Andrew Adams Goes to the Movies
...and confuses plot recaps with actual history
We’ve mentioned the American writer and journalist Andrew Adams a few times in these pages, as he remains to this day probably the most influential English-language ‘ninja’ author of all time. His 1970 book Ninja: The Invisible Assassins remained in print for decades and went through at least thirty-six editions, appearing in the bibliography of almost every ‘ninja’ writer who would come after him. Adams’ book is even recommended as further reading in at least one academic publication I’m aware of, and there may well be others.
Invisible Assassins is not a reliable source for history of any kind, ‘ninja’ or otherwise, and the reason why is very simple: Adams could not reliably distinguish between history and fiction. This, most people would agree, is a fairly significant problem for any non-fiction writer, and the result is that Invisible Assassins contains several ‘ninja’ episodes that never happened, blithely asserted as if they were documented historical fact. This includes episodes from the fictional ninja film Shinobi no mono (1962), which we’ve been looking at in the last few posts and which Adams seems to have treated as a documentary historical source.
The Theater of Dreams
As far as I am able to tell from looking at his writings Adams never specifically mentioned the Shinobi no mono franchise by name, but it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that he was aware of the films. Between December 1966 and February 1967, Adams published a series of three articles on the historical ‘ninja’ in the martial arts magazine Black Belt, which you can read through Google Books. For many English-speaking readers these articles would have been their first encounter with the notion of the historical ‘ninja,’ as that notion was still a relatively new one in the mid-60s. Several of the images that Adams uses to accompany his articles are immediately recognizable as stills from the Shinobi no mono series, because the Japanese graphs for “Shinobi no mono” are clearly visible on the prints themselves:
You can see from the caption in the bottom-right that Adams got these stills from the Kokusai Theater, a cinema that catered largely to the Japanese and Japanese-American community in L.A. It’s very likely that Adams saw the Shinobi no mono films either at the Kokusai Theater itself or while he was in Japan some years earlier. The New Kokusai Theater in Honolulu, Hawaii, had shown at least one film from the Shinobi no mono series as early as 1964, so it seems likely that the LA theater had shown them as well.1
There are also passages in Adams’ 1966-67 articles and his 1970 book that confirm he was aware of Shinobi no mono, though again, in neither venue does he actually name the film franchise directly:
A Japanese film company on a chance produced a low-budget film a few years ago about the ancient exploits of the ninja, based on a scientific approach to the subject. Even the movie producers were astonished at the result. They ended up with a full-scale hit on their hands.2
The “low-budget film” Adams is talking about is unquestionably Shinobi no mono. We noted a couple of posts ago that Shinobi no mono has often been hailed for its “realism” - that is, its lack of supernatural elements - and that explains why Adams describes it as taking a “scientific approach.” I’m not sure that “not obviously using magic” is the same thing as “scientific,” but whatever.
Where Fact Meets Fiction
As with Donn Draeger in our previous post, it’s not surprising that Adams knew about Shinobi no mono, given how close he was to both the ‘ninja’ ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō and the martial artist Hatsumi Masaaki. Okuse, after all, had worked with Murayama Tomoyoshi as Murayama was writing the original novel on which the film was based, and Hatsumi himself had been a consultant for Shinobi no mono. Okuse is specifically credited in the acknowledgments to Invisible Assassins, while a youthful Hatsumi appears in several of the photos that accompany Adams’ articles in Black Belt.
So if some of Adams’ historical claims in Invisible Assassins echo scenes in Shinobi no mono, that would probably be because the claims come from the same source - that is to say, Okuse and Hatsumi’s visions of the historical ‘ninja’ - and they made their way into both works independently.
