In Search of the Niinja (41 page)

. This is Fujibayashi’s way of explaining the secret use of both male and female operatives in the context of ninjutsu.

Kunoichi
is both a skill and a name.
Kunochi no jutsu,
‘the art of the female agent’, consists of placing a
Kunoichi
female agent into an enemy stronghold to work from the inside, normally in tandem with a male shinobi, who will infiltrate at a later date. This was not a glamorous position and would involve sexual exploitation, slavery and possibly death for the female, depending on circumstance. Remembering that Fujibayashi is the author that brought the concept of the
Kunoichi
ninja to the world, it is relevant that he himself denigrates the female role and sees the
Kunoichi
simply as a tool. The following quote is the
Kunoichi
’
s
first appearance in the
Bansenshukai
and in history:

Kunoichi no Jutsu
is to send a shinobi who is represented by one ideogram which consists of three letters combined.
122
When it seems difficult for Tajikara or male ninja to infiltrate, use this art. In general, Kunoichi have a twisted and inferior mind, shallow intelligence and poor speech, so for example [Text deleted with the number ‘two’ left exposed]
123
– you should not use those you cannot follow up.
124
If you have someone you have checked out, make her take a strict oath, educate her thoroughly and specifically about the signals or promises so that you can send her deep into the enemy by taking the appropriate measures. If you make her a servant accompanying someone who is getting embedded with the enemy or anybody like that, [her infiltration] will be successful.

Fujibayashi’s contempt is unsurprising at a time when education of women was rare.

Fujibayashi discusses the tendency for those in power to indulge in sexual adventures, so setting a
Kunoichi
in place to be the target’s
inamorata
is a way of getting an operative on the inside.

Whilst ambiguous, the
Bansenshukai
talks about the horrible plan of including a mock wife and mock child into one’s plans. Often, it was the case that the family of a retainer would be held by the lord as hostages to ensure loyalty, especially from ninja! Many historical references pertaining to the ninja, written by others and the ninja themselves, talk of the need to force a shinobi to leave guarantees of his loyalty. Therefore, Fujibayashi states that a ninja in this situation should prepare a fake wife and child to establish as hostages whilst he is working with the enemy lord in question. Once the rival lord has his trust and believes he has guaranteed the ninja’s loyalty, the shinobi will carry out his true mission and help bring down that lord, at which point the shinobi obviously returns to his real master. What happens to the fake wife and child? The defeated lord is not going to show mercy to the fake family who have obviously lied about their connection to the ninja. The woman and child are put to death; before this, as they have been fed with false information by the original lord who sent them, when they break down and confess they unconsciously work as doomed agents, feeding the enemy with misinformation. Such exploitation of women and children shows the ruthlessness of the times and the inaccuracy of the modern interpretation of the
Kunoichi
as some form of heroine. Were any of the female agents and their children given escape routes? Who are these people and where did they come from? It is doubtful that any family of status would give up their own children for such a ruse, so did they take the fake family from the peasant class or were they taken and trained from youth, or simply slaves? Questions such as these will be hard for any historian to answer due to a lack of records.

In stark contrast, there is a single case of a female ninja agent with the skills of her male counterpart. The
Iga-ryu Kako Ryu Shinobi Hiden
manual talks of the extraordinary case of a female taking over a ninja school or at least holding the knowledge of the school until she could pass it on to a male. In the Matsushiro Domain of Shinshu province at some point in the Edo period, a woman, described as a saint named Umemura Sawano, was given the secrets of the school as she had exceptional skill and no suitable male could be found. She latter passed this skill onto Matsumoto Jirozaemon, who in turn passed it on to Sasaki Yasuke, both of whom were of course male. This shows that whilst it is not impossible to find a female trained in the ninja ways, it was a man’s world and it was very rare.

Notes

122
  This is his reference to the ideogram for female.

123
  This text was purposely blocked out and is considered to be a comment so strong it was removed by a later transcriber.

124
  This text is ambiguous because of the deleted parts.

A
n overlooked aspect of ninjutsu and one of its fundamentals is the art of spying. Within this art, the ninja attempted to understand the human mind and the truth behind illusory social structure. Ethics and the law change through time and across borders. Hitting a child with a cane in 1950s England was a daily occurrence, whilst now such an act would carry a prison sentence, a change put into effect within one generation. There are two worlds that exist at the same time, the unchanging physical world we live in, which includes the generally suppressed emotions of the people who outwardly do what is considered correct – and the world created by our group morality and laws.

The ninja were well aware of this duality and understood how to manipulate it, how to identify and interact with people’s inner desires as opposed to their externally constructed codes of behaviour. The greatest example of this is the
Natori-ryu
concept and skill of
Mumon no Ikkan
or the ‘Gateless Gate’.

The
Mumon no Ikkan
is an annotated thirteenth-century Zen document
125
that is a collection of Zen
Koans
or ‘riddles’ designed to bring an individual closer to enlightenment. It is a staple text in the Zen Buddhism canon. The term ‘Gateless Gate’ is perhaps not as correct as the translation ‘a checkpoint without a barrier’.

