Ninja (3 page)

Even as Jing Ke comes at him again, the king manages to untangle his sword, draw it, and wound Jing Ke in the leg. Jing Ke hurls the poisoned dagger, misses, and falls back as the king strikes at him, wounding him again. Jing Ke, seeing he has failed, leans against the pillar, then squats down, alternately laughing hysterically and cursing the king. The crowd moves in and finishes him off.

Would it be fair to call Jing Ke a forerunner of the ninjas? Hardly. True, he gained entry to the emperor by means of a trick. But the plot demanded that he operate in public and be prepared to die. Ninjas moved in secret and planned for survival. If there are lessons in this story, they are that rulers should be more careful and that secret agents should up their game. There's no point in half a ninja.

The incident, along with much of China's recorded history, became familiar to the Japanese from their embassies. Scholars knew about the first emperor and were familiar with the “Five Classics,” among them Sun Zi's
Art of War
, known in Japan as
Shonshi
, a Japanese version of “Sun Zi.” In theory, therefore, they knew about Sun Zi's admiration for the dark, covert arts of deception and spying. In addition, a number of wealthy Chinese fled the war-torn mainland in the early Middle Ages (tenth through twelfth centuries), many traveling through the Japanese heartland to the court and some settling along the way, emphasizing to their Japanese hosts the importance of Chinese culture, including the techniques of covert warfare. The famous Takeda family, which rose to prominence in the sixteenth century, owned at least six of the Chinese classics, including those by Sun Zi, Confucius, and Sima Qian (the grand historian who told the story of Jing Ke), suggesting that key ingredients of
ninjutsu
, the “art of invisibility,” are Chinese in origin.

In fact, the idea of deception also has well-established Japanese roots, as two stories reveal. They appear in Japan's most ancient surviving book, the
Kojiki
(
Record of Ancient Things
). The
Kojiki
was one of two works produced for Emperor Temmu, who in AD 682 commanded his princes and nobles to “commit to writing a chronicle of the emperors and also of matters of high antiquity.” Produced for the court thirty years later, the
Kojiki
's amalgam of written and oral tales purports to explain the origin of the nation, from the beginning of heaven and earth, “when the land was young, resembling floating oil and drifting like a jellyfish.” From three gods sprang the islands of Japan and eight million—“eight hundred myriad”—other gods, among them Amaterasu, the sun goddess, ancestor of the royal family. In a slurry of myth, song, legend, pseudo-history, and history, the 149 brief chapters reveal how, over twelve hundred years, thirty-four emperors imposed their wills on rival clans as Japan's divinely ordained ruling family.

Two stories tell of a young hero called Wo-usu, later renamed Prince Yamato the Brave, who still wore his hair up on his forehead in the style of a teenager. He was (supposedly) the younger son of the twelfth emperor, Keik
o
of Yamato, which in the second century AD was one of the five provinces of central Honshu, the heartland of the almost unified nation. The words in quotes are from the original as translated by Donald Philippi.

The Wiles of Prince Yamato

Emperor Keik
o
tells the elder of his two sons, whose name is Opo-usu, to bring him two beautiful sisters to marry. Instead Opo-usu marries the sisters himself. Then, in embarrassment, he avoids coming to eat morning and evening meals with his father.

The emperor tells the younger son, Wo-usu, to summon his brother.

Five days later, Opo-usu has not appeared.

“Why has your elder brother not come for such a long time?” says the emperor. “Is it perhaps that you have not yet admonished him?”

“I have already entreated him,” replies Wo-usu.

“In what manner did you entreat him?”

“Early in the morning when he went into the privy, I waited and captured him, grasped him and crushed him, then pulled off his limbs and, wrapping them in a straw mat, threw them away.”

Wo-usu's ruthlessness strikes the emperor as a pretty rough punishment for skipping a few meals. He instantly finds a mission that will suit his son's “fearless, wild disposition.”

“Toward the west,” he says, meaning the southern part of Japan's southern island, Ky
u
sh
u
, “there are two Kumaso-takeru”—
kumaso
being a word for the aboriginals of that part of untamed Ky
u
sh
u
and
takeru
meaning “brave.” If this were an English fairy tale, these aboriginal chieftains would be ogres, and Wo-usu a Japanese Jack of the beanstalk. Anyway, says the emperor, “they are unsubmissive, disrespectful people. Therefore, go and kill them.”

