Kunoichi: Several Decades of Shockingly Bad History
If Female Ninja Didn't Exist, Why Do So Many People Think They Did?
We’ve just seen on our read-through of Yoshimaru Katsuya’s 2017 “What is a Kunoichi?” that there is no historical evidence for female shinobi, and that the kunoichi should be viewed as a fictional construct. But it’s also not hard to find the claim in the ‘ninja’ literature that female shinobi were a real historical phenomenon.
So what’s going on here? If Yoshimaru’s right and there’s no historical evidence for the kunoichi, why do so many writers in English and Japanese discuss her as if she were a real thing?
It’s The Usual Bullshit Merchants
The simplest answer is that the major 20th century Japanese ‘ninja’ writers - Fujita Seiko, Okuse Heishichirō, and Hatsumi Masaaki - all mention kunoichi in their writings between about 1938 and 1964. All three were basing their claims to a greater or lesser extent on the 1676 ‘ninja bible’ Bansen shūkai (BSSK).
None of the three was exactly doing rigorous historical scholarship, though, for a few reasons. First, BSSK itself is not a reliable historical source; second, its mentions of kunoichi are vague and uncorroborated in the historical record; and third, Fujita, Okuse, and Hatsumi’s claims all went way beyond even what could be supported by reference to BSSK. The major English-language ‘ninja’ authors Andrew Adams and Donn Draeger would then take up Okuse and Hatsumi’s largely unsupported claims and repeat them as fact for their readers, and things proceeded from there.
Thinking about it, it should be trivially easy to disprove Yoshimaru’s argument that kunoichi weren’t a thing - just give a verifiable example of a female shinobi from the historical record. And in fairness, a number of ‘ninja’ historians over the years have tried to do this, but none have really succeeded.
First up would be Fujita Seiko, the alleged 14th-generation grand master of Kōga-style ninjutsu. Seiko was one of the first Japanese authors to make an historical case for ninjutsu as the skills of something approaching the modern ‘ninja,’ though he was also an incorrigible fabulist and unreliable as a source of information on basically anything.
As we saw in our discussion of the famous mizu-gumo ‘water spider’ device, Seiko was one of the first ‘ninja’ writers to work with Bansen shūkai, which seems to have been largely unknown in Japan until the mid-1930s. Its influence is fairly clear in a short passage discussing kunoichi in Seiko’s 1938 What is Ninjutsu?:
Within the arts of the Ninja this method of changing into a woman or employing a woman is known as Kunoichi. When these three elements (i.e., ku, no, and ichi) are overlapped they form the kanji for woman, or onna 女. Even today within the spy trade the arts of the Kunoichi are still very much in use. Kunoichi can be used to snare an enemy commander who is particularly susceptible to lust. The Kumaso as well as others were caught by Yamato Takeru’s Kunoichi and fell for what they assumed to be a woman.1
The lines bolded in the block-quote above are almost verbatim from BSSK, so it’s clear that this was Seiko’s source. The bit about kunoichi also referring to men dressing as women is not in the relevant passage in BSSK, though, and it’s unclear where he got it. (This idea, that kunoichi no jutsu actually meant a man magically taking on the form of a woman or disguising himself as one, was a reasonably common interpretation of what kunoichi meant until the mid-1960s, as we saw in the previous post).
The historical example Seiko gives comes from the earliest written histories of Japan, the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki from 710 and 712.2 The basic storyline is that Yamato Takeru was an imperial prince who was too violent for the Emperor to keep around, so he sent him to go and burn off some energy by subjugating another tribe called the Kumaso. These he defeated by dressing as a maid to gain entrance to a drinking-party and kill the Kumaso chieftain. This is the subject of an 1886 print by the artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi depicting Yamato Takeru (then known as Prince Ousu) in women’s robes. This specific print is in quite a few ‘ninja’ histories, including Turnbull and Zoughari, supposedly as an early example of ninjutsu:3
Yamato Takeru is a semi-mythical figure, so this story can’t be taken as historical fact, and even if it could he’s not a female shinobi.
Moving on, we come to the work of someone with whom we’re very familiar…
Okuse Heishichirō Has Some Fun with Kunoichi
With a grim sense of inevitability, the next major figure putting out the idea that kunoichi really existed would be the prolific ‘ninja’ ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō. Okuse served as the mayor of Ueno City in Mie Prefecture, supposedly the heartland of the historical shinobi, and was a founding director of the Iga Ninja Museum. A prolific writer during the ‘ninja’ boom of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Okuse was also totally unreliable as a source of historical information. Even so, the majority of the specific claims about kunoichi that show up in the English-language literature appear to be traceable directly to Okuse’s writings between about 1957 and 1964. Not coincidentally, this was also the precise period when the kunoichi as female shinobi was emerging in the Japanese literary world.
