If you do anything for Halloween this weekend, chances are pretty good you might see a child (or an adult) trick-or-treating (or partying) dressed as a ninja. Maybe itâll be a generic ninja, or maybe a specific one, like a Naruto character or a Ninja Turtle.
Today, ninjas are all around us. Theyâre in our movies and comics and video games; theyâre even in our everyday language (âI canât believe you ninjaâd that in there at the last second!â âCome join our team of elite code ninjas!â). Far from their origins in medieval Japan, ninjas are now arguably that countryâs most famous warrior type. We talk about pirates versus ninjas, after all, not pirates versus samurai.
Thereâs a huge divergence between historical ninja and the fantasy ninjas of popular culture. For example, everyone knows that ninjas were warriors who stuck to the shadows and never revealed their secretsâ yet watch some anime or play a video game and youâre likely to see ninjas portrayed as the flashiest, most conspicuous characters around.
Like a lot of well-known fantasy archetypes, the ninja have a real history, but aside from some basic core attributes, writers and artists around the world feel free to interpret the word however they want.
The two strains of ninjaâârealâ ninja versus pop-culture ninjasâarenât as separate as you might assume. In fact, the tension between the two is one of the things I love most about them. Ninjas as we know them today are a complex mixture of historical inspiration and modern imagination, defined by the intersection of two seemingly contradictory identities.
The true story of the ninja is fascinating. The people known today as ninja (they pronounced it âshinobiâ then) rose out of small villages in the Iga and KĹga regions of Japan. By necessity, they became experts in navigating and utilizing the resources of the dense mountain forests around them. Because of their relative isolation, they served no lord and ruled themselves through a council of village chiefs. In the Warring States period (c. 1467 â c. 1603), people from these areas frequently found work as spies and agents of espionage, work that made good use of their skills in navigation, observation, and escape.
The villages of Iga and KĹga were eventually attacked by one of the greatest warlords of the era, Oda Nobunaga (an event that forms the loose inspiration for, among many other things, the underrated Neo Geo fighting game Ninja Masterâs[sic], by World Heroes developer ADK).
The villages banded together and fought the invading armies with guerilla techniquesâtechniques enabled by their superior knowledge and mastery of the terrain. Thatâs pretty much textbook ninja action, right there.
By the end of the Warring States period, the ninja were enfranchised and integrated into the governmentâs systems of power. Their most famous leader, Hattori HanzĹ, received an official salary equivalent to millions of dollars today. He became so much a part of the establishment that they named a gate in the Shogunâs palace after him, and today thereâs a train line named after that gate: Tokyoâs HanzĹmon Line
Serious researchers and students of ninja history and practice often take pains to remind us that the real-life ninjas they study were decidedly not cartoon characters. The real story of the ninja, they often say, is better than anything thatâs been made up about them. Thatâs true in some sense: the history of the ninja is definitely worth understanding. It weaves together many threads of Japanâs culture, its philosophy, and even its spirituality.
But I have to admit: I love the goofy pop-culture version of ninjas, too.
A couple hundred years after the people of Iga and KĹga took on Oda Nobunaga, the ninja had become mostly obsolete. It was a time of peace, and nobody ordered many spy missions or assassinations anymore. This was when fanciful illustrations of black-clad ninja began to show up in woodblock prints by artists like Hokusai and others.
Then, in the 1950s, a popular light novel called The Kouga Ninja Scrolls pushed the ninja far into the realm of fantasy. It was about star-crossed lovers who came from rival ninja clans. Each warrior of each clan had their own weird superhuman techniques: one of them could slice through his enemies with magic strands of womenâs hair, one of them could breathe poison from her mouth, and so on. It was sort of like the X-Menâeveryone had their specific power, they all had tangled histories with each other, and the outside world feared and hated them.
Ninjas continued their pop-cultural ascent in the west thanks in part to Ian Flemingâs James Bond novel You Only Live Twice, though it was probably the 1967 movie adaptation that had the greatest impact. It featured âJapanese secret service ninjas,âhilariously shown training âin secretâ in broad daylight on the lawn in front of Himeji Castle, one the countryâs biggest tourist sites.
By the 80s and 90s, ninjas were more or less loosely understood as the product of a school of martial arts you could take called ninjutsu (ânin techniquesâ). American-made stories featuring ninjas like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 3 Ninjas, Surf Ninjas, Beverly Hills Ninja, Mortal Kombat, and so on contributed to the ninjaâs rise to fame, even if the portrayals were not always very⌠elegant, shall we say.
Letâs pause for a moment to meditate on a particularly fine example of ninja cinema. This is a compilation of scenes from the 1987 Hong Kong film The Ninja Showdown:
(Man, where do I start with this thing? The way they talk? The way they run? The fact that theyâre all white? The headbands that literally just say âNinjaâ on them? The part where they throw actual frisbees at each other? The part where the dude just stops and shouts âNiiiiiinjaaaaaa!â at the sky?)
