A tradition named for a half-historical archer
Heki-ryū (日置流) is a family of classical Japanese archery traditions (kyūjutsu) that trace their name to Heki Danjō Masatsugu, an archer conventionally placed in the fifteenth century. The historical record for Heki Danjō himself is thin, and scholars have long debated whether he was a single identifiable figure or a name attached to an emerging school of foot archery. What is not in doubt is that from the late medieval period a distinct approach to shooting the Japanese longbow on foot, as opposed to the older courtly and mounted forms, came to be associated with his name and spread widely among warriors.
Foot archery for the battlefield
Where the earlier Ogasawara tradition emphasised ceremony, etiquette and mounted archery, the Heki lines concentrated on hosha, or foot archery, as a practical military skill. The tradition set out teachings on posture, the draw and the release for a shooter standing on the ground, together with detailed instruction on distance, trajectory and the massed shooting of foot soldiers. This practical emphasis is one reason the Heki approach became influential during the warring-states centuries, when large numbers of ordinary infantry, rather than a mounted warrior elite, carried the bow.
A practical school of the bow whose founding name is remembered more clearly than the man behind it.
A tradition of branches
Rather than a single unbroken school, Heki-ryū is better understood as a root from which many branches (ha) grew, among them lines such as the Chikurin-ha, the Insai-ha and the Sekka-ha, each tracing itself to a particular teacher and each with its own emphases. This branching makes a tidy single genealogy impossible, and the relationships between the branches are themselves a matter of scholarly discussion rather than settled fact. The name Heki-ryū therefore covers a spread of related traditions more than one fixed curriculum.
What survives today
Heki-ryū teachings did not vanish with the end of the samurai class. Elements of the tradition were carried into the modern practice of kyūdō, the way of the bow, and several branches continue to be transmitted as distinct classical lines. Modern Japanese archery federations preserve forms descended in part from Heki lineages alongside the ceremonial Ogasawara style, so that a contemporary kyūdō practitioner may meet the tradition's influence without practising a self-contained Heki-ryū as such.
How much is certain
The safest summary is that Heki-ryū names a real and influential current in the history of Japanese archery whose founding figure is only partly documented. Ryūpedia treats the fifteenth-century attribution to Heki Danjō Masatsugu as tradition rather than established biography, while treating the later, better-recorded branches and their influence on modern kyūdō as history.