Awa Kenzō (阿波研造, 1880–1939) of Sendai is the sharpest counterpoint the preservation era offers to committee standardization — and, unlike Kunii, one drawn from archery rather than the sword, which lets this closing section reach across the two arts the book has followed.
From a Heki-ryū line to a religion of shooting
Awa trained in a Heki-ryū line in Sendai〔branch to confirm〕 before turning away from shooting-as-marksmanship toward shooting as spiritual practice. In the 1920s he proclaimed his own way, the Daishadōkyō (大射道教; “the great doctrine of the way of shooting”)〔year to confirm — commonly given as 1927〕 — not a ryūha reform but a quasi-religious discipline built around the single, wholly-attended shot.
The counterpoint to standardization
The book has already followed the Butokukai’s attempt to fix a single teachable kyūdō form — the 1934 Kyūdō Yōsoku and its critics, treated in the Butokukai’s kyūdō standardization. Awa runs the opposite direction in the very same years: where the committees sought a uniform, national shooting method, he drove toward an interior and finally incommunicable one. The two are one historical problem — what to preserve once the martial purpose is gone — answered at opposite poles.
Reception, with a caveat
In the West Awa is known chiefly through his student Eugen Herrigel and Zen in the Art of Archery; that reception is heavily mediated and much criticized, and belongs here as reception-history, not as evidence for what Awa actually taught. A period Japanese notice records the connection at first hand: Shimomura Hiroshi’s Shumi to Seinen (趣味と青年, 1943) recounts that in the spring of 1926 (Taishō 15) Herrigel — a German professor at Tōhoku Imperial University in Sendai — sought out Komachiya Sōzō (小町谷操三) and, wishing to study the bow, asked to be introduced to Awa (Shimomura 1943):
大正十五年の春仙臺で東北大學の先生ドイツ人オイゲン·ヘリゲル君が小町谷操三君をたづねて弓を稽古したいからといふので阿波研造先生に紹介を賴んだ。その打上げから離までの心持ちは阿波研造氏の說くところであり、之を馬術からいへは鞍上人なく鞍下馬なきの境地であり、を看取せられるのである。
In the notice’s own gloss, the state of mind from the raise of the bow through the release is the one Awa expounded — likened, in the idiom of horsemanship, to the boundary where there is “no rider above the saddle and no horse beneath it” (鞍上人なく鞍下馬なき): self and technique dissolved together. The substantive account of what Awa taught must still be built from Japanese material of his own period, of which this is one.
Herrigel wrote Die ritterliche Kunst des Bogenschießens (1936) that later became influential in the west.
