
The evidence for Mochizuki Chiyome as leader of a ring of shrine maidens-slash-spies in Warring States Japan is essentially non-existent. As the Japanese scholar Yoshimaru Katsuya pointed out in 2017, the whole idea seems to be based on several leaps of logic by the pop writer Inagaki Shisei in a book published in 1971. The idea of a real historical sexy female ‘ninja’ is just too good to pass up for most writers, though, so Chiyome’s activities have generally been represented as well-established historical fact across the web and in the published literature ever since.
It’s worth taking Mochizuki Chiyome’s story apart precisely because it’s so widespread, but it’s also a great worked example of how ‘ninja’ history gets made. As we’ll see, we start from a single piece of dubious historical evidence, around which then accumulates layer upon layer of conjecture and outright fantasy. Before long, that accumulation is being presented to the unsuspecting general reader as if it were documented history.
It’s a bit like how pearls get made, if pearls were made of bullshit.
Like an Onion: Lots of Layers, Makes Me Weep
In plowing through all the garbage ‘ninja’ history, it is sometimes possible to observe this process in action, to get at least a rough sense for how and when the different elements of a particular ‘ninja’ myth come together.
The basic point of origin for the idea that Mochizuki Chiyome was a miko-spymaster can be dated precisely, to Inagaki Shisei’s 1971 history. Inagaki’s version, though, is missing one or two of the elements that show up in subsequent re-tellings, notably the claim that Mochizuki Chiyome and her ring of miko were in the business of using their sexuality to gather intelligence by seducing male targets and listening to their pillow talk.
Looking at more recent iterations of Mochizuki Chiyome, we find that the sexuality angle tends to be emphasized quite heavily. Here, for instance, is Yoda Hiroko and Matt Alt’s 2012 account of Chiyome and her merry band of apparently-not-maidens:
Her aruki miko, or “walking maidens,” are the stuff of legend, not to mention adolescent fantasy. Trained “La Femme Nikita”-style in the ways of the world - religion, martial arts, and sexuality - they crisscrossed the country in the guise of holy women, entertainers, and prostitutes, never arousing suspicion but always keeping an ear to the ground for information of use to their masters.1
The following page then tells us that “Kiss and tell is the name of the game for Ku-no-ichi like Chiyojo,” under which is a heading entitled “Carnal Combat: Many ku-no-ichi techniques are believed to have been explicitly sexual in nature,” under which is a rundown of the fantasies of ‘60s pulp author Yamada Fūtarō, whose novels and films played a big role in popularizing the idea of kunoichi as female ninja.2
I think “adolescent fantasy” about sums it up; despite the lack of anything resembling historical evidence, the seductress-assassin claim was a key element of the kunoichi mythos almost as soon as it appeared in the early 1960s in Japan. It would, inevitably, be taken up with considerable enthusiasm by English-language ‘ninja’ writers, for whom it was a useful way to add an erotic frisson for their mostly male audience.
But as I said, Inagaki Shisei’s 1971 history doesn’t actually claim that Chiyome and her girls used sex as an intelligence-gathering tool. Inagaki is not at all shy in talking about seduction as a spy technique in other contexts, as we saw last time around with his enthusiastic references to Mata Hari’s physical assets. And Inagaki does acknowledge that some miko did engage in prostitution; there were, he writes, two types of shrine maiden, those who were mostly attached to shrines and those who wandered the provinces:
Miko of the second type were of course a kind of ‘fallen’ version of the first group, and while these wore heavy make-up just as the first type did, this was for the purpose of helping them to sell themselves as prostitutes.3
So the whole slutty shrine maidens thing is definitely on Inagaki’s radar, but in a slightly unexpected twist a few pages later, Inagaki casts doubt on whether this was what Mochizuki Chiyome and her girls were about:
In order to serve the shrine deity it was required that a miko should be a pure and unsullied virgin. It is true that in the years that followed there were some miko who did engage in prostitution, but it is certain that in Mochizuki Chiyome’s time they maintained their bodily purity, especially the miko of Nonōkōji [the miko district of the village where Chiyome resided].4
Remember, despite the authoritative framing (“it is certain,” ni chigainai in Japanese), this stuff is simply a bunch of guesses from Inagaki, because he has no real evidence to support any of it. Inagaki does say that Chiyome’s miko were often physically attractive, but notes only that this would mean they would be unlikely to be identified as ‘ninja,’ not that they used seduction as a conscious tactic.5
So while Inagaki’s book is pretty much useless as serious history, it does allow us to see the sausage being made, so to speak; we can see where the foundational claims of the myth got started, but also that at this stage it’s missing one or two of the layers found in more recent versions. It appears that the ‘seductress’ element of the Chiyome story postdates Inagaki’s claims, which would mean it was slapped on to the Chiyome myth at some point after 1971.
