Ninja (24 page)

It must have seemed to the ninjas that they would never fight again, until twenty years later, when trouble broke out on the southern island of Ky
u
sh
u
. It stemmed from the persecution of Christians, which came about because over the previous century, Catholic missionaries had won a core of some 300,000 converts, who seemed to challenge the shogun's authority. In 1612 a campaign of persecution started, which reached a peak of ferocity in the 1630s. Tens of thousands of converts recanted, while those who didn't were subjected to tortures that would have delighted a grand inquisitor: a forced recantation might involve being drowned, tossed into a snake pit, sliced with sharpened bamboo, roasted alive, branded, boiled in hot springs, or immersed in icy water. Tens of thousands died and hundreds fled the country (despite a law forbidding flight abroad), leaving a hard core of Christians in Ky
u
sh
u
, most of them in the Amakusa Islands off the west coast. The final straw, literally, was the behavior of a tyrannical local lord, who liked to punish recalcitrant peasants by dressing them in straw capes, such as the locals wore against rain, dowsing them with oil, and setting them on fire. In December 1637, driven beyond endurance by oppression and a harvest failure, peasants and Christians on the mainland rebelled, killing a dozen officials, and attacking several castles before taking ship across the Ariake Bay to the Shimabara Peninsula and rebuilding an abandoned stronghold called Hara. There was nothing sophisticated about their work—no great stone platform, simply earthworks and trenches topped by a scaffold of tree trunks, with planks from their ships as firing platforms and piles of rocks to drop on attackers. But the location was good, with cliffs on one side and a marsh on the other. No one knows how many there were inside—some say twenty thousand, others fifty thousand—but anyway, they included women and children.

Morale was high, because as Christians, they believed they were bound for heaven, not that it would come to that because their leader, appointed as a figurehead by a general, was a charismatic Catholic teenager named Amakusa Shir
o
. The arrival of a redeemer had been much prophesied by Ky
u
sh
u
's put-upon Christians. In the words of a poem written some years before:

A God will come into this world, a boy aged twice times eight.

The youth, endowed by birth with every gift,

Will effortlessly show forth his wondrous power.

Lo, he appeared when needed, a boy of sixteen, able (it was said) to attract birds, like Saint Francis, and to walk on water.

To end the rebellion, the local governor sent a three-thousand-strong force, which endured the humiliation of failing to break in to Hara. The Tokugawa government in Edo sent an army of some fifty thousand, which tried again at the beginning of January 1638, this time using cannon bought from the Dutch, who joined in the bombardment from the sea. Among the government forces was a contingent of K
o
ga ninjas.
²
They surveyed the earth walls, moat, and approach roads, and drew plans that were forwarded to the shogun in Edo, further proof that ninjas were skillful in much more than secret operations. Later that month they launched a raid to seize bags of provisions that were crucial for the defenders.

A week later, the Tokugawa commander, wanting to know the conditions inside the fortress, called for ninja volunteers to break in, warning them that only two or three could expect to survive. Five answered the call, at least two of whom were from families listed as ninjas prior to Ieyasu's invasion in the 1560s and 1570s, further proof that ninja skills were passed down the generations even after the defeat of 1579–81. A contemporary account runs: “We dispersed spies who were prepared to die [or “were a suicide squad,” in an alternative translation] inside Hara castle.”

An assault followed, a special operation intended to spread fear and confusion and gain information. The ninjas, dressed in plain clothes like the defenders, planned to attack at night before the moon rose, which would mean climbing walls that were well lit by flaming torches. With the infiltrators in place, a contingent of gunners fired their arquebuses, at which the defenders, fearing a conventional attack, doused all the torches, leaving the place in starlit darkness. “Then,” the record continues, “we raided at midnight.” Entry was not as tricky as climbing a stone platform, like those typical of many castles, with a broad base sloping up to a vertical top. Earthworks can be climbed in relative silence, with spiked shoes and knives to act as pitons.
³
Still, it was dark enough for one of the ninjas to fall into a pit of some sort. Perhaps it was this that alerted the defenders. Torches were relit, the moon rose, and the ninjas just had time to haul their comrade clear and make their escape, taking a Christian banner with them as a souvenir. As they climbed back down the wall, the moon made them targets for volleys from above, which wounded two of them. They suffered “for forty days,” says the record of the raid, after which (presumably) they recovered.

The siege continued for another three months, by which time the defenders were down to a few bushels of rice and soybeans, with some reduced to eating seaweed, scraped from rocks beneath the cliffs. In mid-April the government forces, now increased to 125,000, at last managed to breach the walls, and the rebellion ended three days later. Many of the defenders committed suicide, hurling their families and themselves into burning buildings, and most of the others—men, women, and children—were slaughtered in one of the greatest massacres in Japanese history. In the words of Ivan Morris in his magisterial analysis,
The Nobility of Failure
: “Vast ditches were filled to overflowing with severed heads, and heads were strewn thickly over the fields, with 10,000 stuck on wooden spikes and 3,000 loaded on to ships for mass burials in Nagasaki.” Among the dead was “the Japanese messiah,” Amakusa, who has since become one of Japan's “heroic failures,” those beloved for their sincerity and bravery who die in a hopeless cause.

That was the end of resistance against Tokugawa rule, the end of all fighting for both the samurai and ninjas, the end of any hopes for Christianity, and the beginning of the two and a half centuries during which Japan became a “closed country.” For the ninjas, it also marked the beginning of a new phase: emergence from the shadows; self-promotion; and the reinterpreting of the past—or, to put it bluntly, of spin, gloss, fantasy, and myth-making.

13

SHADOWS IN RETREAT

Every single thing is decided by your own mind and by the way you think. Never let your guard down nor fail to observe your state of mind.

