While teaching English in Nagaoka, Japan in the mid-1990s, Carly Born and her husband John happened upon a martial art that would change their lives. While studying kendo at a nearby dojo, John took note of kyudo, an ancient form of archery that was also being taught there. Through ritualized movements, practitioners aim at a target using a seven-foot yumi, an exceptionally long bow that, unlike its western counterpart, is held a third of the way from the bottom instead of the center. Accuracy is not the core goal of kyudo: shin-zen-bi is. If one can reach this deep state of “truth, goodness, and beauty”—a calm, focused union of mind and body—flawless shooting should result.
A Japanese major in college (and fluent in the language today), Born returned to the States in 1999 and eventually settled in Northfield, where she has worked as a Carleton academic technologist since 2001. The first non-Japanese U.S.-born woman to receive the renowned rank of renshi, the first rank in the kyudo teaching certification, Born and her husband opened Minnesota Kyudo Renmei, a nomadic dojo that teaches kyudo in Northfield and the Twin Cities, in 2002. And this fall, for the third time, Born’s personal interests and her Carleton life are intersecting: she’s teaching kyudo as part of religion professor Asuka Sango’s class, Samurai: Ethics of Death and Loyalty, an Academic Civic Engagement course that puts experiential learning front and center during weekly, two-hour sessions in a local gymnasium.
“If you know anything about Japanese culture, there’s ceremony in everything and choreography to everything,” Born says. “We teach the etiquette, methods, and history. There are a lot of customs embedded in these practices, some that many Japanese people don’t even know. So that helps situate students in the context of when the samurai were the leading class.”
Often associated with Japan’s warrior, or samurai, class, kyudo is both a martial art and a ceremonial one. Shooting is broken into eight stages, from establishing solid footing and a proper posture to releasing the arrow and remaining in the form and continuing to embody the same spirit after the shot.
But, Born notes, the practice begins even before that. “When I’m walking into the dojo, I’m calming my mind and getting my breath in time with the movements that I’m performing. And I do my best to ignore everything else around me,” she says. “Some sects of Buddhism use kyudo as a form of meditation. We don’t teach Buddhism. We just teach archery, but it can be a very calming and meditative process.”
