Ninja

Unmasking the Myth

Stephen Turnbull

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473850439
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

This history of the ninja uncovers the truth behind the image—from the exploits of medieval ninjas to their modern incarnation as pop culture icons. The ninja is a legendary figure in Japanese military culture, a fighter widely regarded as the world's greatest expert in secret warfare. The word alone conjures the image of a masked assassin dressed in black, capable of extraordinary feats of daring; a mercenary who disposes of enemies by sending sharp iron stars spinning towards them. This is, of course, a popular myth, based on exaggerations and Hollywood movies. But the truth, as Stephen Turnbull explains in Ninja, is even more fascinating. A leading expert on samurai culture, Turnbull presents an authoritative study of ninja history based on original Japanese sources, many of which have never been translated before. These include accounts of castle attacks, assassinations and espionage, as well as the last great ninja manual, which reveals the spiritual and religious ideals that were believed to lie behind the ninja's arts. Turnbull's critical examination of the ninja phenomenon ranges from undercover operations during the age of Japan's civil wars to the modern emergence of the superman ninja as a comic book character. The book concludes with a detailed investigation of the ninja in popular culture.

Chapter 1

The Universal Ninja

The ninja has become a familiar figure in Japanese popular culture as the world’s greatest exponent of undercover warfare. As a masked secret agent dressed all in black he infiltrates castles, gathers vital intelligence and wields a deadly knife in the dark. He possesses almost magical martial powers and is capable of extraordinary feats of daring. The ninja is associated with two specific areas of Japan called Iga and Kōka, from where he sells his services as a mercenary, and when in action his unique abilities include confusing enemies by making mystical hand gestures or by sending sharp iron stars spinning towards them.

This is the exciting image that has been enjoyed in books, films and television series for over half a century. In recent years it has also become an official part of ‘Cool Japan’, an initiative launched in 2010 by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to promote Japan’s creative industries to foreign countries through the use of popular culture, and a great number of people believe, or want to believe, that the ‘cool ninja’ is based on solid historical reality.1 From their point of view the man behind the mask is no more than a lively modern manifestation of an unbroken tradition dating back to a time when specialist ninja warriors really did climb into castles using specialist techniques called ninjutsu.

The topic of ninjutsu, which has a mythology all of its own, will also be covered in this book. It is conventionally understood to mean what the ninja did, although an examination of its historical usage reveals that it once meant sorcery or magic, not techniques subject to human limitations. Those esoteric definitions have long been abandoned by certain individuals nowadays who claim to practise ninjutsu as a martial art in its own right. Just like the ninja themselves, the martial art of ninjutsu is supposed to have its own authentic history, which was miraculously preserved, recorded arcanely in secret scrolls and then passed on to carefully selected modern practitioners who staunchly defend its historical authenticity in a way that is reminiscent of the passions displayed by the members of a religious cult. Yet even the most devoted fans will acknowledge that a certain amount of exaggeration must have taken place to produce the fantasy figure of today and his related behaviour. Human beings, after all, cannot escape from combat by flying backwards on to a roof, so the argument becomes instead one of identifying a genuine continuity with what may have existed in the past. On the opposite side of the debate stand the dogged ninja skeptics, yet even they tend to stop short of declaring that the idea is a total fabrication. The usual approach is simply to accept the ninja and his ninjutsu as genuine historical phenomena that have long been greatly romanticised and highly commercialised.

As this book will show, the romanticisation of the Japanese undercover warrior goes back many centuries, so for readers unfamiliar with Japanese history a short outline may be needed at this stage. Premodern Japan was characterised by sporadic and confusing civil wars in which espionage and undercover warfare inevitably played a role. The conflicts reached a peak between the mid-fifteenth and the early seventeenth century, an era customarily compared to Ancient China’s Warring States Period and therefore given that name: Sengoku Jidai, the Sengoku Period or ‘Age of the Country at War’. To understand why there was such disorder at that time we must look back a few hundred years to the Gempei War of 1180–85, a conflict that had pitted two samurai families against each other in a major war for the first time in Japanese history. The Gempei War led to the reduction of imperial power and the establishment of a permanent form of the once-temporary position of Shogun, who proceeded to rule Japan as a military dictator through and on behalf of the samurai class. The system lasted until 1868, although a severe challenge was made to the Shogun’s authority by the Ōnin War of 1467–77. That tragic conflict began when a succession dispute within the Shogun’s own family led to fighting in Kyoto, then Japan’s capital. Much of Kyoto was devastated, and when the conflict spread to the provinces the Shogun was powerless to stop it. The Ōnin War was the start of the Sengoku Period, and it is during that time that we read of rival daimyō 大名 (local lords, literally ‘big names’) using undercover operations against each other.

