Inuoumono

---

title: "Inuoumono" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["japanese-archery"] description: "Japanese sport that involved mounted archers shooting at dogs" topic_path: "geography/japan" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuoumono" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Japanese sport that involved mounted archers shooting at dogs ::

::figure[src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Inu_ou_mono_03.gif" caption="''Inuoumono''"] ::

Inuoumono was a Japanese sport that involved mounted archers shooting at dogs. The dogs were released into a circular enclosure approximately 15m across, and mounted archers would fire upon them whilst riding around the perimeter.

Originally intended as a military training exercise, dog-shooting became popular as a sport among the Japanese nobility during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1573). During this time it was briefly banned during the rule of Emperor Go-Daigo (owing to his concern for the dogs); however, this ruling was overturned by the shōgun Ashikaga Takauji at the behest of his archery teacher Ogasawara Sadamune. The influential Ogasawara family were particular adherents of inuoumono; Sadamune's archery treatise Inuoumono mikuanbumi regarded it as fundamental to a warrior's training, and his great-grandson Mochinaga devoted five books to the subject.

The arrows used in dog-shooting were usually rendered non-fatal, by being either padded or blunted. This modification to the original sport was suggested by the Buddhist clergy, as a way of preventing injury to the dogs used.

Inuoumono waned in popularity during the sixteenth century and has been largely extinct as a practice since then. It was eventually banned outright during the reign of Tokugawa Iemochi. Occasional revivals have taken place: there is a record of the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyoshi viewing dog-shooting in 1842, and the sport was performed for Ulysses S. Grant during an official visit to Japan in 1879 (Grant reportedly expressed distaste for the practice). The last recorded instance of dog-shooting took place before the Meiji Emperor in 1881.

References

References

1. (2002). "Japan Encyclopedia". Harvard University Press.
2. Mari Womack. (2003). "Sport As Symbol: Images of the Athlete in Art, Literature and Song". McFarland.
3. Doris G. Bargen. (2006). "Suicidal Honor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Oḡai and Natsume Sos̄eki". University of Hawaii Press.
4. Jeffrey P. Mass. (1 September 2002). "The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century". Stanford University Press.
5. G. Cameron Hurst. "Armed Martial Arts of Japan". Yale University Press.
6. (5 May 2009). "Lords of the samurai: the legacy of a daimyo family". Asian Art Museum--Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture.
7. (1 November 2007). "Traditional Archery from Six Continents: The Charles E. Grayson Collection". University of Missouri Press.
8. (5 August 2008). "Samurai: The Code of the Warrior". Sterling Publishing Company, Inc..
9. (2001). "Japanese Sports: A History". University of Hawaii Press.

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::