In Search of the Niinja (42 page)

A selection of scrolls talk of a pistol triggered from and hidden within the sleeve of a ninja’s jacket. This is done whilst they are using the skill of
Yo-nin
or open disguise, as they would not need to hide a weapon if the ninja themselves were hiding. Further manuals also allude to this weapon with tantalising clues, like ‘the inside of the sleeve weapon’ which can only be presumed to be the same weapon or a variant, such as a form of hand-held flame thrower, hidden in the sleeve of the kimono.

In popular imagery, a ninja leaps out from the darkness, blades flashing in the moonlight as darts of light leave his hands, throwing the legendary
Shuriken
or ‘Ninja Throwing Stars’.
Shuriken
are not ninja weapons, in fact they are used by the samurai and are weapons that belong to many schools of the warrior arts that exist today in Japan. It may surprise many that the
Shuriken
fail to appear in any of the main ninja manuals, the
Bansenshukai
, the
Shinobi Hiden
, the
Gunpo
Jiyoshu
and the
Shoninki
. The
Bansenshukai
is a manual epic in scale and content, and lists even the smallest of points, and most likely encompasses more knowledge that the average ninja had, as its purpose was to bring the fragments of ninjutsu together. Yet the
shuriken
throwing star is not described. The only mention of
shuriken
in any of the manuals is with reference to a throwing torch with a nail attached to the end, so that it will either stick in the ground or into a building: ‘Throw like a
shuriken
.’

The Term ‘
Ryu
’ is often used in the modern martial arts world and a host of modern clubs have adopted the suffix of ‘
Ryu
’, or school, to their name. We often hear of a ‘ninja school’ or
ninja-ryu.
Historically, was there any such thing?
Ryu
or
is often translated as ‘school’, however, it also has connotations of ‘line’ or ‘line of transmission’, the stream of information from one generation to another. The term and the concept of ‘school’ changed over time.

There is not a single ‘pure’ ninja-school that can be traced to the Sengoku period, as we do not find mention of a
ninja-ryu
. Ninja-schools can be defined in two ways. The first is a military school that teaches the arts of war and includes ninjutsu in its curriculum. So it is not wholly a ‘ninja’ school, it is a
Gunpo
or military arts school. The second version would be a school that claimed solely to teach ninjutsu as a subject. Remembering that many ninja scrolls are still to be revealed, there is currently only a very select number of references to a ‘ninja school’ where
only
the arts of ninjutsu are taught. The
Shoninki
states in its opening chapters that other ‘experts in robbery’ have passed on their thieving skills as ‘
Ryugi
’, or schools of the shinobi arts, but that they are only common thieves. The
Bansenshukai
claims that 48 ninja schools were created between Iga and Koka along with the teaching of the eleven greatest ninja infiltrators. Fujibayashi, Natori and Hattori Hanzo never define their own school as ninja or refer to it in any other way than ‘our school’ or ‘
Tou-ryu
’. It appears that most if not all schools focussing primarily on ninjutsu were named after the family that taught them. The official records for the Kishu-Tokugawa family state the family name ‘
Natori-ryu
’, the
Bansenshukai
states that some of its tools are from other families and names the school using a family name.

Enter
Iga-ryu
and
Koka
-
ryu.
These names appear to represent ninja schools in the Edo period. However, the ninjutsu writings of Iga and Koka, such as the
Shinobi Hiden
and the
Bansenshukai,
never refer to such a unified school or even the concept of a defined ninja art. Rather than talk of an
Iga-ryu
, Fujibayashi states that he has collected his information from various schools, hence the translation of
Bansenshukai
– ‘A Myriad of Rivers Collecting into An Ocean’. So the concept of an Iga or Koka school is most likely a later attempt to utilise the fame of the Iga and Koka warriors. Some of the documents that claim
Iga
and
Koka
-
Ryu
are not connected to the ninjutsu of Iga or Koka, and some of them do not even deal with ninjutsu as a subject.

Back in the Sengoku period, when clans were vying for power, the concept of ‘
Ryu
’ was more fluid and was connected to the family teaching the arts, with less distinction between the subjects taught. This means that families of Iga and Koka had their own style of ninjutsu, most likely very similar to all the other families, yet with a focus on practical ability and no interest in what is and is not a ‘ninja-school’. With the coming of peace, boundaries appear to have been set and the fluid transmissions of practical ninja skills start to find structure and dogma under terms such as
Iga-ryu
and
Koka-ryu
, amongst others.

With the rise of the ninja boom in the latter part of the twentieth century, the idea arose that there was a specific form of ‘ninja hand-to-hand combat’, which was taught only to ninja, in secret. This new line of ‘
ninjutsu
’ or ‘
ninpo taijutsu
’
128
has no backing historically or logically and is considered a modern invention.
129

The concept of a martial art solely used by the ninja is illogical, as it would need a unified ninja training system and there was none. It would require the ninja to be outside of samurai culture and not subject to their own family arts. Also, it would have to contain elements that are not a part of recognisable ‘samurai arts’; but we cannot even define ‘samurai arts’ in order to differentiate – the reality of martial arts combat in the Sengoku period is not fully understood. Only a handful of schools from the Sengoku period exist and are now very formalised, clearly the product of the accretion of hundreds of years of dogma and lack of application in warfare. Many believe that the traditional martial arts taught in Japan today are the warring arts of the samurai, but this is not true; most traditional martial arts were born in the Edo period and move away from applicable military skills, arts such as Kendo
.
130

Each clan would teach their own warriors their own family traditions, all the arts needed for war, such as horsemanship, tactics, the use of the sword and spear etc, but also, to a select few, the arts of ninjutsu. Ninjutsu is not therefore a distinct martial arts system.

