Subject: ninja spy/assassin

Culture: Iga-Koga Japanese

Setting: Sengoku Jidai, Japan 15-17thc

Event Photos

* Levy 2007 p152-154

"A strong argument can be made that the ninja are more important culturally than historically. While the impact of the ninja in Japanese and world history has been uncertain and arguably minimal, its cultural impact has been significant and global in reach. Indeed, some contend that the ninja is almost entirely a cultural artifact, and that it has no existence outside this realm. [....]

"It is possible to get a flavor of the true cultural impact and meaning of the ninja through tales of those who achieved distinction. The characters ... often straddle the boundary of historical fact and folkloric fiction. Most or all of them may have been historical personages (who probably lived during the Sengoku period -- the heyday of the ninja), but layers of legend, myth, mysticism, and magic have accreted around their exploits. In this sense, they closely resemble parallel characters from Western culture, such as Robin Hood or King Arthur; figures who may have genuine historical foundations, but who are now viewed primarily through the prism of folklore and legend rather than history.

"Whether or not they were true ninja, all reveal shinobi traits or employ shinobi skills or ruses. This has been enough for some writers to claim them as part of the ninja tradition, if indeed there is one."

Primary Sources

* Levy 2007 p174-175

"The Sengoku, or Warring States, period saw the heyday of the historical ninja, but just a few decades later the ninja had become transformed into a cultural, rather than military-political, phenomenon. The ascendancy of the Tokugawa clan ushered in the Edo Period, an era of oppression and authoritarianism. There was military and political stability, but this could not prevent social change, and the dynamic energies of the changing society found expression through culture, and specifically through what came to be known as the ukiyo, or 'floating world.' The floating world was a sort of cultural movement focused on pleasure and entertainment, and both met and created an accelerating demand for cultural content, with an explosion of chronicles, novels, woodblock prints, music, and theater.'

* Levy 2007 p186-188

"The most pressing question for those who study the ninja is why the ninja have such a low profile in pre-Edo Japanese sources. The chronicles are full of references to teisatsu, rappa, and other terms, but they only rarely mention the characters for ninja and shinobi, and, crucially, they tend to do so in an ambiguous fashion. They use the terms fairly generically, in the same way that European chroniclers might have used the words 'spy' or 'assassin,' rather than appearing definitively to refer to a specifically initiated cadre or secret society of specifically constituted ninja. Most of the historical or folkloric characters who today are routinely described as ninja originally had quite different occupations attributed to them. For instance, Hattori Hanzo and Nakagawa Shoshunjin were both referred to as samurai, while Fuma Kotaro and Ishikawa Goemon were said to have been brigands o bandits. Why do ninja, in the modern understanding of the word, seem to be missing from Japanese history?

"Various explanations have been advanced to account for the scarcity of historical reference to the ninja. Some ninjutsu masters point out that the very nature of their craft means that it would have remained hidden and unrecorded. In his book Tiger Scrolls of the Koga Ninja, Jay Sensei explains, 'The laws of the Ninjas [sic] forbade them to tell anyone that they were Ninjas ... Should they break these laws and reveal the Secrets of Ninjutsu, they would be killed by their own group.' Masaaki Hatsumi, perhaps the foremost modern practitioner and promoter of ninjutsu, makes the same point even more succinctly: 'If one did know the truth about ninjutsu, it would no longer be true ninjutsu.'"

Secondary Sources

* Levy 2007 p176-178

"By the early nineteenth century the iconography of the ninja began to evolve into what we know today. The first known image of a classic black-clad ninja is found in an illustrated book of 1802 and shows a ninja climbing across a moat to gain entry to a castle, using a classic ninja grapnel-and-rope device. Subsequently, both assassins and heroes (such as the Forty-Seven Ronin) were depicted in ninja garb. Perhaps the emergence of such depictions was linked to the developing association between the kurogo stage-hands of Kabuki and bunraku theater and the costume of ninja characters in the plays.

"At the same time a parallel strand of ninja iconography was emerging -- the depiction of the ninja as rapists. Several books and woodblock print collections of the period feature ninja raping both willing and unwilling victims, putting their talents of breaking and entering, stealth, and rope-tying to evil use. This link between ninja, eroticism, and sadism persisted well into the twentieth century."

* Turnbull 2017 p5-6

"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 Futarō'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."

Field Notes