Nobody Really Knows What to Do With Yamada Fūtarō

Works like 'Ninja Lady Magic' reveal a mental block for many 'ninja' authors

Nakajima Sadao, dir. Kunoichi ninpō (Tōei Studios, 1964); brightness adjusted.

Over the course of the last few posts we’ve looked at how movie adaptations of works by the Japanese novelist Yamada Fūtarō succeeded in putting the word kunoichi on everyone’s lips in mid-1960s Japan. We sampled one of said movies, the 1964 Ninja Lady Magic, and noted that the action depicted in the movie was so over the top that it obliges us to read the film more or less as comedy. How else, after all, should we read a scene involving a female ninja using magic to trap her male victim inside her during coitus - a moment tastefully represented in the film itself by the above image of a clam on a seashore?

The absurdity of Ninja Lady Magic and other kunoichi films is so obvious that in 2006 the kunoichi genre managed to attract the interest of French Neo-Surrealists, in the shape of a journal article I’ll discuss in the next couple of posts. A group of novels and films this bizarre, one might reasonably assume, is simply a literary curiosity; it couldn’t exert any influence at all on straight ninja history.

Right?

Just the Facts, Ma’am

So here’s the essence of the problem: Your average ninja writer doesn’t really know how to deal with fiction.

I mean that in two senses. First, there’s the narrow sense, in that many ninja writers can’t identify fictional characters or events for what they are. Second is the broader sense, in that even when a ninja author does realize a given text is fictional, the interpretive lens with which he approaches that text remains rigidly historical. Works of literary fiction, in the ninja-historical mindset, are valuable only insofar as they can reveal to us to the supposed truth of the historical ‘ninja.’ So when we read historical documents, we read them as history, and when we read novels, manga, films, or plays, we read them as history too.

The problem with this approach is that it’s limited, one-dimensional, and dull, obliging you to ignore large parts of the ninja phenomenon as a whole. Consider, for instance, the works of the Japanese author Yamada Fūtarō, on whose novels the movies we’ve been discussing were based. Yamada was an incredibly prolific and popular author, who by my count published no fewer than twenty-four ninja novels just in the ten years between 1959 and 1969, precisely the period the ‘ninja’ thing was getting up and running in Japan. His work is still being read to this day; his 1964 novel Ninja Magic: The Eight Dogs Chronicles (Ninpō Hakkenden), for instance, was in print as recently as 2010 and was adapted into comic form last year.¹ So if we were to try to assess what the ninja phenomenon as a whole actually is - by, say, comparing the published page counts and readership of works of fiction versus works of history - Yamada’s fictional works alone would absolutely dwarf any and all attempts at outlining the history of the ‘ninja.’

Yamada Fūtarō (1922-2001). Source: Yamada Fūtarō Museum. Funnily enough in PR shots Yamada is almost always depicted with a cigarette in his hand - see here.

The problem for would-be ‘ninja’ historians, though, was that Yamada was so incredibly prolific and so associated with the word “ninja” in ‘60s Japan that he was very difficult to avoid completely. In his early series of articles in Black Belt magazine in 1966 and ‘67, for instance, the US journalist Andrew Adams gives Yamada a begrudging nod:

Futaro Yamada has gained popularity for his ninja stories with the angle on sex. However, his ninja are mostly women and a product of his vivid imagination since female ninja were few and far between in the old days.²

Note that Adams appears to have little or no interest in the literary merits of Yamada’s work; he cares about what he believes to be the actual history of “the old days,” rather than what Yamada might have produced with his “vivid imagination.” This point is expanded in more detail in Adams’ godawful 1970 book Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, which unfortunately sold incredibly well:

Stories of ninja exploits are usually based on fact, but the details are often only the imagination of the writer or raconteur. Now that new attention has been focused on Ninjitsu, fanciful ninja tales have sprung up everywhere, such as those by Futaro Yamada. This Japanese novelist concentrates exclusively on sex-angled stories of kunoichi, or female ninja, to a point where the reader might be led to believe that most of the feudal-age secret agents were women. Actually, female ninja usually appeared on the periphery of Ninjitsu activities.³

As before, Adams appears unwilling to consider that Yamada’s work might simply be complete and total fiction. At both the start and the end of this paragraph, for instance, we can see Adams reassuring the reader that there is some historical truth behind ninja fiction in general and Yamada’s stuff in particular, that female ‘ninja’ did actually exist, even if it was only “on the periphery.”

