One of the questions I had in relation to Japanese archery(kyudo) technique was its particularly long draw lenth and the position of drawing hand. To elaborate further, I have posted a picture of Jaap koppedrayer drawing a yumi.
When fully drawn, the arrow is almost level to his mustache, and the angle between the forearm and upper arm is considerable, at least when compared to Korean archery.
Although I must admit that I have no experience in drawing yumi, but I doubt whether the same technique could be applied without alteration when drawing much heavier war bows designed to pierce heavy armour.
The fact that most kyudo archers rarely use bows above 40~45lbs seems related to this reason, although I maybe drawing hasty conclusion.
Well, the question is : Were there considerable gap between the draw length(and the length of arrows) of modern target yumi and 'war yumi' which might have been considerably heavier?
The only example I could get was the set of 18~19th century Japanese war arrows in Grayson's book 'Traditional archery from six continents', which were 88cm long in average.
The second question is about the post-release state of yumi,
shown at picture below
As one can see, after the release the bow rotates in the archer's bow-hand so that the back of the bow is facing the archer.
Was this done intentionally solely by the archer?
Or was it partly due to the 'kick' of the yumi?
