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ORIGINS
Make yourself resolute with the idea that you will win whenever you go on a mission, and you can win even if it is not so realistic.
Ninja instructional poem
JAPAN’S “SHADOW WARRIORS” ROSE TO FAME AT A PARTICULAR time, roughly 1400–1600, in a particular region, and in particular circumstances. But they did not spring into existence fully formed. To find their roots, look far away and long ago, to China, almost eight hundred years earlier.
In the early seventh century, Tang dynasty emperors emerged as rulers of a powerful empire and a great culture. The Japanese, precariously united under their own ambitious emperors, wanted to know its secrets. Court officials, students, teachers, monks, and artists visited, were vastly impressed, and returned with the “new learning,” which was in effect all the main elements of Chinese civilization—Confucianism, medicines, textiles, weaving, dyeing, the five-stringed lute, masks, board games, and whole libraries of books on scripture, history, philosophy, and literature, all in Chinese.
One thing China knew a lot about was war. For centuries, it was armed conflict that divided the nation, yet it was war—and ultimately conquest—that, in 221 BC, brought peace and unity. China’s military wisdom had been summarized some hundred years earlier (or more, no one knows for sure) by the great military theoretician Sun Zi (Sun Tzu in the old Wade-Giles orthography). His Art of War was already one of the great classics. Sun Zi was a professional through and through. He spelled out the “five fundamentals”—politics, weather, terrain, command, and management—and went on to analyze details such as the cost of entertaining envoys and the price of glue. He was not concerned with glory; he was interested in fast and total victory, for as he said, “There has never been a protracted war which benefited a country.” Only by quick victory can more war be avoided. Today’s generals study him. Politicians ignore him at their peril. George Bush might have had second thoughts about invading Iraq, let alone boasting of “mission accomplished,” had he pondered one of Sun Zi’s aphorisms: “To win victory is easy; to preserve its fruits, difficult.” The lessons were clear: Don’t engage unless sure of victory; Avoid risks; Better to overawe your opponent than to fight. But if you have to fight, do it my way! Learn the rules of military leadership, logistics, maneuvering, terrain, and, in particular—he saves this for last—deception.
It is the final chapter that interests us in our pursuit of the ninja’s origins:
All warfare is based on deception. Therefore when capable of attacking, feign incapacity; when active in moving troops, feign inactivity. When near the enemy, make it seem that you are far away; when far away, make it seem that you are near. Hold out baits to lure the enemy. Strike the enemy when he is in disorder. Prepare against the enemy when he is secure at all points. Avoid the enemy for the time being when he is stronger.
Only in this way can you gain the essential—speedy victory.
Of all the weapons vital for a speedy victory, the most vital is information. “The reason a brilliant sovereign and a wise general conquer the enemy . . . is their foreknowledge of the enemy situation. This ‘foreknowledge’ cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor by astrologic calculation. It must be obtained from men,” namely, spies.
There are five types of spies, he says: native, internal, double, doomed, and surviving. In brief, your own people, the enemy’s people, double agents, expendables, and ninja-like spies who can penetrate enemy lines, do their job, and return. All these men are vital for victory. None should be closer to the commander, and none more highly rewarded, and “of all matters none is more confidential than . . . spy operations.” He who is not sage, wise, humane, and just cannot handle them, “and he who is not delicate and subtle cannot get the truth out of them. Delicate, indeed! Truly delicate,” for if plans are divulged prematurely, the agent and all those to whom he spoke must be put to death.
An example of what Sun Zi was talking about occurred when Zheng of Qin, the future first emperor, was halfway through unifying what would in 221 BC become the heart of modern China. The first emperor, brilliant, ambitious, and utterly ruthless, was the target of several assassination attempts. Like many heads of state today, he took care to protect himself at all times. When traveling he was particularly vulnerable, as we know from an archaeological find made near his grave site close to Xian, and also near the tomb’s greatest treasure, the several thousand life-size soldiers that make up the Terra-cotta Army.
In 1980 archaeologists working at the western end of the tomb mound found a pit divided into five sections, in one of which were the remains of a wood-lined container, crushed beneath the fallen earth. Inside lay what have become the crown jewels of the Terra-cotta Army Museum: two four-horse, two-wheeled carriages, in bronze, half life-size, complete with their horses and drivers. The carriages had been smashed into fragments, but after eight years’ work they were restored to full working order, perfect down to every rein and harness and free-spinning axle flag.
One chariot is an outrider, with a driver standing on a canopied platform. The other is the emperor’s. It has a front section for a charioteer and a second, enclosed section for the emperor, with a roof of silk or leather waterproofed with grease. In the windows there is mosquito netting—all this rendered in bronze, of course—and, on the side windows, a little sliding panel so the emperor could see out, get air in, and issue orders without his august person being seen.
But Zheng’s chariot is not exactly a tank. It had to be relatively lightweight for easy movement and was therefore vulnerable to heavy-duty arrows or swords, such as might be carried by would-be assassins. The solution, as Sun Zi knew, was deception, which meant exactly the same solution as adopted by many a head of state today: decoy vehicles. The emperor traveled in any one of several identical carriages. At least one assassination attempt failed because the assailant attacked the wrong carriage. Possibly, another four decoy carriages remain to be found, so that a would-be assassin had only a one-in-five chance of attacking the right carriage.
So to get at Emperor Zheng, a conventional approach would be useless. What was needed, in effect, was a ninja.
In what became one of the best-known incidents in Chinese history, Emperor Zheng conspirators against Zheng employed a proto-ninja for the job. The episode has become a popular subject for film and TV dramatization (most effectively in the 1998 epic The Emperor and the Assassin, directed by Chen Kaige). The source is the grand historian Sima Qian, whose account, written a century after the event but based (he says) on eyewitness accounts, is as vivid as a film synopsis.
