Is the 'Ninja vs. Samurai' Thing Actually Communist Propaganda?

Shirato Sanpei's ninja manga of the early '60s

Image created with Adobe Firefly.

A reasonably common claim about the historical ‘ninja’ is that they were of a lower social class than their supposed antagonists, the samurai. You can find this idea fairly easily in the English-language literature: Stephen Turnbull tells us in 2003 that “many ninja had their origins in the lower social classes,” while Stephen K. Hayes writes in 2011 that “ninja were commoners, far below the exalted status of the samurai warrior class.”¹ This claim is unlikely to be true, since a lot of supposed historical ‘ninja’ were samurai by any reasonable definition. Nevertheless, quite a few authors make a point of remarking on the hatred that existed between ‘ninja’ and samurai. Donn Draeger, for instance, tells us that:

Samurai warriors looked down upon [ninja] as traitorous cowards. Since they were regarded as a pariah class and considered as something less than human, ninja who were captured by warriors usually suffered a horrible death. They might be boiled alive in oil, or have their skin slowly peeled from their bodies.²

Yikes. Even less credulous studies of the ‘ninja,’ such as John Man’s 2012 Ninja: 1000 Years of the Shadow Warrior, stick fairly closely to the idea that ninjutsu had its origins in peasant communities obliged to defend themselves against the depredations of the warrior class. Man writes, for instance, that “lower-class peasant violence” against roving bands of warriors during the late 14th century would become one of the “elements that would make up the ninja ethos.”³

What all of the above writers appear to have missed is that this claim is an intensely political one. The argument, basically, is that over time the lower social class - the ‘ninja’ - devised their own ways of fighting in order to resist the oppressive samurai. This is why I termed the ‘ninja vs. samurai’ thing the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis a couple of posts ago - it is, in many respects, an echo of the Marxist idea of historical class struggle. The idea of ‘ninja vs. samurai’ as class struggle is, I should say, utter nonsense from an historical point of view, but let’s suspend that judgment for the time being. If we understand the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis first and foremost as a political claim rather than an historical one, that will give us some clues as to where and when it first emerged.

Prewar Japan: Not a Good Place to Be Left-Wing

The idea of the ‘ninja’ is, as I’ve repeatedly argued, basically a 20th century one, which was first aired around 1909 and smoldered away in the background for a few decades before blowing up in the 1960s. So a good place to start looking is in the writings of the earliest proponents of the historical ‘ninja,’ namely Itō Gingetsu and Fujita Seiko.

Gingetsu, a journalist and critic by trade, began to write on the topic of ninjutsu from around 1909 onward. He, like many other people in prewar Japan, at first understood ninjutsu as a form of literal magic, though further research in mostly Edo-period sources led him to conclude that there had in fact been a form of spycraft by the same name earlier in Japanese history. He is in that sense the originator of the ‘ninja’ hypothesis, though at this stage, between 1909 and 1930 or so, it was still in a fairly rudimentary form, missing many of the elements we now associate with the ‘ninja.’ Gingetsu was also responsible for what I believe is the first discussion of anything resembling ‘ninja’ in the English language, in 1918.

As far as I can see, though, Gingetsu never mentions the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis in his writings. Gingetsu understood the practitioner of ninjutsu (ninjutsusha) to have been part of the general military apparatus of many feudal warlords, and does not seem to have suggested that ninjutsusha were mostly peasants or that their activities brought them into ethical or social conflict with other warriors. That the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis is missing from Gingetsu’s work is not particularly surprising. In 1911, two years after Gingetsu’s first piece on ninjutsu, came the High Treason Incident, in which a motley group of Socialists and Anarchists were arrested for an alleged plot to assassinate the Emperor Meiji. From then on the Japanese government was on even higher alert than it already had been about anything that suggested Socialism or Communism, so even if Gingetsu had believed that the ninjutsusha were peasants resisting their samurai overlords, writing that openly might not have been wise.

Fujita Seiko: Militarist Collaborator

As far as I can tell the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis is also absent from the prewar writings of Gingetsu’s spiritual successor, a flamboyant fabulist named Fujita Seiko. Seiko, who claimed to be the 14th generation Grand Master of Koga-style ninjutsu, built extensively on Gingetsu’s earlier work and was probably the one responsible for bringing the so-called ‘ninja bible,’ the 1676 military manual Bansen shūkai, to broader public attention. Much like Gingetsu, Seiko seems to have understood ninjutsusha as being agents within a larger conventional military structure, rather than defiant peasants or warriors who refused to follow the ‘samurai way.’

Between Gingetsu and Seiko’s time a lot had changed in Japan, mostly for the worse. In 1925, the Japanese government passed the notorious Peace Preservation Laws, which allowed the Japanese secret police almost unlimited powers to root out and destroy subversive elements such as Socialist and Communist groups. Not that Seiko, as far as I can tell, had anything to worry about - quite the contrary, in fact. In 1931 the Imperial Japanese Army, acting entirely outside of civilian command, annexed the northern Chinese region of Manchuria. Six years later, in 1937, that tipped over into a full-on shooting war between Japan and China, which would last for another eight brutal years. After the 1937 invasion of China, Seiko could be found as an instructor at the Japanese Army’s spy school, helping out the war effort. Leaving aside the morality of aiding an institution as brutal and malevolent as the IJA, then, it was highly unlikely that someone in Seiko’s position would go around putting forth the idea of ‘ninja’ as an armed proletariat rising up against their oppressors.

The point I’m making is that in the context of prewar Japan (roughly 1910 to 1945), the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis would probably have gone down extremely poorly, even if that was the conclusion that Gingetsu or Seiko had in fact drawn from their materials, which it doesn’t seem like they had.

