A bridge between old archery and new
Honda-ryū (本多流) is a school of Japanese archery founded by Honda Toshizane (1836–1917), who taught at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Honda trained in the older warrior archery of the Heki tradition and in the ceremonial style associated with the Ogasawara house, and he is remembered for drawing the two together into a single approach that he taught widely, including to students at what became Tokyo Imperial University.
Honda Toshizane and the modern bow
Honda lived through the collapse of the samurai order, when the martial arts of the warrior class lost their old purpose and had to justify themselves anew as education and self-cultivation. His teaching helped carry practical Japanese archery across that divide into the modern era, and he is often named among the figures most responsible for keeping the shooting of the bow alive as the older schools declined. Because Honda is a securely documented modern figure, his life and role rest on firmer ground than the legendary founders of the medieval archery lines.
Keeping practical archery alive by making it teachable to a world that no longer went to war with the bow.
The Shōkyūkai line
The tradition Honda established is carried today by the Honda-ryū Shōkyūkai (生弓会), the organised body that transmits his approach. Through it, and through the wider world of modern kyūdō, the way of the bow, Honda's joining of military and ceremonial archery continues to be practised. His influence is also felt indirectly wherever twentieth-century Japanese archery drew on both the Heki and Ogasawara currents that he had brought together.
How much is certain
The outline of Honda-ryū is comparatively well documented for a Japanese archery school: a named nineteenth-century founder, a recorded teaching career, and a continuing organisation. What is harder to state precisely is how much of the modern curriculum is Honda's own synthesis and how much is inherited unchanged from the Heki and Ogasawara lines he studied, a question best left to the school's own records and to specialist study.