Layer Upon Layer
Some useful context may be had by switching up languages and looking at one of the first mentions of Mochizuki Chiyome in English, by martial artist Stephen K. Hayes in his 1985 book The Mystic Arts of the Ninja:
Chiyome gathered orphaned and runaway girls from different areas, and trained them as miko vestal virgins while also training them as kunoichi female ninja agents for the Takeda family. The kunoichi jonin carefully judged talents, attributes, and attractiveness of each of the girls and placed them in appropriate areas of operation.6
Parts of this are consistent with Inagaki’s 1971 account, but other parts are not; Inagaki does write that the traveling miko selected young women to succeed them, but doesn’t say they were orphans or runaways, nor does he mention kunoichi “jonin” at all, so I’m not sure where Hayes got these details. It’s notable that Hayes doesn’t directly touch on the supposed sexual aspects of Chiyome’s miko; this may, as I noted a couple of months ago, be because he was using kunoichi as a marketing tool to attract female students to the study of martial art-type ninjutsu, or it may have been that the idea wasn’t yet firmly attached to Chiyome’s legend. Whatever the case, we can see that as late as 1985, the seduction thing wasn’t foregrounded as Mochizuki Chiyome was first introduction to English-speaking audiences.
Yoshimaru, for his part, suggests that the main popularizer of the Mochizuki Chiyome thing was not necessarily Inagaki Shisei but rather the author Nawa Yumio, who mentions Chiyome in his 1991 book Everything About Ninja: The Definitive Edition.7 Nawa Yumio, though less immediately prominent than our frequent flyers Hatsumi Masaaki or Okuse Heishichirō, was also a significant part of the ‘60s ‘ninja’ boom. He’s name-checked by Andrew Adams in one of his early 1967 articles in Black Belt magazine, and wrote a number of books on ‘ninja’ over the years such as You Too Can Be a Ninja (Anata mo ninja ni nareru), published a year before Adams’s article in 1966.
Nawa included Mochizuki Chiyome in his 1991 book Everything About Ninja: The Definitive Edition, and Yoshimaru suspects that it was actually Nawa rather than Inagaki who was primarily responsible for the story’s dissemination. It’s not clear whether Nawa read Inagaki or was working from the same 1930s source as Inagaki, Nakayama Tarō’s A History of Japanese Miko, but whatever the case Yoshimaru appears unimpressed with Nawa’s work. Yoshimaru notes that Nawa claims Chiyome was a jōnin, a top-ranking ninja, following the common idea that ‘ninja’ clans organized themselves into three ranks of jōnin (top), chūnin (mid-rank), and genin (low-rank). This system of ranking wasn’t actually a thing, as a lot of more recent writers have pointed out, and so the fact that Nawa made this common error, for Yoshimaru, is pretty damning:
A passage that appears to suggest that the historical shinobi had ranks known as jōnin, chūnin, and genin is sufficient in and of itself to consider a work lacking in historical reliability. Ninja publications then went on their merry way just copying out the content without bothering to do any fact-checking, and so it was that from that day forth Mochizuki Chiyome’s story would be added to the annals of legendary ninja tales.8
So yeah, Yoshimaru thinks that Nawa’s book is crap. Incidentally, I’m not sure if the ‘seductress’ thing is specifically mentioned in Nawa’s book; Yoshimaru doesn’t say, so I’ve ordered a copy of Nawa for myself and will take a look when it arrives from Japan.
