How Did the Kusarigama Come to Be a 'Ninja' Weapon?
A case of 'piggybacking' in action
In the last couple of posts we’ve provided a bit of a mini cultural history of the kusari-gama chain sickle, supposedly one of the weapons favored by the historical shinobi. Funnily enough, none of the sources we’ve looked at so far has said anything about the weapon’s use by shinobi; instead, it seems to have been a weapon used across Japanese martial arts as a whole, associated if anything with women rather than ‘ninja.’ The question then arises: When and how was the claim for the kusari-gama as a distinctive ‘ninja’ weapon first made? And, just as importantly, with what evidence was this claim supported?
Working on a Chain Gang
The kusari-gama is in fact mentioned in some of the first attempts at modern ‘ninja’ history in the early 1960s, but it took some time for the explicit claim that it was a ‘ninja’ weapon to attach to it. Ninjutsu master Hatsumi Masaaki’s English-language debut, in the pulp magazine Argosy in 1961, features a spread of what we would now think of as classic ‘ninja’ weapons and even a weighted chain, but no kusari-gama:
Martial artist Donn Draeger was, as most of us know, Hatsumi’s student, so it’s fitting that in Draeger’s 1961 article “Invisible Men With Secret Weapons,” probably his first foray onto the topic of ‘ninja’, Draeger suggests (with some typically florid prose) that the feared shadow warriors used weighted chains as their signature weapons:
Perhaps it was the barely audible sound behind him, maybe the sudden darkening as the moon slid behind a large cloud which made the sentry turn - too late - as the intruder, a hooded, black-garbed figure quickly wound a short metal chain around the sentry’s neck. The sentry struggled helplessly, almost silently, unable to cry out an alarm - he was another victim of the dreaded ninja.1
Draeger was certainly aware of the kusari-gama at this point, since it’s mentioned later in the same article, as we saw last time around. But there’s no attempt to suggest any connection to ‘ninja’; rather, Draeger seems to understand the kusari-gama as one of a number of weapons in common use in the martial arts.
The slightly less credulous martial arts author Jay Gluck, writing a year later in 1962, was also aware of the kusari-gama, but again, he doesn’t connect it specifically to ‘ninja.’ Like Draeger a year earlier, Gluck portrays the weapon as being in widespread general use:
Its most famous exponent was Yamada Shinryukan [sic]. He was hired and set off with 37 spearmen to knock off a noted swordsman, Araki Matayemon. Araki accepted solo battle against the lot, but retreated to a crowded bamboo grove where the spears and bolo-chain were useless. So ended the career of Yamada Shinryukan. Kusarigama technique is taught in karate – not because it is of any value whatever in combat (Oyama said it was useless), but because it develops speed of observation and reaction. And it’s fun.2
Gluck’s anecdote appears to be a version of the duel between Yamada Shinryūken - note spelling - and Araki Mataemon we covered a couple of posts back, and it’s probably the ultimate point of origin for the almost universal tendency to mis-romanize Yamada’s soubriquet in English-language materials.3 Gluck appears to have been skeptical of the real-world value of the weapon, though, citing the Kyokushin Karate master Oyama Masutatsu as an authority and appearing to view the kusari-gama more as training tool than as something usable in combat.
The Need to Be Different
As late as 1962, then, it seems that the kusari-gama wasn’t automatically a ‘ninja’ weapon. That had changed by 1964, though, as we can see in Hatsumi Masaaki’s children’s book Ninja Skills Illustrated: For Kids from that year:
The caption at the top-left reads as follows:
The kusari-gama was a weapon that regular samurai also used; the ninja used the ‘ninja sickle’ or shinobi-gama. The sickle part was made entirely of iron and was more compact, so it could be concealed in the pockets of a robe. It could be used both as a weapon and as a tool for opening [doors etc].
The shinobi-gama, for reference, is the one on the bottom.
One of the things I’ve found about ‘ninja’ history over the years is that, as bad as much of it is, it’s quite rare for a claim to be completely made up ex nihilo. There’s usually at least some basis out there somewhere for any most pieces of ‘ninja’ lore, even if the point of origin is a work of fiction, historically dubious, or has nothing at all to do with ‘ninja.’ What seems to be happening here is that Hatsumi is taking a weapon that definitely existed - the kusari-gama - and then grafting his own ‘ninja’ lore onto it, seemingly without providing any evidence to support the new claims. This is, in essence, what I’ve previously called “piggybacking,” and it works something like this:
Start with something almost everyone used.
Tweak it slightly to come up with a minor variation.
Claim that the slight variation was in fact the ‘ninja’ version.
Boom! Instant ‘ninja’ lore. The beauty of this approach is that you can use it for almost anything - snow sandals, tofu, shuriken, and even swords, as in the case of the alleged straight-bladed ninjatō (“Well yes, it’s true everyone used swords, but see, our ‘ninja’ swords were different!”).
