Until the adoption of the gun as the main weapon on the battlefield, they made plentiful use of archers (and even after the gun was in use, bow still saw use on the battlefield). Before the gun, the bow was the single most important weapon on the Japanese battlefield. As I and u/ParallelPain noted in https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/autrm4/in_medieval_warfare_whether_european_or_not_what/ most wounds were caused by arrows.

The samurai began with their main battlefield role being as mounted archers. One 9th century samurai, Fun'ya Makio, was

described as a man of "courage and power" and as "a superlative mounted archer," who "did not like reading books but studied the horse and bow."

(Friday, 1996). Note that the martial arts, and warriorhood in general, were called kyūba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow". Many of the great martial feats in the Medieval Japanese epics involve archery. Not only did samurai clans use archers a lot, the archers were often samurai - the bow was a weapon of status.

Reference:

Karl F. Friday, Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan, Stanford University Press, 1996