This reluctance to concede that some ninja stuff is in fact 100% just plain made up strikes me as very odd, by the way. It reminds me in some ways of the religious fundamentalist’s insistence that either all of a holy text is true or none of it is; it’s almost like Adams believes that he can’t afford to acknowledge that any aspect of ninja lore could be completely fictional, lest the whole edifice crumble as a result.

Everything is History On Some Level

Adams’ way of approaching Yamada’s oeuvre may, perhaps, remind some readers of the “kernel of truth” argument first put forward by Itō Gingetsu in 1909, and Adams was not the only one to apply this logic. Martial artist Donn F. Draeger’s influential Ninjutsu, first published the year after Adams’ book in 1971, doesn’t specifically mention Yamada, but it does contain possibly the single most ludicrous claim of all time concerning the history of the ‘ninja’:

So great would be [the kunoichi’s] physical beauty that the lord could not resist her charms and would order her to occupy his bed. It was then a simple matter for the woman ninja to introduce an appropriate poison into her female organ that, later during the night’s sexual play, would poison the lord and cause his death.⁴

I pointed out several months ago that this claim is obviously total and utter nonsense, and wondered where the hell Draeger could have gotten the idea. And now I think we know. He got it right here:

Shimada, dir., Kunoichi ninpō (1964)

My guess is that Draeger saw Ninja Lady Magic while in Japan in 1964. He realized, as any reasonable adult would, that the ‘ninja techniques’ in the film couldn’t possibly be real as depicted. But remember, the “kernel of truth” argument tells us that all ‘ninja’ lore must be based on something that happened in the real world. So, using that logic, a man dies horribly disfigured after having sex with a female ninja?

Well, then, what must really have happened is that she used some kind of poison.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

And if this sounds implausible, even insane, then clearly you haven’t been here very long. It wouldn’t even be the only time in the same book that Draeger took a film scene and presented it to his readers as something that had really happened.

Yamada Fūtarō: Not a Realistic Novelist

The point I take from the above two examples is that Adams and Draeger both seem to have been aware of, yet slightly confused by, the kunoichi works of Yamada Fūtarō. Seemingly unable to wrap their heads around the idea of literary fiction, they plowed ahead regardless, assuming that works of fiction by Yamada and others had to have some kind of historical correlate, and that wrong-headed assumption turned their purportedly historical works into unreliable mixes of fact and fiction.

One might, perhaps, imagine that subsequent authors would do better, avoiding the mistakes that Draeger and Adams made and improving the quality of material on the ‘ninja’ over time. One would be wrong, because even more recent treatises on the ‘ninja’ that do show some awareness of Yamada still seem confused about the nature of his work. Take for instance Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda’s 2010 Ninja Attack, published by repeat offender Tuttle, which gives us this:

[Sarutobi] Sasuke’s exploits inspired a new generation of storytellers who came of age after World War II. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, ninja stories fueled a renaissance of Japanese fiction. Writer Yamada Futaro penned a series of bestselling historical novels that introduced ninja as highly trained human beings rather than supermen, tricking opponents with camouflage and subterfuge rather than spells.⁵

I’m an admirer of Yoda and Alt’s overall body of work, but they’re simply wrong about Yamada’s ninja being “highly trained human beings.” On the contrary, Yamada’s work is probably the most notable example (until Naruto, anyway) of the enduring popularity of the magic-using version of the ninja, even after the appearance of the ‘realistic’ version.⁶ Take a look through the Fandom Wiki for Basilisk, the only one of Yamada’s ninja works to reach any significant English-speaking audience, and you’ll immediately see what I mean.

The Teleological Ninja

But there’s something else in Yoda and Alt’s brief narrative that I want to call attention to, and it’s this. Underpinning their account of postwar ninja fiction is what academics would call a teleological narrative - that is to say, a just-so story of progress which tells us that certain aspects of history have all been building towards a pre-ordained end point. Academics tend to distrust teleological narratives for a variety of reasons; for one, they’re often too neat and simple, concealing or ignoring other ways in which a given phenomenon could have developed or could be interpreted.