I think this is so common in ‘ninja’ history because a large part of the task for the advocate of the historical ‘ninja’ is differentiation. Using the category of ‘ninja’ as a way to interpret pre-modern military history only really makes sense if the ‘ninja’ is meaningfully distinct from other warriors in terms of tools, behavior, ethics, identity, tactics, social class, or whatever you care to name. Making the case for ‘ninja’ as radically distinct from other warriors is very hard to do using the available historical evidence, but it’s what the modern cultural phenomenon of the ‘ninja’ demands, so you’re stuck with it. To paraphrase Voltaire, if unique ‘ninja’ weapons did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical here, but I can’t help noting that Hatsumi, as is his wont, appears uninterested in supporting his claim with any concrete evidence. Perhaps he’s right and the shinobi-gama was a thing, but no historical writer should be accepting this or any claim solely on Hatsumi’s say-so, which is pretty much what the subsequent history of the claim shows they did. If the shinobi-gama was a real thing, or even if shinobi were just frequent users of the regular kind of kusari-gama, surely there ought to be some kind of trace of that. I’ve searched as far as I am able to do in Japanese sources, and I’ve not found any mention of the supposed shinobi-gama that predates the 1960s. But I suppose it’s possible I’m just looking in the wrong place.
Boys and Their Toys
Once Hatsumi had put the idea of the kusari-gama as ‘ninja’ weapon out there, possibly with an assist from ‘ninja’ historian Nawa Yumio, it was inevitable that it would also appear in the work of the first wave of English-language ‘ninja’ writers. Andrew Adams’ series of 1966 and 1967 articles for Black Belt magazine, for instance, includes this print and caption:
Ninja are shown disguised as farmers, priests, and gangsters on this Edo period (1616-1868) kakemono scroll painting. Some of the “ninja” are shown using typical weapons, such as the rope-knife in the upper-right corner.
I wonder if Adams considered the possibility that the figures in question might actually be “farmers, priests, and gangsters,” rather than ‘ninja’ disguised as such.
The “rope-knife,” as Adams calls it, looks an awful lot like a kusari-gama, though evidently in 1967 Adams hadn’t yet come across the precise name for the weapon. Somebody obviously filled him in shortly afterward, as the same print appears in Adams’ 1970 book Ninja: The Invisible Assassins with the description of the weapon updated to be kusari-gama.4
Adams does, in fairness, acknowledge that the kusari-gama was not exclusively a ‘ninja’ weapon, but the transition is significant; by 1967, it was apparently considered a “typical” ‘ninja’ weapon by one of the foremost English-speaking writers in the field.5 And then, four years later, we have this in Donn Draeger’s 1971 Ninjutsu:
One composite weapon that was always part of the ninja’s paraphernalia was the kusarigama…The ninja’s kusarigama was of necessity smaller than that of the warrior, for it had to be carried concealed. But its effect, as a tool or weapon, was respected by all warriors who had faced it in combat.6
Emphasis, on the word “always,” is mine. Draeger started out with no connection between the kusari-gama and the ‘ninja’ in 1961, only to deem the weapon an essential part of every ‘ninja’s’ armory a decade later.
So the flow of ideas about ‘ninja’ and kusari-gama seems to have gone something like this:
The kusari-gama was a common martial arts weapon that everyone used. (Draeger 1961, Gluck 1962)
‘Everyone’ includes ‘ninja,’ so ‘ninja’ used the kusari-gama. In fact, ‘ninja’ developed their own special version of the kusari-gama. (Hatsumi, 1964).
The kusari-gama was used by other warriors, but it was a “typical” ninja weapon. (Adams, 1967).
All ‘ninja’ used the kusari-gama (Draeger, 1971)
Needless to say, none of (2), (3), or (4) was based on anything as mundane as new historical evidence or new reading of existing evidence. We’re not dealing with conventional history here so much as we are with something resembling urban legends or the kids’ game of Telephone, each participant adding his own embellishments over time and the story growing in the telling.
Thereafter the game of Telephone seems to have continued, from Adams on to Turnbull:
…which duly becomes the statement, in Deal’s Oxford University Press-published Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (2007), that the kusari-gama was “especially associated with ninja infiltrators.”7
So the “kusari-gama was a ninja weapon” thing, dispiritingly enough, seems like it flows through many of the well-worn channels of ‘ninja’ history - slapping the label of ‘ninja’ on everything not nailed down, claims made and accepted without evidence, and pretty much everyone copying off everyone else rather than doing any actual source checking. For what it’s worth, the actual history of the weapon seems to be interesting enough, with no need to crowbar in the ‘ninja’ at all, but perhaps that’s just me.
Anyway, by way of wrapping this little excursion up, I’d like to take a slight diversion into the realms of speculation, and tackle a completely different question:
‘Ninja’ or not, how good a weapon would the kusari-gama have been, anyway?
Donn F. Draeger, “Invisible Men with Secret Weapons” This is Japan no. 9 (September 1961), p. 209.
Jay Gluck, Zen Combat and the Secret Power Called Ki (first pub 1962, my ed. 1996), p. 148.
I don’t know where Gluck got the bamboo-grove version of the story, though. I can’t find an obvious source in the Japanese literature; pretty much every Japanese re-telling sticks to the basic plot we covered a couple of posts ago. I’ll return to this point in an upcoming post.
The caption to the same picture in Invisible Assassins is: “[N]inja were prepared for combat at all times with such typical weapons as kusari-gama (shown in upper, right-hand corner).” Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (1970; my ed., 1980), p. 120.
See e.g. Adams, Invisible Assassins, p. 55.
Draeger, Ninjtsu (1971; my ed., 1989), p. 70.
As Jura Matela pointed out in the comments to the post, Deal’s source is probably Turnbull’s Ninja: AD 1460-1650, which appears in Deal’s bibliography along with Turnbull’s 1991 Secret Warrior Cult.
“I wonder if Adams considered the possibility that the figures in question might actually be “farmers, priests, and gangsters,” rather than ‘ninja’ disguised as such.” 😂