This screen is showing the Dog-chasing Event, an equestrian sport which originated as a form of martial-arts training as early as the thirteenth century. By the early seventeenth century, however, the sport was virtually defunct. After dog-chasing was revived in 1646, the complicated rules of conduct were rigorously codified and illustrated manuals depicting the sport came into circulation. The sport transmogrified into a grand annual affair and became a popualr theme on screens of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The sport was important as target practice and as training in military etiquette. Different schools or familes evolved their own sets of rules. An event in 1489 records the use of more than 150 dogs and three teams of archers, each with twelve riders. The competition went into abrupt decline in the scond half of the sixteenth century as it may have seemed superfluous in an era of violent civil war. There is a long hiatus between the last recorded event in 1576 and the 1646 revival in the Shiba district of Edo (Tokyo) on the order of Shimazu Tadahisa, daimyo of the Satsuma fief.