive science at Carleton, “or it could be vice-versa. You hit the target as a process of posture. In reality, you shouldn’t be focusing on your posture either. You should be standing correctly as a result of good practice. But if you’re focusing on your posture, you’re not shooting the target, which you should be doing. You have to find a way to make a connection between the body and the target. That’s what Kyudo is.”

It’s also a martial art with a formal hierarchy.

“There’s ten [ranks, also called dans],” said Born. “You don’t have to hit the target until the third. If you can get the arrow down the [range] and look like you know what you’re doing with the equipment, you can generally pass the first one. Up until eighth, it gets exponentially more difficult [to promote]. Ninth and tenth are awarded to a handful of people, often posthumously. There’s no living tenth-dan right now. There is at least one living ninth-dan. In addition to the numbered dan ranks, there’s teaching certifications. There are three ranks in that: Renshi, Kyoshi, and Hanshi. I equate them roughly to trainer, instructor, and master. I was the first woman born in the U.S. to get [trainer] rank.”

Kyudo was, like other Japanese martial arts, on the precipice of dying out following World War II. All martial arts were banned by occupying powers, creating a lot of concern about them being lost to history. Several did end up lost, but the five biggest Kyudo schools came together to create a central format to endure.

Bringing Kyudo to Minnesota

Born first encountered the martial art while living in Japan with her husband, John.

“I speak Japanese, but I wanted to be better and get invested in the culture,” she said. “Flower arrangement and calligraphy weren’t working for me. My husband was already doing Kendo, which is Japanese sword fencing. He noticed at the city gym that they also had an archery range, so I said, ‘Okay, fine, you have your Kendo. I’m gonna go do that.’ [Kyudo] is a difficult thing to pick up. The reason why we stuck with it was the community of people in that dojo. They were amazing. We had already been there for almost a full year, and they were the first group of people that treated us like people and not just like foreigners. It was absolutely incredible.”

After their experiences there, the Borns moved to California, where they continued to practice Kyudo with established groups. That wouldn’t last long, though, as both Borns wanted to move to the Midwest. Eventually, Carly Born got a job at Carleton and they moved to Northfield, with the Borns looking to spread the practice of Kyudo in their new home.

“I started on campus first doing demonstrations for the Japanese department,” said Born. She grew interest into a student organization in 2003, then spread participation through community education centers throughout the state until 2007, when Minnesota was granted Renmei, or federation, status. 

Kyudo, Born explained, is regulated by the International Kyudo Federation, which maintains contact with national federations. The United States is broken into smaller state federations, with just over 400 practitioners. All federation levels work together to bring in new participants and organize both exhibition and examination events.

“I have to distribute all of that information and collect all of the applications,” Born said of her work as American Renmei president. “I set deadlines for applications, figure out [funding], and make sure the translations make sense. There’s [an event] happening in Nagoya in February. Who’s eligible, who wants to go? It’s about sending those lists on the right deadlines, making sure everybody here is involved. All of the rules and regulations, none of those had been translated into English [before me], so I did all of the translations for that.”

Born is also involved at the international level in a committee trying to establish full international regulations, a feature lacking in the Japanese rule set. Her participation has even allowed her to meet highly important people such as Shigeo Yamada ’89, Japanese ambassador to the United States.

“I’m good friends with Mariko Kaga, emeritus professor of Japanese,” Born said. “She was a new faculty member when Yamada was a student here. They became close, both being Japanese. She has consistently been in contact with him throughout his political career. In October 2024, Yamada gave a talk at the Weitz Cinema. We got introduced, and I was invited to dinner with him at the president’s house. I invited him to come to our event this past fall, but of course he was way too busy and couldn’t make it.”

He did send a very nice personal letter, though!

2025 American Seminar

After much planning, Born and the Minnesota Kyudo Renmei organized the 2025 Kyudo American Seminar to be hosted at Carleton, where it became the biggest Kyudo event in the Western Hemisphere to date. The seminar included learning experiences for all participants, as well as rank and teaching examinations. The seminar was deeply unique in that it allowed zero- and first-dan participants to learn directly from eighth-dan practitioners, a very rare occurrence.