Before departure, Wo-usu's aunt, who in other versions of the story is a high priestess of the sun goddess, gives him two items of clothing suitable for a woman, an “upper garment” and a skirt. Why? Because very soon they will become vital to the story, and he has to get them from somewhere. Armed with a small sword, which he tucks into his shirt, he sets off.

When Wo-usu arrives at his destination, he finds the ogre brothers inside a newly built pit house, for in olden days aboriginals often lived in houses hollowed out of the ground. There is much noise, for the ogres are preparing a feast to celebrate the completion of the house. Wo-usu waits, walking around until the feast day. Then he dons a ninja-like disguise. He combs his hair down in the style of a young girl, puts on the robe and skirt given him by his aunt, hides his sword under his costume, mingles with the women, and enters.

The two ogres take one look at this vision of loveliness and command the “maiden” to sit between them.

When the feast is at its height, Wo-usu draws his sword, seizes the elder ogre by the collar, and plunges the sword into his chest.

The younger ogre, seeing this, takes fright and flees, with Wo-usu in pursuit. At the foot of the stairs leading out of the pit house, Wo-usu catches up with his victim, seizes him by the shoulder, and stabs him in the rectum.

“Do not move the sword,” says the ogre. “I have something to say.” At this the action, as if in a dream, comes to a dead halt, giving the ogre, to whom it has now occurred that the “maiden” is no maiden, time to ask, “Who are you, my lord?”

Wo-usu launches into a long explanation of his origins, naming his father the emperor. Hearing that “you [ogres] were unsubmissive and disrespectful,” he says, “he dispatched me to kill you.”

Then the ogre, still ignoring the sword up his backside, says politely, “Indeed, this must be true. For in the west there are no brave mighty men besides us. But in the land of Yamato there is a man exceeding the two of us in bravery. Because of this I will present you with a name. May you be known from now on as Yamato the Brave.”

Then, at last, Wo-usu, now Yamato-takeru, Yamato the Brave, killed his long-suffering victim, “slicing him up like a ripe melon.”

In the next chapter, Yamato the Brave comes to an old province in southwestern Honshu, intending to kill the ruler, Idumo the Brave, otherwise known as Many-Clouds-Rising. To do this, he uses two deceptions. First, he pretends to be Idumo's friend, then he makes an imitation wooden sword.

The two “friends” go to a river to bathe.

Yamato comes out first, and says, as a friend might, “Let us exchange swords!” Idumo agrees, and straps on Yamato's wooden sword.

At this Yamato issues a challenge, but of course Idumo can do nothing with the imitation sword and falls an easy victim to Yamato, who exults in his unsporting victory with a song:

The Many-Clouds-Rising

Idumo the Brave

Wears a sword

With many vines wrapped round it

But no blade inside, alas!

After my visit to the restaurant owner and his collection of ninja armor, we—my local guide, Noriko, and I—had gone south in a small, swaying train to Akame, to explore a beauty spot known as the Forty-Eight Waterfalls. We were on a paved path, walking up a gorge beside a river that fell over rocks and trees brought down by a typhoon a few days earlier. Japanese of a certain age strolled ahead and behind. Walking shoes, backpacks, and jackets with many pockets—these were people prepared for a serious day out, the ladies shielding themselves with parasols from the late-summer sun filtering through the near-vertical forest. I wanted to see the falls because the mountain from which they flow was a place once favored by ascetics who practiced Shugend
o
, Japan's ancient folk religion. The practitioners, uncounted generations of them coming here for more than a thousand years, included warrior farmers who would eventually be known as ninjas, for they wanted to share in the knowledge and skills that gave the “mountain ascetics”—the
yamabushi
—their power. That was why I was interested in this extraordinary tradition.
¹

They came for two reasons. The first is that mountains have a particular significance in Japanese religious thinking. In old Japan, existence depended on rice, which grew in patchworks of fields that had to be created and managed with expertise and hard work. Men and women needed to be in control. The landscape was flat. Water must flow gently in and out, at the right time. Mountains were the opposite of all this. They were steep and, in Japan, forest-covered (not rocky eminences, like the Alps), and home to wild and dangerous things—bears and snakes and the supernatural beings called
tengu
, with their red faces and long noses and scaly forearms. Mountains were uncivilized, untamed places, where the souls went after death, and where countless deities lived. They were the sources of life-giving water, of the spirits that cause disease, and of the medicinal plants that can control the spirits and cure the diseases. In short, they were places of power. The ways ordinary people could respond to the world of spirits was with subservience, expressing gratitude, or awe, or contrition to the spirits that came and went from the mountains.