The eventual reunification of Japan began with the military genius called Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) during the 1560s. It was completed under his equally talented successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) and consolidated under Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616). The reunification process was largely a military operation that was enforced by land surveys, the transfer of landowners and forcible disarmament. The ultimate result was a shift from the rule by provincial daimyō to a national hegemony where the only daimyō left were the appointees of the national ruler. Following Ieyasu’s triumph at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 the Tokugawa family re-established the Shogunate in 1603 and continued to rule Japan until the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Their era was called the Tokugawa or Edo Period, from the Shogun’s capital of Edo, the city we now know as Tokyo. The civil warfare of the Sengoku Period had been replaced by a long time of peace sustained by severe martial law and supported by an extensive state intelligence network that would also contribute to the concept of a ninja.

The notion of an unbroken continuity between a number of well-recorded secret operations associated with these historical events and the ninja and ninjutsu of today constitutes the essence of the ninja myth, and it goes far beyond the retelling of ancient stories. It is a very complex entity that contains many elements of the classic notion of an invented tradition, a concept from the social sciences that will be discussed in detail later, although the ninja myth appears to differ from the usual model of an invented tradition because of its long history and its dynamic nature.

The building blocks for the ninja myth can easily be traced back to the civil wars of the Sengoku Period, although some enthusiasts will go back even further in time and find links in the mists of imperial antiquity, seizing upon certain historical figures and projecting the idea backwards to credit them with being ninja. The legendary Prince Yamato Takeru resorts to subterfuge on at least one occasion, including dressing up as a woman, making him the forerunner of the ninja in some eyes.2 Kusunoki Masashige (1294–1336), lauded for his devotion to the emperor and the greatest hero in Taihei ki, the chronicle of the Nanbokuchō civil wars of the fourteenth century, supposedly used guerrilla tactics including booby traps and dummy warriors, but one should not claim that these activities prove that Masashige was the founder of a specific ryū 流 (school or tradition) of ninjutsu without much more supporting evidence.3 Even more contrived is the story of the rebellious sorcerer Fujiwara Chikata, who conjured up four devils to overcome an emperor. Chikata’s devils have been identified as ninja by some writers, but this is just a further example of the ‘retrofit’ notion of a ninja.4

It is also important to note at this stage that in addition to misconceptions about who the ninja’s historical antecedents were, there are several misunderstandings about what they did. As the following pages will show, the historical forebears of the ninja were infiltrators and spies, not assassins, and only one pre-modern document lists assassination among their possible roles.5 Nevertheless, many stories of assassination have fed into the ninja myth. For example, there is the exciting account in Taihei ki of the murder of Honma Saburō by the youth Kumawaka, who escaped by climbing up a bamboo trunk (in itself no mean feat) and allowing it to deposit him in a place of safety. It is a good story that may with complete justification be described as a ‘ninja-like assassination’, but the boy was a revengeful opportunist, not a trained infiltrator.6

Misinterpretations like these demonstrate that instead of a smooth continuity between past and present, the ninja myth has suffered breaks in both flow and concept, which have been bridged in retrospect by huge leaps worthy of the most acrobatic ninja from the movies. The evidence for this will be provided from a wide range of historical and literary sources, but the first step will be to tease out the essential features of the archetypal ninja as he is presently understood to provide a baseline for comparison with what may have existed in the past. The second stage of enquiry will be to look at accounts of undercover warfare that were recorded by unbiased eyewitnesses when wars were still taking place. The third stage will be to examine the wide range of written material produced after Japan’s wars had ceased. We will see how during the peaceful Tokugawa Period the earlier descriptions were exaggerated and manipulated within a wide range of literary works to produce what would become the building blocks for the ninja and ninjutsu of today. The book will continue with a detailed examination of how the ninja emerged within pulp fiction and films in post-war Japan and went on to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon. It will conclude with the ninja’s extraordinary new role during the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as a physical and moral exemplar for the nation’s youth.