A good example is Okuse’s claim in his ironically-titled 1964 Ninja Arts: Secret Teachings and Real Examples that a kunoichi’s hairpin would conceal a blade that she would use to kill a man after sleeping with him:
Ninja Hairpin (Shinobi-kōgai)
A weapon used in assassinations by female ninja. Consisted of two daggers concealed in a hairpin.4
This should be an easy claim to prove - just give us the name of the warlord(s) who were knocked off in this way. After all, as I noted in our discussion of the Uesugi Kenshin ‘toilet ninja’ story, other people tend to notice when someone dies unexpectedly. Funnily enough, though, Okuse gives no specific historical examples, but the lack of evidence for this claim hasn’t done anything to prevent it from circulating very widely, right up to the present day.5 This is one of the ways Okuse goes about his task: eye-catching claims for which he has no historical evidence.
It should be said, in fairness, that Okuse’s discussion of kunoichi no jutsu does occasionally contain historical examples, but the problem is that when he does give examples he’s using kunoichi no jutsu in an extremely broad sense, to refer to almost any event in Japanese history that has to do with using sex to manipulate someone. One of his examples, for instance, concerns the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), second of the major unifiers of Japan. In 1593 Hideyoshi’s concubine Lady Yodo (1569-1615) finally gave Hideyoshi what he had long desired in the shape of a son and heir, Toyotomi Hideyori (1593-1615).6 Unsurprisingly, Lady Yodo rose dramatically in Hideyoshi’s favor after this, and the attention lavished on Lady Yodo would in time alienate some of Hideyoshi’s other commanders. This, Okuse argues, was essentially an example of kunoichi no jutsu.7 But linking these events to kunoichi is nonsensical. Okuse is talking, in the most charitable interpretation, about marriage and sexual politics in the late Warring States period. Lady Yodo was not a kunoichi and this whole episode has nothing at all to do with female ‘ninja.’
Okuse also records a famous anecdote whereby an Edo merchant tried to curry favor with the notoriously corrupt mid-Tokugawa official Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-1788) by sending him a real live courtesan in a box with the legend, “A Doll from Kyoto” (Kyō ningyō). Again, this has nothing to do with ‘ninja’ - it’s an imaginative form of bribery, yes, but there’s no shinobi connection at all.8
The first few times I read through these sections, I couldn’t figure out what Okuse was doing - why include these in a book on ‘ninja’ in the first place? Then it hit me:
He’s got nothing.
Okuse doesn’t have any verifiable examples of kunoichi, so he uses this second approach, stretching the concept to the point of meaninglessness and include episodes that kind of, sort of, illustrate things that are similar in spirit to what historical shinobi might possibly have done. In a way it’s impressive how much kunoichi lore Okuse manages to present despite having basically no historical evidence.
Mid-way through his book Okuse offers a definition of kunoichi, noting that a kunoichi in his mind was anyone who used their sexuality to allow for espionage. And I do mean anyone; one of the things Okuse claims is that kunoichi seduction didn’t have to be done by women. Quite often, Okuse asserts, male shinobi were used in seduction operations as well, so kunoichi could refer to men sleeping with other men:9
When targeting those who enjoyed male love (i.e., homosexuality), it was the case that shinobi employed attractive youths instead of kunoichi. Or, if the target was a woman, naturally one would send a man instead of a kunoichi, and send a woman if the female target was given to homosexuality. So practically speaking, there were many cases when a man was used as a kunoichi. In theory we might define ‘kunoichi’ as “any operation that exploits sexual attraction, whether to men or to women, to allow for the conduct of espionage.”
I have no idea what the basis for this could be, as it’s not obviously in BSSK. The only thing that even resembles it is BSSK’s mention of the katsura-otoko, or ‘moon man’ infiltration technique. Katsura-otoko refers to a Chinese and then Japanese legend about a man in the moon with unearthly good looks who would steal you away if you looked at him too long, as BSSK says:
In normal times, before the need arises, you should find someone as an undercover agent who will become the betrayer, an enemy you plant and thus make a [shinobi] of him and have him within the enemy castle, camp, or vassalage, exactly as the ghost in the legend, Katsuraotoko, is stationed on the moon.10
So sleeper agents, basically. Maybe you could argue that the katsura-otoko’s unearthly good looks hinted at the possibility for seduction, but that’s a very tenuous reading.
Oh Jeez. It Gets Worse.
