Sakamoto Naoko is a member of the Society of Shinto Studies. She was a pupil of Dr. Kaneko Ietaka who was the Grand master of Takeda-ryū, one of Japan’s oldest horseback archery schools. As a practitioner of traditional horseback archery, she performed yabusame before the Queen of the Kingdom of Bahrain in 2002. This performance of yabusame was the first ever in the Middle East. In 2007, she became the first female horseback archer at Kamigamo Jinja. Her current academic research deals with Japanese folklore, with a special focus on rituals concerning horses.