Garlic Chives and Other Types of Shuriken
More Bad History from the Usual Suspects
In the previous post, we showed that (a) the term shuriken in pre-1960s sources seems to have usually meant a throwing-knife, (b) we could find no evidence that anyone actually used star-shaped weapons, and (c) there was no evidence that either knife-type or star-type shuriken were associated with the historical shinobi.
Shinobi Did Not Use Shuriken
On this last point, it’s worth noting that a couple of months ago in June 2024 Yamada Yūji, the Mie University Ninja Center scholar I’ve mentioned before, gave a public address in which he stated:
There is no record of ninja having used shuriken.
「忍者が手裏剣を使った記録はありません。」
Well, there you go. Nice and simple, no muss, no fuss. I might quibble with Yamada’s casual use of the word ‘ninja’ here, because we’re talking about the historical shinobi rather than the fictional construct of the ‘ninja,’ but we’re not in any real disagreement over the main point.
Yamada’s statement may come as a bit of a surprise, because since the 1960s ‘ninja’ historians and enthusiasts have spent hundreds of pages relaying all sorts of claims about ‘ninja’ and how they used shuriken. It’s common knowledge among ‘ninja’ enthusiasts, for instance, that shinobi used shuriken to distract or wound rather than kill, a claim made to English-speaking audiences by the ‘ninja’ writer Andrew Adams as far back as 1970.1
This all seems a bit difficult to believe, frankly. Is it really possible that a staple element in ‘ninja’ lore for 60+ years now, the notion that the shinobi used shuriken throwing stars, could have no historical evidence behind it?
How Did We Get Here?
Stephen Turnbull’s 2017 Ninja: Unmasking the Myth provides what appears to be a pretty good basic narrative of how the notion of star-shaped shuriken as a ‘ninja’ weapon got started. The first point would be the writings of the flamboyant martial artist Fujita Seiko in the 1930s.2 Seiko, who claimed to be the 14th-generation grand master of his style of Koga ninjutsu, includes some pictures of star-shaped throwing weapons in his 1936 book Secrets of Ninjutsu (Ninjutsu hiroku).3 Turnbull thinks that Seiko’s pictures were probably based on actual items owned by one of the Tokugawa shoguns, and these in turn may have been weapons used in Edo-era martial arts training.4
It’s not clear, though, that Seiko explicitly made the argument that shuriken (of whatever kind) were regularly used by practitioners of his version of ninjutsu. His 1938 book What is Ninjutsu? doesn’t mention shuriken at all, and even his postwar Shuriken: An Illustrated Guide (1964) doesn’t say anything about ‘ninja’ specializing in shuriken.5 Rather, the impression you get from the latter book is that training in thrown blades was an element in a number of schools of late medieval and Edo-period schools of martial arts, and also that most of the blades in question were darts or throwing-knives. All of this is consistent with what we saw in the previous post, incidentally.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that Seiko himself seems to have had a ludicrously broad definition of what a shuriken was. His 1964 An Illustrated Guide seems to class as shuriken basically any weapon that was thrown with the hand, including rocks and thrown spears, neither of which most readers would think of when they hear the word shuriken.6 Nor, across any of his works, does Seiko have any concrete historical examples of anyone using shuriken in anger. Except, of course, for this:
Shuriken originated with Prince Yamato Takeru…One day, Prince Takeru was returning from subjugating the barbarians in the east when he stopped at Ashigara Pass…As he was gathering food the Deity of the Slope transformed into a white deer and approached him. Scooping up some of his leftover meal in his hand, he threw scraps of Nira garlic chives into the eyes of the deer, killing it. This incident, which is the first use of Shuriken, is recorded in both the Records of Ancient Matter[s] and Chronicles of Japan.
Shuriken Jutsu is the art of throwing a blade concealed in the palm at a distant enemy.7
Yes, reader - the deadly Garlic Shuriken.
You’ll probably have noticed that Seiko’s “first use of Shuriken” doesn’t involve anyone actually using shuriken, even in Seiko’s own definition of the term. If a semi-mythical dude throwing leftover garlic chives at ghostly deer is the best Seiko could do as an historical example of shuriken, that’s probably not a good sign.8
More Horseshit from Okuse
To continue following Turnbull’s narrative, it seems that after Fujita Seiko had briefly introduced the notion of star-shaped shuriken it would be the well-known ‘ninja’ ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō who would then pick the shuriken thing up and really run with it. Okuse appears to have commissioned some actual shuriken based on Fujita’s designs, and included their photos in a 1956 pamphlet on what he thought ninjutsu was. Okuse’s pictures then appear to have been copied into several widely-read fictional media, the novel Yagyū bugeichō (1956-1958), the manga Ninja bugeichō (1959-1962), and then the novel Shinobi no mono (1960-1964) by the well-known playwright and prominent Communist Murayama Tomoyoshi.9 Having read the latter, I can tell you that Murayama has his ‘ninja’ use shuriken quite a bit, including in one assassination attempt on Oda Nobunaga. Murayama also includes a reasonably lengthy section about the different forms of shuriken that were used by what he believed the historical ‘ninja’ to have been, for which he specifically credits Okuse.10 When Murayama’s novel was then made into a hit film of the same name two years later in 1962, with black-clad ‘ninja’ using the classic star-shaped weapons, that pretty much cemented the association between ‘ninja’ and shuriken in the minds of Japanese audiences.
