Girl Power, Ninja Style?
Why the Kunoichi is a Pitfall for Women's History
A few years ago, just as I was starting out on my study of the historical ‘ninja,’ I came across this 2013 blog post on kunoichi by an attorney and writer named Susan Spann. The basic idea behind it seems to be to argue for kunoichi as a way of reclaiming women’s agency in medieval Japan:
Medieval Japan was ruled and dominated by men of the samurai class. Samurai rarely trusted strangers, but often made exceptions for women, either because of their beauty or because the woman filled a “harmless” social role (a maid, for example). Kunoichi frequently posed as performers, courtesans, or servants. In these disguises, kunoichi infiltrated temples, castles, and fortresses, either to gather information or to strike at well-protected targets male assassins could not reach.
So in a land where men are on top in most respects, the kunoichi strikes a blow for girl power. She got shit done, and she did so in a way that men couldn’t. In fact:
In some ways, kunoichi inspired more fear than their masculine counterparts because of their ability to mimic different types of women that samurai often regarded as harmless….A woman […] needed only to appeal to the target’s natural attractions, particularly when she approached in the guise of a courtesan or professional entertainer.
Then, as now, sex sells … and dangerous sex can kill.
So according to Spann, in certain respects kunoichi were even more badass than their male counterparts. You go, girl!
Except…
The Fiction Comes First
Looking at media depictions of kunoichi like Botan, the well-endowed young lady who serves as the splash image for this post, it’s tempting to assume she’s a sexualized interpretation of a real historical phenomenon. This, after all, is how historical fiction works: the history happens first, and it’s then reflected in the literary work decades or centuries later. Consider (say) the Hulu show Shogun; the events on which it’s based, like Will Adams’ stay in Japan or Tokugawa Ieyasu’s rise to power, happened between 1600 to 1603 and were then adapted hundreds of years later in James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shogun.
This is our default mental model for understanding the relationship between history and literature, so it’s much harder for us to imagine that it could work in reverse, that fiction could be presented as history. Surely nobody would be so clueless as to present fictional characters as historical ones? No way - there must be some real historical basis somewhere. But yes, it is absolutely possible for fictional works to drive historical claims; in fact, it’s arguably one of ‘ninja’ history’s central methodologies.
If we accept Yoshimaru Katsuya’s argument that there is no historical evidence for the existence of female shinobi, then fiction is the only remaining source for all of the many, many claims about them. This would also explain why Spann’s article above doesn’t mention any historical source evidence or give any specific examples of verifiable kunoichi operations: there aren’t any to discuss. What Spann is doing, I’m sure unwittingly, is presenting a modern media creation which she has been misled into understanding as historical fact.1
Let me remind you that the sum total of the textual evidence for the seductress-assassin version of the kunoichi is a couple of lines in the 1676 ‘ninja manual’ Bansen shūkai:
Ordinary people easily give themselves up to lust or greed. Of all people, high-ranking men tend to wallow in sexual desire, so this art of the kunoichi female agent is one of the most effective tactics of all […]2
And that’s basically it. Even if we treat Bansen shūkai as 100% reliable, which we definitely shouldn’t, the passage in question doesn’t explicitly say that kunoichi should seduce the target to kill him, and you could easily read the above to mean that you should send attractive women as sleeper agents because they’d have an easier time getting hired as maids. And as I’ve said over and over, in the absence of any verifiable evidence that anything like this happened for real, it’s quite likely that the above passage is nothing more than a product of the BSSK author’s fertile imagination.
The Kunoichi is a Male Sexual Fantasy
If that’s the sum total of the pre-modern textual evidence, it would follow that all of the other stuff is simply fantasy - Okuse and Adams’ assassination-by-hairpin, Draeger’s handsome temple acolytes and poison vaginas, and all the rest of it. And to be frank, it’s fantasy that seems to tell us far more about various male psycho-sexual hangups than it does about anything to do with Japanese history.