The benchmark ninja in word and deed

An extremely complex reality lies behind the origins and development of the ninja myth, although its complicated nature is obscured by the remarkably consistent image of a ninja that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s and has persisted to our own day. As noted earlier, this archetypal ninja figure is a secret agent dressed from head to foot in a tight-fitting black costume who deploys a unique armoury of weapons in his superlative practice of ninjutsu. These esoteric techniques include using an unusually straight sword as a climbing device, throwing star-shaped shūriken (the iron ‘ninja stars’ spun from the hand), scattering caltrops and discharging smoke bombs to cover his withdrawal. In this he is sustained by mystical powers acquired by making esoteric hand gestures. The ninja is a key player in Japan’s civil wars who crosses moats, scales walls and climbs into castles to acquire intelligence, to cause havoc among the garrison or to carry out an arson attack. His services are hired from the ninja masters of Iga and Kōka, a tiny area of Japan from where all ninja excellence ultimately derives.

So far, so familiar, but popular culture has also placed him in a particular social environment of impoverished lower-class part-time samurai-farmers, in which he can be either the ‘good guy’ or the ‘bad guy’. The good ninja of the film world is a militarily élite yet socially inferior mercenary who is a member of a hierarchical ninja clan and augments this Confucian notion by a deeply spiritual side that has links to esoteric Buddhism. His clan consists of rugged proletarian warriors who fight oppression, although their rivals may sometimes be another ninja clan who have been seduced into serving a wicked overlord. Those ninja are always the bad guys, and the worst of them all belong to mysterious clandestine organisations which the heroes must overcome. Sometimes the places called Iga and Kōka are transformed from being mere geographical locations into rival clans, schools or even secret societies.

The world of both good and bad ninja can be dark and violent, although the action tends to stay within physical limitations, give or take a few somersaults. The benchmark black-clad ninja is therefore essentially human, so it is not at all difficult to identify parallels between what ninja do in the movies and what certainly went on many centuries ago. Yet fantasy is never far away, because there appears to have long been a tacit understanding that if the benchmark ninja is a creature of the imagination, then the addition of a few superhuman elements will be fully acceptable to one’s readers and viewers. Thus it was that in 1958 Yamada Fūtarō’s influential novel Kōka Ninpōchō created a painstakingly accurate historical environment in which superhuman ninja could transform their hair into porcupine quills and use them as weapons.7

A different development has been to abandon the visual shorthand of the benchmark ninja’s black costume for a punk outfit or a space suit to produce a completely outrageous figure who suffers no restrictions, physical or otherwise. One example is the character called Naruto from the manga series of the same name who dresses in a bright orange jumpsuit. He is referred to as a ninja, but all the old visual clues have disappeared completely. This boundary-free concept may also be encountered in a safer junior version: the kawaii (‘cute’) ninja. The children’s ninja hero is a brave but highly sanitised fantasy warrior who is always the good guy. These cute little ninja are very accomplished at fighting opponents who are as likely to be monsters and wizards as brutal overlords. They use magic as much as martial skills and will readily swap their black costumes for bright colours. Such a character is exemplified by the bespectacled boy hero Nintama Kentarō, who may be encountered alongside the archetypal man in black in studio theme parks and ninja villages, where all the family can dress up in pink or blue ninja outfits and share in the fun.8

The other consistent element of the ninja as he is currently understood lies in the choice of language for his name, which is written using the two kanji (Chinese-derived ideographs) 忍 and 者. There is no problem over the meaning of the second character. Sha (or ja) 者 simply refers to a practitioner of something, as in the word geisha 芸者. The word ninjutsu 忍術 uses a second character 術 meaning techniques, but the first character nin 忍 in both words can have two very different meanings. It is usually taken to mean secrecy, invisibility or concealment, but its primary definition involves the idea of endurance. For example, The New Nelson Japanese–English Character Dictionary gives the primary meaning as ‘bear, endure, put up with’ and the meaning as ‘hiding’ only appears in second place.9 In the original Chinese ren, the Mandarin pronunciation of nin has no association with stealth at all and instead appears in dictionaries as ‘endure; tolerate; put up with’. Examples of its use in modern Mandarin include ‘Don’t l...