Sakura is the Japanese word for Cherry Blossom and Yabusame is a type of mounted archery in traditional Japanese archery. An archer on a running horse shoots three special "turnip-headed"arrows successively at three wooden targets. Every spring there is a Sakura Yabusame festival in Towada (about 45 min. from Misawa). In the two years we have lived here we never made it to this festival so I really wanted to go this year. Unfortunately it has been a fairly cold spring and the cherry blossoms were not quite out yet. All the pictures look kind of bland and brown but imagine this crazy warrior woman archery on horseback in a sea of pink blossoms... petals blowing in the breeze and coving the ground almost like snow! It would have been amazing. It was still cool but not quite what I was hoping for.
So like I said earlier each rider gets three shots... there are three targets down this path they ride, after each shot there is someone with an umbrella... a closed umbrella means a miss and an open umbrella means a hit!
I thought this girl was very pretty and she looked so happy and proud to be competing!
After the first few passes I decided I wanted a better view so I climbed a tree! Surprising? No.
Me in my tree
This lady was really good! Bullseye!
After watching out fill of Yabusame we wandered around the rest of the festival... it was pretty small so I am talking like 5 minutes of walking... but the first thing I found was a SAMURAI!!! I called me up to him and but his headdress on me and we did a warrior pose!
Then he decided to cut Derick in half!
We then visited the horses... I think this was Derick's favorite part.
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