One of Emperor Zheng’s generals, Fan Yuqi, defected, and is now under the protection of the prince of Yan, a rival province. Zheng has offered a reward of a city plus 250 kilos of gold for his head. The emperor’s troops are massing on Yan’s border, and the only way to stop Zheng’s meteoric rise is to find an assassin to kill him. A young adventurer named Jing Ke is chosen for the task. He is a man with nerves of steel and high intelligence, who likes “to read books and practice swordsmanship”—in brief, the essence of the true ninja. He refuses to quarrel; if offended, he simply walks away. Jing Ke is too smart to agree at once, but his reluctance is overcome when he is made a minister and given a mansion.
Knowing he has no chance of getting close to Zheng without a good excuse, he approaches the renegade Qin general, Fan, with an extraordinary suggestion: If he could have the general’s own head, he will go to Zheng offering Yan’s surrender, with Fan’s head as a sign of good faith. He will also have a map of Yan territory. These two items will gain him access. Inside the rolled-up map he plans to conceal a poisoned dagger, with which he will stab Zheng. The general finds this an excellent idea—“Day and night I gnash my teeth and eat out my heart trying to think of some plan. Now you have shown me the way!” So saying, he obligingly cuts his own throat.
Head and map gain Jing Ke and an accomplice entry into the court and an audience with the king. At this moment the accomplice has an attack of nerves, leaving Jing Ke to go on alone. Watched by a crowd of courtiers, Jing Ke unrolls his map, seizes the dagger, grabs the king by the sleeve, and strikes. The king leaps back, tearing off his sleeve, and Jing Ke’s lunge misses its mark. Zheng flees with the assassin in pursuit, while the unarmed courtiers stand back, appalled, watching their lord and master dodging around a pillar, trying in vain to untangle his long ceremonial sword from his robes. A doctor has the presence of mind to hit Jing Ke with his medicine bag, which gives the king a moment’s grace.
Ninja: The Word Explained
English-speakers are often puzzled that the word ninja is sometimes rendered shinobi. How can two such different words in English be the same in Japanese? Here’s how:
From the seventh century, Japanese took on Chinese culture as the foundation of their own. This included writing with Chinese signs, despite the fact that there is no connection between the two languages. This script, kanji, is used in combination with two other scripts, both of which are syllabic. The two syllabic scripts are relatively easy to learn, but in practice they are not much use without knowing several hundred kanji signs as well. It’s a struggle and, frankly, for non-Japanese, a nightmare.
The kanji signs have two pronunciations: mock Chinese, which, being more scholarly, has high status, and real Japanese. For example, a “mountain” in Chinese is written
and pronounced
shan, with a macron over the a representing a level tone of voice, as opposed to a rising [á], falling [à] or falling-rising tone, represented with a caron over the
a. In the Japanese version of the Chinese, that becomes
san. But in proper Japanese, “mountain” is
yama. The Japanese use both, with
san as the higher status—hence Fuji-san for their most famous mountain, rather than Fuji-yama, which is favored by foreigners. One sign, two utterly different pronunciations.
The same system applies to the signs and words usually transcribed in English and many other languages as
ninja. In Chinese, the signs
/
ren zhe mean “one who endures or hides.” Japanese uses the same signs. But in the Japanese pronunciation, the term is distorted into
nin sha, usually transliterated as
ninja. In spoken Japanese, the word for “one who endures or hides” is
shinobi mono (“enduring or hiding person”), usually shortened to
shinobi. The “nin” part of
ninja consists of two elements, “blade” (
) placed above “heart” (
) in the wide sense of intelligence, soul, life. By tradition, the two suggest a hidden meaning. Perhaps a ninja is someone who has a sword blade hanging over him, ready to end his life if anything goes wrong; perhaps he is someone who knows how to make his intelligence as sharp as a blade.
Until quite recently, Japanese were happy to use both terms indiscriminately, because they have the same signs and mean the same thing, except that the mock-Chinese version is higher status. Since early contacts between foreigners and Japanese were at a high social level, ninja became the preferred version in both foreign languages and Japan.
Even as Jing Ke comes at him again, the king manages to untangle his sword, draw it, and wound Jing Ke in the leg. Jing Ke hurls the poisoned dagger, misses, and falls back as the king strikes at him, wounding him again. Jing Ke, seeing he has failed, leans against the pillar, then squats down, alternately laughing hysterically and cursing the king. The crowd moves in and finishes him off.
Would it be fair to call Jing Ke a forerunner of the ninjas? Hardly. True, he gained entry to the emperor by means of a trick. But the plot demanded that he operate in public and be prepared to die. Ninjas moved in secret and planned for survival. If there are lessons in this story, they are that rulers should be more careful and that secret agents should up their game. There’s no point in half a ninja.
The incident, along with much of China’s recorded history, became familiar to the Japanese from their embassies. Scholars knew about the first emperor and were familiar with the “Five Classics,” among them Sun Zi’s Art of War, known in Japan as Shonshi, a Japanese version of “Sun Zi.” In theory, therefore, they knew about Sun Zi’s admiration for the dark, covert arts of deception and spying. In addition, a number of wealthy Chinese fled the war-torn mainland in the early Middle Ages (tenth through twelfth centuries), many traveling through the Japanese heartland to the court and some settling along the way, emphasizing to their Japanese hosts the importance of Chinese culture, including the techniques of covert warfare. The famous Takeda family, which rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, owned at least six of the Chinese classics, including those by Sun Zi, Confucius, and Sima Qian (the grand historian w...