So what Okuse appears to be doing is taking BSSK’s vague mention of using women in infiltration operations and spinning it up into a whole world of seduction practices by both men and women. An even worse example of Okuse embellishing BSSK follows a few sentences later; here’s the BSSK text first:
You should make an isoanaushi undercover agent of a girl from her childhood. If there is a child who is good looking among those close to you, you should create an intricate plan and then, when the time comes, use her to create false charges, or murder by poisoning, or other such appropriate measures.11
And here’s what Okuse does with it:
Since a ninja could never know when he might need someone (an attractive man or woman) to send as a kunoichi, it was necessary to make sure that the appropriate human resources would always be at hand. For that reason, ninja would take attractive males and females into their organization at a very young age and entrust them to ninja to raise s their own, thereby ensuring the human resources for kunoichi operations, and would do this in one of three ways: 1) adopting a child born to a particularly attractive couple, 2) kidnapping, or 3) buying them from the parents.12
Oh dear God. Kidnapping and trafficking in children, just to raise them for use in honey-trap operations? I really hope Okuse was just making this bit up, and I’d imagine this is one point where even the most hard-core ‘ninja’ advocate might join me in calling bullshit on him.
There are also a few claims about kunoichi for which I can’t identify any source at all, BSSK or otherwise. Okuse states, for instance, that female kunoichi agents were managed by an overseer (kantoku), and could be divided into disposable agents who were tricked or manipulated into fulfilling their task (kakan, per Okuse’s term) versus those who were trained, regular members of the ‘ninja’ organization (shinkan).13 Okuse also asserts that, because of the nature of their seductive role, kunoichi agents were particularly vulnerable to being turned and falling in love with the enemy, so it would be necessary to select a handler and agent with particularly strong ties, such as husband and wife or parent and child.14
You do have to wonder whether Okuse, in the midst of all this creative enthusiasm, stopped to think about how the reader might react to this portrayal of ‘ninja’ organizations.
None of the kakan/shinkan stuff is in BSSK, and since BSSK is to the best of my knowledge the only ‘ninja manual’ that mentions kunoichi at all, I have no idea what Okuse’s source could be. So what we have are a series of assertions that are maybe 20% based on BSSK, itself a dubious source, and 80% made up - there’s little to nothing by way of solid historical evidence to support the vast majority of the claims here. Unfortunately, very few of the early English-language ‘ninja’ writers had much of a critical filter, and so these claims would be presented largely unchallenged to Western audiences over the next few decades, as we’ll see in the next post.
Fujita Seiko, trans. Eric Shahan, What is Ninjutsu? pp. 13-14. Japanese: この女に化けたり、女を利用したりする方法を、忍術の方で「久ノ一の術」と申して居ります。久ノ一はつまり「くノ一」で、女といふことになります。現今でもスパイには、この「くノ一」は盛んに使われまして、敵将の中で 淫慾に耽るやうなる者は、女を使って、これを籠絡いたします。熊襲なども、日本武尊を「くノ一」と思って引掛かつたのでありませう。
Kojiki 古事記; Nihon shoki 日本書紀.
Stephen Turnbull, Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult (1991, p. 17) and Ninja: AD 1460-1650 (2003), p. 44; Zoughari, The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan (2010), p. 33.
Okuse Heishichirō, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei (1964; my copy 1997), p. 267. Japanese: 〈忍び笄〉女の忍者の暗殺用の武器。笄に二本の小剣を仕込んだもの。
See also Andrew Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (1970; my copy 1973), p. 28; Michael Finn, “Ninja - Shadows in the Night” in Martial Arts: A Complete Illustrated History (Stanley Paul, 1988), p. 124; and probably lots of other places as well.
Lady Yodo 淀君; Toyotomi Hideyori 豊臣秀頼.
Okuse, p. 76.
Okuse, p. 77. Tanuma Okitsugu 田沼意次; Kyō ningyō 京人形.
Okuse, p. 129.
Minami, trans., and Cummins, ed., The Book of Ninja, p. 104. Original text is here (p. 9 in the viewer).
Minami, trans., p. 105; original text as in footnote. 9 above. It’s not clear what isoanaushi means in this context.
Okuse, p. 129. Japanese: 《久ノ一を準備する法》忍者は何時、久ノ一を行わせる者（美女、美男）が必要になるかも分からないのだから、その人的資源は、常に確保する必要がある。そのため、（１）美女、美男の間に生まれたこどもを、貰いうける（２）奪い取る（３）買い求めるという三つの手段で、美女、美男を幼少から、組織内に入れ、組織内の忍者の手に預けて、その子として育てさせ、久ノ一の術の人的資源を確保した。
Okuse, p. 130-31. Kantoku 監督; kakan 借間; shinkan 真間. I mention these terms because they’re very specific and will show up in the English-language literature, as we’ll see in our next post or two.
Okuse, p. 131.