The practice of these ‘ninja martial arts’ today may very well be highly skilled but it does falsify and distort the history of Japan as year by year, ‘high ranking’ members of these new schools find their way on to the bookshelves or into documentaries or films, as advisers or hosts. Slowly, this misleads historians, including authors with no agenda. The well known academic Turnbull has been influenced by this misinformation in his popular works, and the contamination is starting to reach further. Dr Waterhouse’s article ‘Notes on Kuji’, which is found in Kornicki and McMullen’s book
Religion in Japan
shows such a tendency and was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996. Eventually, the history of the ninja and connected areas of Japanese history may be beyond recall.

This leaves us with the question, what martial arts did the ninja actually use? First, the question is flawed, as it would require that the ninja was a single entity, uniform across Japan, which we know is not true, as whilst ninjutsu does have a recognised curriculum there are multiple variations. Second, the tasks of the ninja do not require him to fight. Ninja manuals often warn ninja
not
to fight. The
Gunpo Jiyoshu
states that a ninja should never enter a fight but should run away; the
Bansenshukai
says if a spear fight is joined, a ninja must get out of the way. A ninja must return with his information undetected – a ninja may kill some of the enemy in a fight, but his information could kill many more.

The
Bansenshukai
does state that as ninja are used as criminal catchers
131
and pursue wanted samurai and targets, they should learn the art of
Kenjutsu
or swordsmanship, or
Iai,
which is the art of quick response (normally with a sword). There is no mention of a secret ‘ninja martial art’. A ninja’s use of a martial art would depend on his upbringing and social situation. If he was of a samurai house, he would learn the martial arts of that house or that family and from those around him, alongside his ninjutsu. An active shinobi in the Sengoku period was most likely a great fighter and a brave character, as his job would take him to the heart of the enemy.

The Okimori version of the
Shinobi Hiden
has a section inserted after the 1730s, nearly 200 years after the document was first written, and this text appears to be an inserted statement by a ninja. He writes in an extremely ‘sloppy’ cursive writing and uses the idiom
, which means ‘mounted warrior to mounted warrior’, which later came to mean fighting. The text is nearly illegible. However, in the Nagata version, in 1843, over 100 years after this paragraph was inserted, the transcriber has the statement as ‘shinobi excel in fighting.’

There are ninja manuals that explain what a shinobi should do in a combat situation. They are specific to circumstances. For example, when chasing down a thief at night, run on his left side and behind the scabbard of his sword, as he has to draw and turn at a difficult angle, or when entering a dark house, go through a door in a certain manner, or have a servant use a torch to illuminate the enemy whilst you use the shadows to fight from. Similar advice appears in samurai literature. These are tricks or ways to gain an advantage, they have no
Kata
specific to the ninja, they do not teach strikes or hits.

In truth, the shinobi were probably ruthless killers and mean fighters, but not with some secret ‘ninja martial art’. The modern art with its hand springs and
shuriken
is simply not linked to the ninja, a shinobi would use the martial arts of his family and any war tricks he had picked up as a frontline wartime soldier.
132

Ninjutsu is dramatic enough without fabrication. These were warriors of a blood-thirsty age, trained to kill with weapons, trained to scout, clutching hand grenades and rockets and setting landmines and traps, writing secret codes and launching fire arrows, climbing rock faces in the dark and walking amongst the enemy in the day. They are the ninja, they are samurai, and their history is remarkable.

When trying to understand where the idea of a ‘peasant ninja’ originates, we have to look at the social changes in Japan. The idea of samurai as a class has been in existence for over 1000 years, yet it was relatively late on that it became a fully separated and unobtainable position. Families were ruled by the warrior elite, as they were in Europe, and the samurai was at the top of that chain; active service alone could create a samurai from a lower class. The term samurai is vague. He could be land owning or in service or retained by a lord for a short period of time, or be a mercenary. The later in Japanese history you go, the more concrete the status of samurai becomes, with a halt to social mobility as the Edo period takes a hold.

In the early Edo period, which is looking back on the Sengoku period, we see the ninja described as retained warriors and as samurai, a status that does continue into the Edo period. However, the defeat of Iga was a massive turning point. Before the defeat of Iga, the warriors of Iga were known as samurai and were hired as such. The heads of the families in Iga were powers unto themselves with no overlord to answer to, their ‘kingdoms’ uniting at times to fight off invasion. The warriors of Iga were samurai and the famed shinobi who came from there were hired out, retained and employed as samurai. Issues of class start to appear when the families of Iga were displaced from this powerbase in the 1580s. This defeat placed them lower on the social ladder and many of the Iga families lost samurai status. In one generation, we see the highly trained samurai, hired out across Japan, fall in class. The wars end and their skills are no longer at a premium. At the same time there is a halt to any movement between the four major social classes, preventing any promotion to samurai. This means that a 25-year-old Iga warrior of samurai status, trained in ninjutsu in the year 1575, would by the age of 50 be an unwanted but skilled semi-peasant in a time of growing peace.