What the above suggests is that the connection between ‘ninja’ and shuriken was therefore made in the public consciousness primarily through the depiction of shuriken in works of historical fiction, not by any clear body of historical evidence. In fact, it’s worth noting that the Edo-period military manuals such as the well-known ‘ninja manual’ Bansen shūkai that provide the basis for much of what is thought of as ‘ninja lore’ to this day never mention shuriken as a specific weapon.11
You wouldn’t necessarily know this from Okuse’s writings, however, because Okuse made all kinds of assertions about the historical shinobi’s use of shuriken, none of which seem to have had any real evidence to support them. I want to focus on one specific example, because it’s going to crop up again in a very different context a bit later. It comes in a section of Okuse’s 1964 Ninja: Secret Techniques and Real Examples where he talks about the ‘ninja’ use of poisons:
This drug [just described] would kill someone by getting into the bloodstream and paralyzing the nerves that controlled movement, breathing, and so forth. It was used by smearing it on shuriken, arrow tips, or blow-darts. The main ingredient was the juice of the wolf’s bane plant…When targeting someone with a shuriken, if one did not have wolf’s-bane juice, it is said one would throw the shuriken after first coating it with horse dung. Horse dung contains clostridium tetani bacteria, so it is said that the person struck by the shuriken would often die of tetanus [erysipelas?].12
Oh yeah? Name ‘em, then. If this happened “often” (koto ga ōi) it should be a simple matter to give the names and dates of the people who died after being hit with a shit-coated shuriken. That is of course unless Okuse just made the whole thing up, either out of his own imagination or based on something he saw in a novel or film, and passed it off to his readers as a real thing. With depressing inevitability, Okuse’s unsupported claims about aconite poison and horse dung have since been reproduced for English-speaking audiences, including in the first answer in the Quora thread I cited above.
Most of the major English-language ‘ninja’ historians such as Adams, Draeger, and Turnbull are no better, largely because they were all basically working with either Okuse or the martial arts instructor Hatsumi Masaaki, who was also all-in on the claim of shuriken as a common weapon of the ‘ninja.’ Hatsumi put the star-shaped shuriken front and center in the the May 1961 photo shoot in Argosy magazine that first brought him to US audiences, and his 1981 English-language book Ninjutsu: History and Tradition claims that:
Perhaps the most well-known and characteristic weapon of the ninja is the shuriken or throwing blade. Historically, the ninja used shuriken that covered a wide variety of designs…13
As you might expect, Hatsumi gives no evidence to support his claim that ‘ninja’ regularly used shuriken, and as his book contains no citations or bibliography, it’s not possible for the reader to tell what his evidence might be. Knowing this, when you come across specific claims like this from Draeger:
Since each ninja designed his own particular type, there were countless patterns of these small handheld throwing blades…A ninja usually carried nine of them…14
or this, from Adams:
Ninja constantly practiced hurling the small shuriken at tree trunks, posts, and other fixed targets until they could practically hit a dime with them…15
…you can be pretty certain that these claims are unsupported by any historical evidence.
Stars in their Eyes
I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers still find this hard to wrap their heads around. Surely there’s got to be some basis for shinobi using shuriken? Something so widely attested-to and prominent in pop culture couldn’t just have been invented in the early 1960s, right?
I guess I’d say it absolutely could have been, and that once you grasp that, you’re on your way to getting a much clearer picture about what ‘ninja’ history is and how it works. There are aspects of the shuriken thing - historical claims made and accepted without evidence, a heavy reliance on fictional works instead of historical sources, the ‘anchoring’ of largely fictional claims to things that really existed, a tendency to exploit changing word meanings - that are very much on-brand for ‘ninja’ history as a whole.
While I think there will be value in using the shuriken thing as a case study to analyze the patterns of bad ninja history, it’s time to move on to look at some other aspects of the field before we do that.
So for next time, let’s take on perhaps the most famous of all the online ‘ninja’ debates:
Did ‘ninja’ really wear black?