How Ninja History Gets Made
So while we may not have all of the pieces of the puzzle just yet, I think we can offer a series of snapshots of the progression of the Mochizuki Chiyome thing, and that gives us at least a rough idea of how her myth developed between about 1971 and 2010.
The ‘core,’ so to speak, is the supposed letter from Takeda Shingen. Though the letter is no longer extant and may not be authentic, that’s the textual evidence on which the whole thing is based, for better or worse. So, the core:
1930: Nakayama Tarō includes the Mochizuki Chiyome letter in his A History of Japanese Miko. He says nothing about Mochizuki Chiyome being a spy or a ninja.
Then layer #1:
1971: Inagaki Shisei reads Nakayama’s A History of Japanese Miko and decides that Chiyome was a spymaster. He says nothing about Chiyome using her sexuality as a weapon; in fact, he suggests that her miko would have remained chaste.
Layer #2:
1985: Stephen K. Hayes writes about Mochizuki Chiyome, seemingly following Inagaki in claiming that Chiyome selected her girls for physical beauty but not specifically that Chiyome’s miko seduced anyone for information.
Layer #3:
1991: Nawa Yumio includes Chiyome in his Everything About Ninja. He terms Chiyome a jōnin, and may or may not have claimed she and her miko seduced men as part of their operations (still waiting on the book delivery to check).
Layer #4:
2010: Yoda and Alt include Chiyome in their Ninja Attack, along with the explicit claim that she and her agents used sex to do their job.
There are almost certainly some additional layers to be sketched in here, but I think this is enough to give us a general sense of what seems to have happened. The take-home point, in case it’s not already clear, is that none of these subsequent ‘layers’ is supported by any direct historical evidence. The approach here is not history as most of us would understand it; it’s far closer to the oral transmission of folklore or urban legends. Nobody’s entirely sure what the evidence underpinning the story might be, but it’s a great story, so we’ll go ahead and pass it on. And of course, we’re at liberty to invent whatever new details we like on the way, because what the hell, that’s how ‘ninja’ history works.
After all, what is history about if not telling a good story?
Yoda and Alt, Ninja Attack! (Tuttle, 2012), pp. 59-60.
Yoda and Alt, p. 61.
Inagaki, p. 85. Japanese: もちろん後者の巫女は前者の墜落したもので、同じ厚化粧でも春を売るためのものである。
Inagaki, p. 88. Japanese: 巫女は神に奉仕するため純無垢の処女であることが要求された。後世になって各地の巫女に春を売る者も出たけれど、千代女の時代に、 特にノノウ小路の巫女たちは、清浄の身を保っていたにちがいない。
Inagaki, p. 88. Japanese: 特に美女を集めたのだから、たとえ敵国へ潜入しても、これが武田の忍者とは気がつかなかった。
Stephen K. Hayes, The Mystic Arts of the Ninja: Hypnotism, Invisibility, and Weaponry (Contemporary Books, 1985), p. 4.
Yoshimaru, “Mochizuki Chiyome no kyomō” in Yoshimaru, Yamada, eds., Ninja no tanjō (2017), p. 285.
Yoshimaru, “Mochizuki Chiyome no kyomō,” p. 285. Japanese: 史実の「忍び(のもの)」に「上忍・中忍・下忍」という名称の階層があると見る文章はそれだけで信頼性に欠けると考えてよい。忍者関係の出版で、事実確認を怠った引き写しが行われたため、これ以降、望月千代女伝が忍者列伝の仲間入りをすることになった。