So, as far as I can tell the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis isn’t there before the end of World War II, or at least, it was not openly expressed in the early ‘ninja’ literature.

Those Dang Commie Ninjas

You may, perhaps, think that I’m over-interpreting this, that the idea of armed conflict between higher and lower social classes does not automatically evoke Marxist notions of class struggle. That’s a fair argument, but I’d counter by pointing out that when we get into the postwar period, some of the best-known and most influential films and manga about ‘ninja,’ the ones that did the most to popularize the newly invented concept, were written by people whose politics were quite a way left of center. I have in mind here four individuals, namely the manga artist Shirato Sanpei, the novelist and playwright Murayama Tomoyoshi, and the film directors Yamamoto Satsuo and Ōshima Nagisa.

Shirato Sanpei (1932-2021). Image source.

Let’s start with Shirato Sanpei, the author of the very popular manga series Ninja: The Arts of War (Ninja bugeichō), published in seventeen volumes between 1959 and 1962.⁴ Luckily for you people, I have all seventeen of ‘em in my office - yes, that’s what I do with my ASU research funds - so we can explore their content in some depth.

‘Shirato Sanpei’ is actually a pen name, as the artist himself was born Okamoto Noboru, the son of Okamoto Tōki, a noted painter whose works are still exhibited today.⁵ Tōki was a prominent member of the Japanese Proletarian movement, the politics of which were exactly what you would expect. One of his paintings, from 1933, is entitled “For a Red May Day - Resisting XXX Authority” and depicts a group of workers advancing arm in arm on a nasty-looking bunch of police and top-hatted capitalists.⁶

You didn’t join Proletarian Associations and paint this sort of thing in 1930s Japan just for fun, by the way. You had to really mean it, and you also had to be aware that it could get you arrested and beaten up - or worse - by the Japanese Secret Police. The “or worse” bit did in fact happen to one of Tōki’s friends, the Proletarian author Kobayashi Takiji, who was murdered in police custody in 1933.⁷ One of Tōki’s more famous paintings is in fact the seemingly peaceful face of Kobayashi’s corpse shortly after his death by torture, so it’s not like Tōki was unaware of the context in which he was operating.

So this was Shirato Sanpei’s family background, and it’s therefore not surprising that his manga works have a noticeable anti-authority streak to them. One of the first scenes we see in the first volume of Ninja: The Arts of War, in fact, involves a group of samurai under the warlord Sakagami Shuzen in the early years of the Eiroku era (1558-1570) in northern Japan. Sakagami is not a nice guy - he has his domain because he has betrayed and murdered his liege lord Yūki Mitsuharu some years earlier - and he rules with an iron fist. Sakagami knows that Mitsuharu’s young son Jūtarō is still alive and plotting to avenge his father, so he sends his men out to find the young man.⁸ Sakagami does not require his men to be particularly careful; in fact, he orders them to slaughter an entire village of people he suspects might be harboring Jūtarō:

Shirato Sanpei, Ninja bugeichō (Shōgakukan, 1976), vol. 1 pp. 20-21.

The images speak for themselves, I think - no translation needed.

Kagemaru, Master of Shadows

The figure in the bottom-left is Kagemaru, a name that could be loosely translated as ‘Master of Shadows,’ and it turns out that he is our main ninja.⁹ The following page sees him surveying the slaughter at the village:

Ninja bugeichō 1:22. Translations are mine.

Kagemaru, as you can probably tell by his outfit, is a ninja, and is explicitly referred to as such by other characters, so there’s no mis-identification of samurai going on here; the action is unfolding in a world where ‘ninja’ is a recognized category of warrior. As if that weren’t enough, Kagemaru uses a lot of stuff most modern readers would associate with ‘ninja,’ like star-shaped shuriken, caltrops, and smoke bombs:

Ninja bugeichō 1:32-33.

We actually learn very little about Kagemaru’s background, at least to start with; he presumably has some association with the slaughtered villagers, but it’s not immediately clear what. What is clear is that Lord Sakagami Shuzen is a real scumbag, as are his men, and that they think little of casually murdering any peasant who gets in their way. We see this again in the second volume, where Sakagami raises taxes on the peasants:

Ninja bugeichō 2:32-33.

The sign on the right-hand side reads:

BE IT PROCLAIMED

Yearly taxes hereafter shall be thirty per cent higher than before. Any who disobey or are late in payment shall be punished harshly.

LORD OF THE DOMAIN

The peasants on the left-hand side are trying to escape, carrying a bale of rice on their shoulders. Unfortunately, they’re about to find out just what kind of lord Sakagami is, and find out the hard way.

As I’m running up against the email length limit, though, the next part of the story will have to wait for next time.

1. Turnbull, Ninja: AD 1460-1650 (2003), p. 5; Stephen K. Hayes, The Ninja and Their Secret Fighting Art (Tuttle, 2011), p. 16.

2. Donn F. Draeger, Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility (Tuttle, 1989; first pub. 1971), p. 26.

3. John Man, Ninja: 1000 Years of the Shadow Warrior (W.M. Morrow, 2013), p. 78.

4. Shirato Sanpei 白土三平; Ninja bugeichō 忍者武芸帳.

5. Okamoto Noboru 岡本登; Okamoto Tōki 岡本唐貴 (1903-1986)

6. Japanese: 五月一日・〇〇〇権力に抗して・赤色メーデーへ. The 〇〇〇 bit (translated as ‘XXX’) are what are known as fuseji, marks indicating a particular word had been censored pre-publication. Prewar Japanese censorship was often visible in the published work, weirdly enough.

7. Kobayashi Takiji 小林多喜二 (1903-1933).

8. Sakagami Shuzen 坂上主膳; Yūki Mitsuharu 結城光春; Jūtarō 重太郎.

9. Kagemaru 影丸.