I noted a post or two back that Adams and Draeger’s vision of the kunoichi seems heavily influenced by Western stereotypes about Asian female sexuality, a reprise of the evil yet sexually alluring ‘Dragon Lady.’ Adams, to be fair, was getting his stuff from Okuse, but his Invisible Assassins contains no fewer than four mentions of the way in which kunoichi killed their victims with a hairpin after sleeping with them, and that makes me think there was more than just historical interest at work. As for Draeger, well, as the psychiatrist in the British comedy Fawlty Towers remarks, “there’s enough material there for an entire conference.”
Even if we take gendered Orientalism out of the equation and consider the kunoichi in the Japanese context, the same basic point applies. I doubt that any of my readers will have read any works by the novelist Yamada Fūtarō, whose fiction did a lot to popularize the kunoichi in the 1960s. He’s not particularly well-studied in either US or Japanese academia, and very little of his work is available in translation. I have read some of Yamada’s stuff, though, and by 2024 standards, some of it is downright creepy, while some of it really only makes sense as a form of very off-beat sex comedy.
For instance, you may remember a few posts back I mentioned the 1964 film Kunoichi Magic (Kunoichi ninpō), which is based on a novel by Yamada. I recently got hold of a copy of the film, and boy, “batshit insane” doesn’t go nearly far enough. The male Iga ninja in the film use what they call ‘kunoichi magic’ that makes them sexually irresistible to women and then allows them to assume the form of the woman with whom they have congress. To demonstrate this magic, one Iga ninja asks that a lady-in-waiting be brought to him, ideally the one…
The result of the Iga ninja magic is that this chaste woman immediately throws herself at the ninja…
…and after the woman gets naked, the Iga ninja can now take on her form. So, when the ‘woman’ speaks again to say:
…she does so in the male ninja’s voice.
You probably don’t need me to point out that this says some fairly, uh, ‘interesting’ things about sexual consent and access to women’s bodies. And yes, I’ll definitely be doing a full review of Kunoichi Magic very soon.
The Kunoichi’s Illusionary Promise
As tempting as it might be for some writers to search for the history behind the fiction, doing that is chasing an illusion. If the kunoichi is a collection of sexual fantasies (as I argue) that emerges from cultural shifts in postwar Japanese society (as Yoshimaru argues), then there is no historical phenomenon to recover. As much as scholars might want to make the case that historical female shinobi could kick just as much butt as their male counterparts, there doesn’t appear to be a valid way to do so.
This is not to say that the kunoichi isn’t interesting and significant as a phenomenon. She’d be a fantastic way of working through postwar Japanese gender and sexual politics, so long as we bear in mind that she’s a literary and media construct, not an historical one. Documentary history as such may not be the right disciplinary approach, but a cultural historian, a film and media scholar, or a gender studies scholar could get a lot of mileage out of the topic. Yoshimaru briefly touches on this issue in his “What is a Kunoichi?,” but there’s clearly plenty more research that could usefully be done on the topic. The way in which kunoichi characters seem to alternate between ‘maiden’ and ‘mother’ archetypes, for instance - seems like that’s worth excavating in some detail.3
Anyway, I think we’ve covered the kunoichi in enough detail for the time being. There’s a couple more follow-up pieces I’d like to do, covering Yoshimaru’s dismantling of the case for Mochizuki Chiyome, the supposed kunoichi mastermind of the Takeda clan, and a full review of Kunoichi Magic, but I’m going to leave those for later, maybe in the new year.
Since the holiday season is approaching, perhaps something a little more positive is in order. So let’s tell the story of the warrior Manabe Rokurō, the guy who is depicted all in black in the 1883 image on our main page. And, more importantly, let’s tell the tale of his sister, too.
I don’t necessarily mean to fault Spann for this; I have every reason to believe she was working in good faith. It’s just that the available material in English is so unbelievably awful that even someone genuinely trying to do historical research is going to come across reams and reams of unreliable information. Most non-specialists are not going to be able to discern just how bad it actually is, especially if they don’t read Japanese.
The character Kagerō in Yamada’s Basilisk, for instance, has poisonous breath when sexually aroused, but this ability will apparently disappear if she becomes a mother. Or, for a non-Yamada example, the character of Tsunade in Naruto.