Born explained that past seminars have been difficult to organize. Kyudo seminars in the U.S. have not been solely for U.S. practitioners; they’re typically the only training opportunity in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, since participants travel with seven-foot-long bows and other equipment, most public transportation has been off the table, so event organizers would have to make several carpool trips to airports. 

“After a past nightmare of an experience, we started working with Northfield Lines,” said Born. “We have this event, and most people are flying in. Can we work [with Northfield Lines] so that they buy tickets on those buses? We collected travel information from all of the participants and gave it to them. They sent everybody the link: ‘Buy your tickets here!’ They worked with us on that and it was incredible.”

“Did you know,” said McKinney, “that if you go to the booking website for the bus service that we used, it still has an option for the Kyudo event on their website right now? They added the option because there were so many people traveling for it.”

Beyond transit, Born also had to work with local businesses to accommodate the event as well, communicating with restaurants to accommodate large groups of people and notifying the city that people might be walking around with massive bows.

Looking back, Born thinks the event was successful and was managed much better than prior events, particularly shouting out people like McKinney, who understands Kyudo rules and etiquette but was not a participant.

“At the time, I was newly hired faculty,” said McKinney. “I knew what a headache it would be to organize something this big. I showed up every day and closed the dojo every day. It was quite the experience. Because of my unique dual roles of Carleton faculty member and junior Kyudo practitioner, I was able to act as a liaison between staff, faculty, visitors, and seminar participants.”

McKinney’s knowledge of both Kyudo etiquette and being a Carleton faculty member certainly aided in one particular moment from the seminar.

“At one point, the athletics department received a palette of supplies at the loading dock at the far end of the gym. On any other day, moving it would have been a simple matter,” McKinney said, “but that’s on the other side of our dojo. Once the dojo is set up, it’s a dojo, it’s no longer a basketball court! You can’t drag a pallet through the dojo. I see [an athletics staff member] walking across the dojo wearing shoes, which means I know that he didn’t get the memo about our use of the space, so I jumped in and offered to move it myself, following the dojo ‘no shoes’ rule. Thinking back to it now, it probably wasn’t the safest solution, but I was able to guarantee that the palette didn’t run over our shooting areas or disrupt our precise ceremonial layout.”

While they didn’t participate this time, McKinney did deeply enjoy the event, particularly talking with some of the participants.

“I did get to hang out with the folks from Ecuador a little bit,” said McKinney. “We got to talk about Kyudo philosophy. We were digging into some of the various metaphysical ideas, the notions of non-dualistic enlightenment, meditative practices, and we really started nerding out about it. Japanese philosophy is not widely studied. It is rare to find folks who research or teach it. Those guys were so much fun.”

One notable outcome from the seminar was Born’s husband passing his examination to be certified to teach. The teaching examination involves two rounds of shooting with an interview separating them.

“He did not think he would pass this exam in his lifetime,” said McKinney. “He was also not healthy at the time. He had just broken his foot several months before, and he had to do an aesthetic walking exercise. You can’t wear a boot for that, it’s an aesthetic practice. There is no practical element to it. You just have to go out there, and if you do it, you do it. What’s interesting about John’s interview versus the other interviewers at the table is that he was laughing, not rigid and terrified. I have no idea what they talked about, but I could tell that he was going to pass.”

What’s next?

McKinney wants to take their experiences with Kyudo into research in their field of cognitive science.

“I’ve got a study, which I’m going to work on with Carly,” said McKinney, “to put Nintendo Wii balance boards on the ground and have people shoot arrows while standing on them so I can see how they wiggle around. We hypothesize some detectable differences between experts and novices, so we’ll see just how much that’s the case. Experts wiggle less, not because they shouldn’t wiggle at all, but they’re wiggling in a more subtle and useful way. This is a counterintuitive part of my research. Our bodies sway and our eyes move in ways that help us perceive and act. Archers wiggle side to side, enabling them to better aim and shoot at faraway targets.”

McKinney will also be offering a new class at Carleton next winter on Japanese philosophy: No Mind, No Life. Drawing from Kyudo and some of the Buddhist and Zen influences on Japanese philosophy, they hope to explore different notions of aesthetics and the mind.

Born will be participating in the 2026 Kyudo seminar, where she will most likely be testing for promotion to sixth-dan.