“The multi-pointed shuriken…were mostly nuisance weapons, aimed at the eyes, temple, brow, throat, or heart. In this way they were designed to stop pursuers only momentarily, or by striking one of their arms or hands they could prevent opponents from effectively wielding a sword.” Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (Ohara Publications, 1973; first pub. 1970), p. 61. It’s probably redundant to point this out by now, but Adams offers no evidence to support his assertions, and his book has neither source citations nor bibliography.
Fujita Seiko 藤田西湖 (1899-1966).
Ninjutsu hiroku 忍術秘録. I’m having to rely on Turnbull’s description here because Ninjutsu hiroku is really hard to get hold of. There are no copies in US libraries as far as I can tell, and the original is held by only five libraries even in Japan. There’s a 1991 reproduction which is a bit more widely available, and it’s possible to purchase it in Japan, though it goes for $70-90 plus shipping and handling. I’m working on having it purchased by ASU and will write more in a subsequent post when I get it.
Turnbull, “A Star is Born” in Ninja: Unmasking the Myth (2017), pp. 168-9.
Both of these books have been reproduced and translated by Eric Shahan: What is Ninjutsu? (Ninjutsu to wa 忍術とは) in 2021, and Shuriken: An Illustrated Guide (Zukai shuriken jutsu 図解手裏剣術) in 2020. What’s especially helpful about these books is that they reproduce the original text, which can often be very hard to get, so Shahan deserves a lot of credit for doing this. The translation is fine and I would recommend the books to those interested in reading more about Fujita’s thoughts (weird as they may have been), with the caveat that the books are not well edited and could have used some closer proofreading.
Fujita, trans. Shahan, Shuriken: An Illustrated Guide, pp. 17-25.
Shuriken: An Illustrated Guide p. 57. Garlic chives (nira 韮, Chinese jiu cai 韮采) are delicious green plant with a funky garlic-y flavor. They’re a key seasoning in boiled dumplings - if you’ve ever had ‘dumplings with pork and chives’ in a Chinese restaurant, the ‘chives’ were probably nira/jiu cai.
Yamato Takeru is a semi-mythical prince of the Japanese imperial family who was traditionally supposed to have lived from 71 to 114 CE, so this is not exactly a clear-cut historical personage.
Turnbull, “A Star is Born,” p. 170. Yagyū bugeichō 柳生武芸帳 (‘Warrior Records of the Yagyū Clan’) was an unfinished serialized historical novel by the author Gomi Yasusuke 五味康祐 (1921-1980). Ninja bugeichō (‘Ninja Warrior Records’) was a manga series between 1959 and 1962 by the artist and author Shirato Sanpei 白土三平 (1932-2021).
See e.g. Murayama Tomoyoshi 村山知義 (1901-1977), Shinobi no mono 忍びの者 (Iwanami Shoten, 2003 reprint; first pub. Nov. 1960 onward), vol. 1 p. 196 (shuriken ambush) and p. 415 (mention of Okuse’s assistance).
Bansen shūkai 万川集海, a celebrated ‘ninjutsu manual’ written c. 1675. The point about shuriken’s absence from military manuals is noted by Turnbull, “A Star is Born,” p. 167 and Anthony Cummins, In Search of the Ninja: The Historical Truth of Ninjutsu (History Press, 2012), p. 163. I think ‘ninja’ historians are generally far too uncritical regarding the content of all of the many Edo-period ‘military manuals’ that purport to provide the history of the ‘real shinobi’ and would count Cummins among them, so I don’t generally recommend his work.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, p. 279. Japanese text: この薬は、血液に入って運動、呼吸等の神経を麻痺させ人を殺すものである。手裏剣、矢先、吹矢に塗って用いた。材料はトリカブトの汁である。[…] 手裏剣で人を狙う時、この毒汁のない時は、馬糞をつけて打てという。馬糞には破傷風の菌があるから、打たれた人は丹毒にかかって死ぬことが多いという。I’m not completely sure how to translate 丹毒 because from context it should probably be ‘tetanus,’ but in most medical contexts the term is translated “erysipelas,” a skin disease that according to the NIH “can be serious but rarely fatal.” Of course, it’s possible Okuse was just making the whole thing up, so there may be no point in getting the terminology straight anyway.
An attentive reader might note how often Okuse uses the construction to iu という, which means something like “they say” or “it is said.” She might also realize that Okuse appears to be subtly hedging his assertions here, almost as if he were aware he was not on very solid ground with his assertions…
Hatsumi Masaaki (plus unknown translator?), Ninjutsu: History and Tradition (Unique Publications, 1981), p. 165.
Donn Draeger, Ninjutsu (1989, first pub. 1971), p. 72.
Adams, Invisible Assassins, p. 61.