That’s a reasonable position, but there is at least one claim in Adams’ book that could only have come from Shinobi no mono, at least as far as I can see. It’s this one:
One of the most daring and imaginative assassination attempts was made by famed ninja hero Ishikawa Goemon. After tremendous efforts, he succeeded in sneaking into the attic over the bedroom of the great samurai general Nobunaga Oda. After Nobunaga had retired for the night, Goemon made a small hole in the ceiling just above the general’s head. Then, noiselessly he lowered a thin thread until it hung suspended just above the lips of his sleeping victim. Taking out a vial of deadly liquid poison, the ninja sent the poison, drop by drop, down along the thread and into the mouth of Nobunaga. The light-sleeping general, ever alert for such attempts on his life, managed to awaken in time to prevent Goemon from succeeding with his diabolical trick.3
Yeah…no. This is a scene recap, not something that actually happened. It’s the climactic scene from the first Shinobi no mono movie:
OK, but could Adams have gotten the poison-thread story from some other source, maybe? I don’t think so, for the following reasons:
Adams gives no source for the story - in fact, Invisible Assassins contains no source information of any kind.
We can clearly show that Adams was aware of the Shinobi no mono films.
This is not the only point in Invisible Assassins where Adams appears to be unaware that a story he’s presenting is fictional.
It appears that when Adams wrote Invisible Assassins, Shinobi no mono was the only possible source for the story. There is, so far as I can tell, no other work before 1970 in which Goemon, the poison-thread technique, and Nobunaga had appeared together.
Ishikawa Goemon was a hugely popular character in premodern and modern Japanese media, so there are tons of stories about him over the centuries. But in doing the research for my upcoming article, I checked every single Goemon story I could find, and none of them mentions a poison thread or has him trying to kill Nobunaga. So Goemon’s poison-thread thing appears to be unique to the film Shinobi no mono - it isn’t even in the original novel by Murayama Tomoyoshi on which the film was based.
Unless I’m really missing something, it’s as simple as this: Adams watched a ninja movie and presented one of its scenes to his readers as something that had actually happened. The poison-thread thing isn’t an historical event from the 1580s; it’s a scene from a film that had been released eight years before the book was written.
What makes this still more hilarious is that even Black Belt magazine - yes, that Black Belt magazine, purveyor par excellence of absolute nonsense about East Asian history - had warned its readers not to take the Shinobi no mono films as historical fact. One of these warnings had appeared in the same issue in which Adams published one of his ‘ninja’ articles:
One thing all these movies have in common, they are based more or less on real historical incidents. But the movies play fast and loose with the facts, so if you’re planning to learn any real Japanese history at these films, forget it. These films are intended to portray one thing - action. And they give the customers plenty of that. The producers don’t intend to let a few historical facts stand in the way of a good adventure yarn.4
Emphasis mine. When even Black Belt magazine has better critical faculties than you do, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
One thing I’ve long wondered about, by the way, is what the hell Adams thought he was doing in writing Invisible Assassins. Was he misled, perhaps? Did Okuse or Hatsumi lead him to believe that the climactic scene from Shinobi no mono was a real historical event, or was that his own assumption? Did he try to verify a source for the story outside of Shinobi no mono, or did he not care that much so long as the book sold? Was he naively swept along in the enthusiasm for this new and exciting ‘ninja’ thing from Japan, or did he know on some level that a lot of this stuff was dubious? Unfortunately, since Adams passed away in 2010, we’re unlikely to ever know for certain.
So we’ve shown, I think, that Shinobi no mono was more than simply a popular ‘ninja’ movie; it appears to have been treated as an historical source by two of the most influential English-language ‘ninja’ writers of the 20th century.
We’ve drifted a little way from the original topic of ‘ninja vs. samurai’ that I set out to explore, alas, so for next time I’ll bring our discussion back to that topic, and wrap up everything we’ve covered in the last few posts.
Anon, “Japanese Soft-Pedalling Sex Themes in Movies,” Honolulu Advertiser December 10th, 1964, p. 18
Adams, “A Leap into the Supernatural” Black Belt December 1966, p. 17, and Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (1970; my copy, 1980), p. 29); the text is basically the same in both venues.
Adams, Invisible Assassins, p. 160. Goemon is also mentioned as an enemy of Nobunaga on p. 39 of the same text.
Anon, “Shin Shinobi no mono: Ninjitsu Spy: Action Aplenty in Ninja Movies” Black Belt January 1967, p. 50.
Thanks for doing this. While I still have to watch my DVDs of Shinobi no Mono, I have been told that the dripping poison on a thread onto the sleeping victim scene was "borrowed " and put in the classic James Bond film "You Only Live Twice. "