Writing History, Writing Fiction
Part 2: Very Carefully Avoiding Doing History
In the previous post I suggested that we could usefully understand ninja history as a form of unacknowledged historical fiction, where the main point is to tell a good story rather than to stick to what the primary source evidence might justify. I also noted that unacknowledged fiction seems likely to happen in situations where the historical evidence either isn’t there or isn’t all that interesting. We might speculate that in these cases the writer really wants to tell a good story, but doesn’t want to be seen to be writing full-on historical fiction. The intellectual prestige of History (note the capital H) is after all a lot greater than that of the historical novel; most of us would probably want to be known as AN HISTORIAN rather than yet another writer of historical pot-boilers.
Critically Assess My Sources? Nah, Fam
If we understand that for ninja historians the need to tell a good story almost always wins out over the requirement to stick to the rules of serious history, quite a few aspects of ninja history start make a lot more sense. For one, it becomes easier to understand why many ninja historians don’t seem to care whether the stories they’re citing as evidence are true or not.
This has always struck me as a rather odd element of ninja writing, but it’s been there from the start. Consider Itō Gingetsu, active in the first half of the 20th century and one of the first writers in Japan to make a case for what we now think of as the modern ‘ninja.’ Gingetsu may well have been the first writer to introduce the concept of the modern ‘ninja’ to English-speaking audiences in a 1918 article in the English-language The Japan Magazine (which you can read here). This article, although probably the first introduction of the ‘ninja’ to English-speaking audiences, appears to have gained no traction overseas; it certainly didn’t spark anything like the ninja craze of the late 1970s and early 80s, anyway.
Gingetsu’s article is missing one or two elements of what we now think of as the modern ‘ninja’ (such as the actual word ‘ninja’), but what Gingetsu describes is close enough to the modern ‘ninja’ that I don’t think we can really quibble about it. Whether Gingetsu’s claims are supported by credible historical evidence, of course, is a different matter, but we won’t go into that here.
I want to draw your attention to the final couple of paragraphs of the piece, where Gingetsu cites an example of ninjutsu as practiced by the famous 16th century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi.1 In the episode cited, Hideyoshi deceives another warrior into thinking Hideyoshi is waiting outside the house when he had in fact gone off to steal a sword. In the final sentence, Gingetsu writes, “This story, whether true or not, at least illustrates the methods of the ninjutsu-sha in old Japan.”2 (Bolding is mine.)
So Gingetsu admits that he does not know whether this supposed example of historical ninjutsu is real or not, but he’s going to include it anyway. And this admission, that they don’t actually know whether their stories are true or not, is surprisingly common among advocates for the modern ‘ninja’ as historical phenomenon.
Consider Donn Draeger’s Ninjutsu, first published in 1971. Draeger (1922-1982) was a very widely-respected martial artist who trained in a variety of Japanese combat systems in postwar Japan, and who is rightly regarded as a pioneer in introducing Western audiences to many East Asian martial arts.3
As I understand it, Draeger trained in ninjutsu under the prominent 1960s master Hatsumi Masaaki and appears to have been very impressed with Hatsumi’s claims for ‘ninja’ as historical phenomenon, many of which Draeger then included in his 1971 book.4 The book’s sub-title changed a few times over its subsequent editions, so it’s not always easy to keep track of it, but I will note that Tuttle published a 40th anniversary edition of the text in 2011. That means that Ninjutsu was in print for at least forty years and was therefore widely read and very influential. This is the kind of reach and impact that most academics can only dream about.
The section that struck me in Draeger’s Ninjutsu is Chapter Six, a collection of stories of ‘ninja’ operations throughout history. The chapter is titled “Facts and Legends,” and it opens as follows:
Stories about the lives and exploits of ninja form a substantial portion of the aura of mystery that surrounds these masters of invisibility. Some of these stories are true. But a good many of them have become distorted by exaggeration, while still others are purely the result of persons with overly active and imaginative minds who have become possessed by the lure of ninjutsu.5
So at this point, the reader might reasonably expect Draeger to clear all this up for us, to explain which of the stories are true, which are exaggeration, and which are pure fantasy. But he doesn’t – instead he just presents all of the stories without comment, presumably leaving the reader to figure out their factual status all by himself. So the reader knows that some of Draeger’s stories are fiction - just not which ones.
To the extent that I’ve been able to identify sources for the stories, they’re basically all straight-up fiction, except for one or two where ‘ninja’ have been crowbarred into actual events. But then, I would qualify as a specialist reader, in that I have the skills, training, and background knowledge to track the sources down – and even then, there’s a couple I can’t yet identify. It strikes me that if you throw a bunch of fictional and semi-fictional stories at a non-specialist reader with no attempt to distinguish among them, you’re almost guaranteed that the reader will come away confused, and quite possibly thinking of at least one fictional story as true.
If I had to guess, I would say that Draeger probably didn’t know which of the stories were true, and didn’t necessarily see it as his job to figure it out. It’s generally accepted that one of the tasks of the good historian is to critically assess your sources, to determine whether they’re reliable or not. If so, then what we have here is not so much history as a refusal to do history, to do the hard work of figuring out whether your sources bear any connection to reality in the first place.
Hear Me Out…What If We Just Used Fiction?