Ninja instructional poem

SHIMABARA
MARKED
THE
END
OF
THE
NINJAS
'
FIGHTING
ROLE
, but they had already been playing a part in keeping the peace for more than thirty years. Ieyasu owed a debt of thanks to the ninjas of K
o
ga and Iga, who had, under the direction of Hattori Hanz
o
, seen him safely across hostile territory in 1582. As soon as his great castle in Edo was ready for occupation, he took on about a hundred ninjas each from Iga and K
o
ga as bodyguards and guards. Hattori himself was given a residence there, with a salary of eight thousand
koku
(a measure of rice, one
koku
being enough to feed a peasant for a year). A low-level samurai cost about twenty
koku
. Hanz
o
's Gate remains as a reminder of his presence. The ninjas' job was to patrol the buildings and keep the peace by ensuring that no one wore a sword inside the castle. They were expected to be masters of unarmed combat, able to disarm anyone with their bare hands or with a rope.

That wasn't all Ieyasu did for them. He employed other ninjas as spies to keep an eye on lords whose loyalty could be in doubt. In short, they became his secret police. And later in his reign he asked some of his lords to do what they could for the ninjas by employing them.

Now, two hundred ninjas employed as guards, a few dozen others as shogunal spies, and another few dozen employed by other (
daimyos
) was hardly equal to the numbers who had acted as ninjas previously. Most of them returned to their main occupation as farmers and family men, as craftsmen and doctors. But there was no denying that for those still hoping for employment, opportunities all but vanished. With no more battles to fight, no one wanted mercenaries. Peace meant a loss of status and self-image.

One answer was to keep on practicing those skills that had been so useful in the past, and teach them, and make it as clear as possible how important they were for personal development, self-control, and strength of body and character. That was why the ninjas broke with tradition and recorded their secrets.

When I was eleven, I was in a small, private boarding school for boys. That summer, the class was seized by a mania for physical strength. We avidly discussed our merits. We flexed biceps, and wrestled, and wondered how to get strong. Was it an inbred talent? Could it be cultivated? If so, how? One day, in a magazine, I saw a tiny advertisement showing a man stripped to the waist with giant biceps and pecs like beached whales. He made a promise that I too could have a body like his, if I bought his bodybuilding program. It was called Dynamic-Tension. I had no idea what that meant, but suddenly I realized that, if I had the money, I had access to something that would turn me from a weed into an oak. To my classmates, I let slip that I knew the secret of strength. This was an explosive claim. Instantly, I was surrounded. They demanded that I share my knowledge. I was astonished to discover I was in possession of a secret that was, in its way, as strong as my body would become after I had studied, swallowed, injected, or otherwise absorbed Dynamic-Tension. Obviously, the whole point was to keep the secret, or I would end up simply making all the others as strong as me. I refused. They threatened. They said there were ways of making me talk. I said there weren't, which was foolish. They tortured me. They sat on my head, they boxed my ears, they gave me Chinese burns—which for the uninitiated means counter-twisting the flesh on the forearm. I cried but kept silent. In the end they gave up, pretending they didn't care. But they did, and I was able to capitalize on my knowledge by telling two allies, swearing them to secrecy. For a brief, sweet while, I had a cocoon of friendship and security. It didn't last, because soon afterward, we forgot about strength and became obsessed with the little colored glass balls known as marbles. It was a lesson, though. Strength would have been good; but almost as good was the secret of how to acquire it. A secret that others want confers power.

The ninjas had status partly because they were good at what they did, but also because they kept it secret, until the late sixteenth century. This makes it hard to say anything definitive about pre-1600 ninja fighting skills, the body of knowledge and activities wrapped up in the term
ninjutsu
. To publicize their skills would have undermined the very purpose of their existence. Masters took care to pass on their skills to one chosen heir. If you were not on an inside track, you had to make up your own set of techniques. So there arose a general body of skills, and many subgroups, schools or
ryu
, perhaps as many as eighty, developed all over Japan, though focused on the prime areas of K
o
ga and Iga, and all of them secret. Occasionally, a master or scholar recorded the details of a
ryu
, to be kept safely under lock and key. But the country was at war, and writings were hard to preserve. So, little documentation survives from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

That takes us up to 1638, at which point conflict came to an end permanently, and the ninjas, like the samurai, lost the fundamental point of their existence, which was war. They might then have vanished. But there were traditions, and some had a job of a sort to do. What they could not do was go out and infiltrate castles, spy, and assassinate. How in this changed world could they preserve themselves? One answer was that they could retain a sense of identity by clinging to their teachings and making them available to a wider public, while maintaining the myth that war was still a fact of everyday life.

There are several summaries of ninja knowledge and techniques, all of them dating back no farther than the late seventeenth century, when the ninjas' great days were over. One is the
Shoninki
, which forms the three “How to” chapters in the early part of this book. It is the most literary and succinct of the manuscripts. Another is the
Ninpiden
(
The Secret Ninja Tradition
), perhaps written by a Hattori, but at least in the possession of the Hattoris, the famous ninja family from Iga. A third is the
Gunpo Jiyoshu
(
The Collected Way of the Samurai Military Arts
), so called because Ieyasu thought all samurai should read it; it's fifty-nine paragraphs of severely practical advice on tactics and equipment. Finally, there is the encyclopedic
Bansensh
u
kai
, which intrigued me because it was the only one of the four not translated into English,
¹
and because of its size.

The hotel in K
o
ka was of the traditional sort, built around little Zen-style courtyards of gnarled trees and stones, with corridors of sliding doors and paper screens leading to steamy mineral baths. One moved to the tinkling twitter of caged grasshoppers, which call with the sound porcelain would make if it could sing. My room had fitted, off-white
tatami
matting, and that was all, the futon being still stored away.