Alternatively you could be more proactive and choose a more autonomous path. That was what it took to develop what ninja sources call “correct mind.” For “shadow warriors” were—in principle, at least—more than the traditional idea of warriors, as one of my advisers was keen to make clear. Toshinobu Watanabe, a remarkably fit, seventy-something, from the ninja base of K
o
ka (or K
o
ga, as it used to be), will appear several times in this book, guiding us here and there, but here he is a guide to the state of mind sought by the ideal ninja. “You Westerners often think of ninjas as men of darkness who only knew how to assassinate. Completely wrong! The records, every single one of them, insist in their first lines that you need the correct mind.”

“What does that mean?”

“Do no evil! The ninjas believed in peace. They gathered information in order to avoid as much war as possible. They were dedicated to the idea of killing only if necessary—and to their own survival. They practiced martial arts only for self-defense. Of course, not all ninjas were like this. That is why the sources emphasize the need for correct mind. But most of the time they did their best.”

If you wanted correct mind, if you sought power over your own life, over others, over events, and over the world of spirits, you would go to the mountains, find yourself a master, and subject yourself to rigorous physical, mental, and spiritual rituals. This is the practice known as Shugend
o
, the way of mountain asceticism. You walked the sacred spots, among groves, exposed rocks, ancient trees, waterfalls, streams. You fasted, purified yourself by sitting under waterfalls, hardened your body with feats of endurance, got to know the spirits of the mountain, and because the spirits might object to your presence on their territory, you learned how to propitiate them. Having done this, you became a
yamabushi.
Moreover, you got a certificate from your master to prove you were not a fake.

“And there were plenty of fakes,” said one of my advisers, Tullio Lobetti, an Italian expert in Shugend
o
at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He is a graduate of one of Japan's most famous training centers, on Mount Haguro in Yamagata Prefecture, and thus one of the few Western
yamabushi
(“though I have only the lowest form of certificate”). “How else do I show I am not a fake? By being able to perform supernatural feats. Like being able to stay in a cauldron of boiling water.” He saw my raised eyebrows. “Being boiled—really!”

“You have actually seen this?”

“Yes. It was not much water, but still—it was hot.”

“Do you know how it was done?”

“I know the rituals but not the mechanism. I didn't ask. It's not the kind of thing they want to talk about. Also walking on swords.”

“You've seen that, too?”

“I have done it. Anyone can. It's not hard. You just have to know the right technique. It's all part of proving you have the right credentials and are part of an established group.”

Perhaps, if you were an advanced adept, you would become a priest. That was the equivalent of an MA or PhD. But at the very least you would emerge with a technical and professional qualification—knowledge and skills and power to cure diseases, exorcise evil spirits, and perform rituals essential for ordinary people, such as funeral rites and the breaking of new ground for building a house. You would be respected, and people would pay for your services.

For a ninja, the advantages of Shugend
o
training was obvious. Miyake Hitoshi, a pioneer in Shugend
o
studies, explains why:

Especially remarkable among the activities of the
shugenja
, or
yamabushi
, in the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185–1573) were those in time of war—performing magico-religious rites, acting as messengers or spies, and practising the martial arts. The
shugenja
, who knew the mountain trails and through their travels were familiar with conditions all over the land, were well qualified to undertake these activities. Before battle, they blessed horses, arms and armour and prayed for the defeat of the enemy. Their intercessory rites were called for when camp was set up or broken. . . . Then too there were significant links between
shugenja
and the ninja masters of Koga (Omi province), Iga and Negoro. So skilled were the
shugenja
at stealthy appearances and disappearances that they were compared to the legendary mountain creatures called
tengu
, who were said to inhabit the very mountains where the
shugenja
had their centres.
²