It's not just Gingetsu and Draeger, either; the well-known ‘ninja’ ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō did this all the time as well. In his Ninja Techniques: Secret Teachings and Real Examples, which we touched on last time around, Okuse cites a story about Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s skill at reading people, which Okuse understands as exemplifying the ninja skill of sōjutsu (basically, people skills, or ‘reading people’). Then, however, he concedes that his story is from the semi-fictional Taikōki, and “this seems like the sort of story where you can’t be sure if it’s true or false.”6
A bit later in the same book, Okuse cites a famous thief named Nezumi Kozō as a master of stealthy infiltration, before noting that he does not actually know whether Nezumi Kozō existed or not.7 A few pages later, Okuse gives us an example of an actual ‘ninja’ operation, where the famous Forty-Seven Ronin used a female operative (kunoichi) to steal a map of their enemy Kira no Yoshinaka’s mansion ahead of their attack on him.8 Except that Okuse then immediately concedes that this was probably the invention of a kōdan oral storyteller.9
Okuse does this sort of thing so much that you realize it’s a key part of his methodology; his ability to make a case for his version of historical ninjutsu depends on not thinking too carefully about the factual status of the stories he is citing. He’s quite open about this, by the way; at one point in his book, he notes that although there are lots of historical texts that talk about ninjutsu, he has found that they tend not to be very specific, and so to shed light on the actual techniques and practice of ninjutsu, he has had to use what he calls “ninja lore” (denshō). This Okuse defines as “kōdan oral storytelling, legends, works of prose fiction, and oral traditions.”10
Kōdan is a form of popular oral storytelling a bit like music hall that involves retelling heavily embellished and fictionalized accounts of historical events, while ‘legends’ ‘prose fiction,’ and ‘oral traditions’ you don’t need me to explain to you.
The problem with this methodology should be blindingly obvious: much of this material is going to be fictional. As to why he chose to do this, Okuse was also quite open:
To be honest, when it comes to in-nin (ninjutsu techniques of concealment and escape), I find that when attempting to back these up with historical materials (true stories), I have no option but to manufacture fictional stories (tsukuribanashi). Accordingly, I cannot present any actual examples […]11
The martial arts magazine Black Belt described Okuse in 2014 as “perhaps the foremost authority on ninjutsu.” Yet by his own admission Okuse was used fictional works to support his claims about ninjutsu, and sometimes didn’t know if the examples he was citing had any basis in reality. What Okuse was doing seems like a kind of gonzo literary criticism where he simply ignored the notion of fiction altogether.12
What is going on here? If the historical ‘ninja’ is a well-attested phenomenon, then why are its most prominent proponents using stories that they themselves admit are dubious? The obvious explanation is the one Okuse provides, which is that the historical evidence isn’t really there, or if it is it’s not very interesting. So Okuse, Gingetsu and co used fictional or semi-fictional works to make their case because if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have had very much to work with. That being the case, a ‘ninja’ author has no real incentive to verify and exclude fictional works, and it’s not surprising that Draeger and Okuse don’t seem to have tried very hard to do so.
At the same time, all of the writers discussed above really wanted their work to be taken seriously in making a case for the modern ninja as an historical phenomenon. But when it came down to it, good storytelling was always going to win out; and in the end I’m not sure they were really that concerned as to whether there was anything by way of “truth” to these stories.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 (1537-1598). Second of the major unifiers of Warring States Japan after Oda Nobunaga and before Tokugawa Ieyasu. If you want to think in terms of the characters in the HBO show Shōgun, he’s the old guy Toranaga calls “Taikō” in the earlier episodes.
Ninjutsu-sha 忍術者 - literally, practitioner of ninjutsu.
From what I understand, Draeger was one of the good guys, a genuinely accomplished martial artist and a widely-revered teacher. This makes what I’m going to have to write about his work on ninjutsu all the more unfortunate.
Hatsumi Masaaki 初見良昭 (1931-).
Donn F. Draeger, Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility: Facts, Legends, and Techniques (Tuttle, 1989), p. 103. The edition I have is a 1989 one, but the book was first published in 1971. As I noted above, the subtitle to the book changed a bit across the print runs.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 56. “the sort of story where you can’t be sure if it’s true or false” is 本当のような、嘘のような話である. Sōjutsu is 相術, and Taikōki 太閤記 (‘Chronicle of The Retired Regent [i.e. Hideyoshi]’) was a very popular semi-fictionalized account of the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi first published around 1626. Like a lot of the sources we’ve talked about so far, it’s heavily romanticized and not a reliable source on its own.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 184; the relevant text is 鼠小僧次郎吉が実在したかどうか知らないが.’ The kanji for Nezumi Kozō are 鼠小僧. Like his fellow thief Ishikawa Goemon, he’s probably based on a real person but is mostly known through his exploits in heavily fictionalized kabuki plays, prose fiction, etc, so is about 95% fictional character when you get down to it.
Okuse Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 187-88. Kunoichi くノ一 is a supposed female ninja, though the actual usage of the term varies enormously. Kira Yoshinaka is 吉良義央 (1631-1703). If you’re not familiar with the story of the 47 Ronin, start here and then go to someone who definitely knows what he is talking about here.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 187-88. “Probably the invention of an oral storyteller:” おそらくこれは講談師の作り話であろう. If you’re not familiar, kōdan is a type of oral storytelling based on historical events (note, “based on”) that was extremely popular across the 19th century in Japan.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 290. ‘Lore’ in Japanese is denshō 伝承, which Okuse defines as 昔からの講談・伝説・小説・口碑.
Okuse Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 236. Japanese is: 正直のところ、陰忍（隠法、遁法）については、歴史的素材（本当の話）で、これを裏づけようとすることは、作り話を、製造する以外に手がない. したがって、その実例を挙げ得ない[…]
A more sophisticated academic-ish way of looking at this would be to say that Okuse was doing something close to subaltern history. That is to say, he was attempting to recover the history of a marginalized group that was written out of conventional histories, and so was obliged to use unconventional materials (like works of literature) to get at certain more abstract social truths. I actually have some sympathy with this argument and plan to address it in more depth later on. This is definitely not how Okuse’s work has been presented to English-speaking audiences, though, so there’s definite potential for readers to be misled as to how reliable Okuse’s claims are.