The Ninja Showdown may be the epitome of silliness, but it can be difficult to make a non-campy ninja movie. A lot of the actions we equate with ninjas are a stoneâs throw from physical comedyâwe visualize fanatical acrobats vanishing into shrubberies, sticking to ceilings, willingly swimming through sewers. Thereâs something darkly amusing about fatal surprise, too: if youâve ever played the original PlayStation ninja classic Tenchu, youâll no doubt remember the hapless samurai who good-naturedly intones, âNice night!â just before emitting a clipped gurgle as you slit his throat from behind. Perhaps itâs best to accept that thereâs something inevitably camp about pop culture ninjas (as there is with all of the ninjaâs Halloween costume kin: vampires, zombies, etc.).
Today, comic book-style, super-powered ninjas are the norm. If you play video games, youâve no doubt seen them all over the place: thereâs Hayabusa from Ninja Gaiden and Raiden from Metal Gear, both of whom can slice through tanks and helicopters with their swords.
There are also plenty of knock-off versions of those charactersâwho remembers Ken Ogawa from forgotten 2009 Xbox 360 exclusive Ninja Blade? I do. Look at this poor guy:
Then there are the âfan favoriteâ lady ninjas (sometimes called âkunoichiâ) like Dead or Aliveâs Kasumi and her half-sister Ayane, or King of Fightersâ Mai Shiranui. Why are the costume designs for female ninja often so⌠fanservicey? A lot of creators seem to feel that female ninja are okay to treat as sex objects. Thatâs not something that was invented solely in the modern eraâserious ninja tomes almost always do a little nodding and winking about the role women could play in spying by mentioning that seduction and âfeminine wilesâ are perfectly effective espionage techniques.
Of course, in medieval Japan, it was a given that anyone important enough to be targeted for assassination or interrogation was most likely a man, and sure, maybe this approach worked sometimes. Iâm pretty certain the ninja women of 15th century Japan didnât dress anything like this, however:
Sometimes ninja facts and ninja fiction run together in confusing ways. For example, the 100% serious 1984 book Ninpo Ninjutsu: The Complete History And Training Guide says one ninja technique involves telling time by studying the dilated eyes of a cat:
âThe ninja, however, can take advantage of a catâs eyesight,â the author writes. âBy recognizing when changes occur in a catâs eyes, a ninja can use the deviation in the size of the retina to tell time.â
This brings up so many questions for me. Will a cat just magically show up when you need to tell the time? If youâre sneaking around, how do you get the cat to look at you so you can see its eyes? Is looking at a cat easier, somehow, than looking up at the moon or the sun? What if itâs dark or the cat is far away? What if the cat has just been inside a building? And even if this technique does work, why is it important enough to mention now, where the modern ninja on a mission is more likely to have a Casio digital watch than an easily accessible cat?
The whole cat-eye-clock thing is just one of the many strange nuggets I come across anytime I start looking into âauthenticâ ninja materials. Is it real? Do the people writing these books really think ninjas found this stuff handy? Will tricks like these really work in the field? The lineage of todayâs teachers of ninjutsu are difficult to verify because the ninja (for good reasons) kept few records. You can find a whole lot of controversy and accusations about the provenance of many current ninjutsu schools, if you want to go looking.
The two strands of the ninjaâfactual and fictionalâarenât as separate as they might seem at first. Thatâs actually the best thing about them: almost all ninja characters and stories build upon the history and lore that came before them. When you watch Sonny Chiba play Hattori HanzĹ in Kill Bill, youâre watching the director making an homage to previous film portrayals of HanzĹ⌠which themselves were based on popular historical fiction⌠which themselves fancifully reinterpreted the real historical figure.
Every time you experience a ninja story, youâre biting into a metaphorical spanakopita comprised of thousands of filo-dough layers of imagination, abstraction, and (at the very center) a band of historical truth. When I watch, play, or read something with ninjas in it, I can see how the creators have carefully (or carelessly) picked which parts of the ninja myth to continue and which to let go. Their âninjaâ could be a historical Japanese warrior, or a time-bending, tank-slicing superhero. Or maybe just a new startup hire whoâs really good at coding.
Thatâs why I love ninjas, in spite of all the inaccuracies, fantasies, and the inherent goofiness they invariably bring with them. The reality and fantasy of ninjas actually work together and enhance one another. Reality inspires fantasy, and fantasy (sometimes) gets people thinking about reality. Ninjas have survived and thrived in the popular imagination by being highly malleable. They loom large in our awareness but expertly avoid formal definition. Thatâs probably just how a real ninja would want it.
Matthew S. Burns is a writer and game developer in Seattle. Follow him at @mrwasteland and see his other work at Magical Wasteland
Illustration by Sam Woolley.