As far as ‘ninja’ historians are concerned, the end point in question would be for the fictional ninja to come to resemble his supposed historical counterpart. This ‘realistic’ ninja, ideally, would be much like those seen in the 1962 film Shinobi no mono, whose amazing skills are the result of arduous training rather than magic. The idea that the ‘realistic’ ninja is the end point to which all of earlier ‘ninja’ lore was building prompts Stephen K. Hayes to write things like this:

Of course, the exaggerated tales [of ninja in Japanese history] are based on roots of reality, which were then nurtured into the flowering of myth and misunderstanding.⁷

Note the “of course,” because we enlightened moderns live at the end point - the telos, to use the academic term - of ‘ninja’ history. We now understand the true nature of the ‘ninja’ phenomenon, having discerned it from the midst of centuries of “misunderstanding.” Draeger writes something similar, too:

As reports of persons who had seen ninja perform skillful feats accumulated over the years, exaggerations of facts made the ninja out to be a superhuman.⁸

Again, the assumption underlying this statement is that we, from our enlightened modern viewpoint, are capable of perceiving these “exaggerations” for what they are, unlike those superstitious peasants in the dark ages.

I suspect Yoda and Alt’s mistaken characterization of Yamada as a writer of ‘realistic’ ninja novels happens in the slipstream of this narrative; and I think that this narrative also helps to explain why so many ninja writers either ignore or don’t know what to do with works of literary fiction.⁹ If you’re convinced that you now know the truth of the ‘ninja’ better than all who came before you, then literary works which do not depict ‘ninja’ as you think they actually were - works which stubbornly insist on portraying ninja with magical powers rather than as highly-skilled real-world warriors - become evolutionary throwbacks, flawed and backward-pointing representations of an obscured and abstracted truth, and can thus be mostly ignored.

The end result of this is perhaps the central flaw of English-language ‘ninja’ history: convinced it didn’t need to take works of fiction seriously, it failed to realize that the same fiction was in fact the source for many of its supposedly historical claims.

I’d like to develop this point about how postwar ‘ninja’ discourse connects to postwar ideas of enlightenment and progress a bit further, so in the next post I’ll consider how ‘ninja’ lore, both fictional and supposedly historical, leant heavily on the rhetoric of “science” during the 1960s in Japan. Assuming we have space, I’d also like to introduce a completely different study of kunoichi films, one that (in perhaps typically French fashion) finds their meaning in the very fact of their obvious absurdity.

1. Ninpō hakkenden 忍法八犬伝. I have a copy of this novel, which also stars a squad of female ninja, and parts of it are frankly creepy in terms of how they portray the women’s bodies and activities. I’ll probably get around to writing about it at some point.

2. Adams, “Last of the Ninja” Black Belt Feb. 1967, p. 33.

3. Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (1970; my edition, 1989), p. 158.

4. Donn F. Draeger, Ninjutsu (1971; my edition, 1989), p. 54.

5. Yoda and Alt, Ninja Attack! True Tales of Samurai, Assassins, and Outlaws (Tuttle, 2010), p. 192.

6. What’s weird is that the same book also features a run-down of some of Yamada’s hilariously absurd kunoichi techniques, including - as you’ll see - a few that we’ve mentioned in the previous couple of posts. So Yoda and Alt are clearly familiar with Yamada’s more fantastical inclinations, but I can’t really tell from the way the kunoichi techniques are presented whether Yoda and Alt intend for the reader to take these techniques seriously or whether the section is there just for comedy value. I mean, the techniques themselves are obviously fictional, but given the header stating that “Many kunoichi techniques are believed to have been explicitly sexual in nature” and the fact that the broader section on kunoichi argues that they did exist, I’m kind of confused as to what Yoda and Alt were going for.

7. Stephen K. Hayes, The Mystic Arts of the Ninja: Hypnotism, Invisibility, and Weaponry (Contemporary Books, 1985), p. 133.

8. Donn F. Draeger, Ninjutsu (1971; my ed, 1989), p. 96.

9. Here’s another example, if you need one, from the same publisher that puts out a lot of Anthony Cummins’ stuff. Needless to say, ninpō in Yamada’s work absolutely does not mean “codes and laws of the Ninja” - it’s magic, as we’ve repeatedly seen, and it looks very much as if the author of the book in question wasn’t familiar with any of Yamada’s stuff.