Yumi (Japanese Longbow)

The yumi is the traditional Japanese bow, an unusually tall weapon standing over two meters in height and built with a distinctively asymmetrical shape, its grip set roughly two-thirds of the way up from the lower tip rather than at the center as in most other bow traditions worldwide. The asymmetrical Japanese bow form is attested as early as the third century CE in the Chinese Book of Wei, which describes Japanese archers using wooden bows with short lower limbs and long upper limbs, and the weapon's laminated bamboo-and-wood construction was progressively refined across the Heian and Sengoku periods of Japanese history. The yumi became the principal weapon of the samurai warrior class through Japan's feudal era, with the powerful shigeto yumi variant capable of ranges up to four hundred meters and reliable lethal accuracy at eighty meters, and unlike in much of the rest of the world the bow did not immediately give way to the arriving firearm, continuing to serve as an important battlefield weapon alongside early guns for generations.