From a (simplified) Zen angle, the ‘Gateless Gate’ is an imaginary barrier inside your mind, a grand checkpoint with truth and enlightenment on the far side and normal constructed human existence on the side the average person stands. The checkpoint itself has no barrier and it is possible to walk through it at any time, however to pass through it, a person has to understand the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘intelligence’. Once a person is enlightened and they can see through the illusions of self-identity and the network of the human ethical societal web, the gate, and the concept of the gate, will dissolve and the person will stand in the realm of truth, free of the burden of the ego. The enlightened person does not allow the ebb and flow of the human condition to control his or her thoughts, actions or metal state.

The Gateless Gate
document is a series of ancient riddles that help direct a student of Zen to this position, breaking through the illusions and showing the student the truth behind why humans do what they do, a concept that the ninja Natori Masatake appropriated with the aim of aiding the ninja in his work. Natori places a great deal of trust in the idea
126
of
The Gateless Gate
but with a slight twist on its use. He names the skill of entering a man’s mind after it –
Mumon no Ikkan Shinchi no Ho
.

According to Buddhist thought, humans are made up of seven emotions in different states of balance and a human’s true emotion is hidden by ‘social masking’. Everything that is said by someone is generally a projection of the image they wish the world to see of them, which does not always correspond to their ‘true’ self. An apparently noble and courageous person may be so because they are in fact vain, whereas a quiet and polite person may be repressing anger and hate and the quietness masks the rage inside. In this way a ninja, according to
Natori-ryu
must identify the ‘construct’ and then identify the ‘truth’ of a person’s personality. It would be useless for a ninja to give praise and to highlight the deeds of someone who had the
true
nature of humility, and at the same time it would be wrong for a ninja to ignore a quiet person when deep down inside they wanted respect and recognition. It is in this way that a ninja must break through the
Gateless Gate
, not for self improvement, (whilst that may also be a motivation) but to gain an understanding of the patterns that appear in human behaviour and to manipulate them to gain an advantage. The
Shinobi Hiden
, considered a Sengoku period manual,
127
gives a more direct approach. The author advises causing panic and distress, such as burning down a house, or letting a group of horses escape or even calling out an intruder alarm whilst a ninja is still hidden in a castle. The idea is that in true emergencies, the veil of the ‘constructed’ world falls away, even if for a short time and that a human will revert back to their ‘true’ state until they can regain composure and thus continue to project what they wish people to see. During the hiatus, a ninja can ‘enter’ into their minds and discover the true human behind the veil.

All in all, a ninja was predominantly a spy and his job was to creep into human minds as much as it was to creep into castles, and the idea of the two worlds is fundamental to understanding the art of manipulation in a world of espionage, leaving a ninja standing at the Gateless Gate, one foot in the ‘constructed’ world and one foot in the realm of ‘truth’.

Notes

125
  
The Gateless Gate
is available in multiple editions and translations.

126
  It is beneficial to separate the document, which shows you the way to get through the gate, and the idea of enlightenment itself, both of which are the Gateless Gate.

127
  The earliest surviving copy is a transcription from 1733.

T
here are certain elements of study that the Research Team has unearthed that do not fit with ease into any of the previous categories, yet they are important. Therefore, they have been included here as a kind of concordance of ninjutsu.

Ninja were employed in the 1637 Shimabara Christian rebellion at Hara castle, one of the last major military campaigns before prolonged peace. The rebels – many of them Catholic Christian peasants, some leaderless samurai – held out against the vastly superior numbers of Shogunate forces (some 125,000) for months, before running out of food and gunpowder. After the castle fell, an estimated 35,000 rebels and sympathisers were beheaded and the ban on Christianity already in place was strictly enforced.

Killing people by this means is nothing new to the world of espionage and it is without doubt that the shinobi would have utilised poison. However, poison itself is not mentioned as often as one might expect in the ninja manuals, a reminder that ninja are not, by definition, assassins. Poisons were readily available in medieval Japan and some documents in private collections in Koka talk about their use. Interestingly, some poisons were distributed as powder on the air, showing they had no particular target but rather the death or incapacitation of troops.

The scroll pictured overleaf is dated the first day of the ninth lunar month in the year 1686 and is signed by Tango Izu. It has no title. It is not aimed at the ninja, nor does it mention shinobi. The document is an outline for the regulation of poisons and fake or bogus medicines and is believed to be an attempt at controlling poison and its distribution. If there was a need for a form of regulation of dangerous substances, then poison was widely available and not a hidden weapon of the ninja. A shinobi would use strychnine as a digested poison and various poison gases based on arsenic, white lead and mercury. It is known that some shinobi would have had access to and been proficient at snake handling so they would have had the ability to utilise snake venom, if they so desired.

A scroll describing the use of poison.

The
Ninpo Gyokan
manual, now in a private collection, talks of
Emyousan
or ‘well poisoning’, using a poison based on crushed insects and the puffer-fish. ‘This is a poison to kill a number of people by stealthily putting poison in a well.’

Manuals mention poison muskets, where shots are fired into a castle and a crowd of troops, killing ‘hundreds’. Perhaps this was a form of shaft with a poison package fired from a musket. Lastly, an ointment to stop poison killing a person – presumably an airborne irritant – is red monoxide and asiatic ginseng mixed with oil and applied to the skin.