Japanese Erotic Prints Do Not Show 'Ninja'
How Really, REALLY Not to Do Art History, Part#3
(If you haven’t been following our discussion of how ‘ninja’ historians routinely abuse and misinterpret Japanese pictorial art, I recommend bringing yourself up to speed here and here before reading on. Note that today’s discussion also refers to depictions of sexual violence).
As I’ve repeatedly argued, English-language ‘ninja’ history is incredibly bad. Sometimes, though, you run across something egregious even by the generally abysmal standards of the field. Today we’ll look at one such case, that of the supposed presence of ‘ninja’ in Japanese erotic prints.
Dreams of Spring
As some of you may be aware, the Japanese publishing industry during the Edo period (1600-1867) produced large quantities of erotic prints, which is to say basically pornography. Some of these works are reasonably well-known to Western audiences, like the print Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by Katsushika Hokusai (link Not Safe For Workplaces, by the way, and you should assume NSFW for all links below unless specifically indicated otherwise).1
These prints are generally referred to as shunga, meaning ‘prints of spring,’ since there’s a traditional association between the spring season and eroticism in many areas of East Asian literature.2 While they were basically what we would now think of as porn, there’s some evidence that shunga may also have been used as a form of rudimentary sex education. Hokusai, mentioned above, is perhaps most famous for The Great Wave off Kanagawa (that one is safe for work), but he also produced shunga like the octopus print above. This collection of erotic prints (link NSFW, obviously), is believed to have been drawn by Hokusai, though the ID is a little tentative and relatively recent. The collection is entitled Ehon futamigata, loosely translatable as something like “An Erotic Book for Much Beauty and Celebration Between Wife and Husband,” which suggests the collection may have been intended (or at least justified) as a kind of marital aid.3
As you’ll see if you click through on the link above and look at the central picture in Hokusai’s collection, one of the prints shows a black-clad figure raping a woman, having first tied up her husband. We saw in the previous couple of posts that a black-clad figure in an Edo print is usually someone who wants to conceal their identity, most often a visitor to the brothel districts, a robber, or a bandit. The most sensible interpretation from art-historical context would therefore be that the black-clad intruder is a robber, and that’s what most serious scholars who have written about this print have concluded. The art historians Jack Hillier and Paul Berry, for instance, account for the print as depicting a “robber” and a “burglar.”4
No. Just No.
You can probably see where this is going, can’t you? Stephen Turnbull, Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult (1991):
PLATE 2 The ninja as rapist
This book illustration by Hokusai reminds us that the often romanticised and sanitised world of modern ninja myth was, in reality, one of secrecy and savagery. The ninja has broken into the house, tied up the husband (who appears on the following spread in the original book) and then rapes the helpless woman.
Oh dear God.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but…the man is NOT A NINJA. The concept of the ‘ninja’ is a modern one and did not exist at the time the print was produced. The figure is a robber, a point easily demonstrated by comparing his clothing to any number of other Edo prints.
I also want to highlight this bit:
modern ninja myth was, in reality, one of secrecy and savagery
I’m not really sure of the point Turnbull is trying to make here. Is it that ‘ninja’ actually did sexually assault their victims? Or that this print perhaps reflects a cultural belief in Japan that ‘ninja’ were savages? Neither of those is very likely, because - one more time! - the concept of ‘ninja’ is a 20th century one and did not exist in the early 1800s.
It’s also puzzling that Turnbull doesn’t seem to have considered that the print is a work of pornography. I’d have thought that basing any claim about the history of the ‘ninja’ on a piece of erotic art would be unwise, since after all, pornography does not show “reality”; it taps into desires and fantasies, taboo and otherwise. I don’t think Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife can be read as evidence that female divers actually had threesomes with octopi, for instance. Perhaps a few centuries from now some incautious historian will claim that erotic encounters with scantily-clad young women were a real occupational hazard for 1980s plumbers and pizza delivery guys.
To be fair to Turnbull, his most recent work, Unmasking the Myth (2017), does acknowledge his errors in interpreting Edo-period prints (though not specifically the shunga howlers):
Modern minds clouded by the movie image of the ninja inevitably see the [black-clad] figures as ninja, and it is very tempting to juxtapose the espionage tools from the manuals with the men in the book illustrations and present the resulting blend as historical proof for the existence of ninja. This was a trap into which I fell in 1991…5
Turnbull deserves a lot of credit, I think, for having the courage to admit that he was wrong and attempt to clean up some of his errors. The thing is, though, not everyone is going to read Turnbull’s 2017 mea culpa, and in many respects the damage has already been done, because once bad info is out there it’s often very difficult to dislodge it. Remember that for most of the last thirty-odd years Turnbull has been the main authority on ‘ninja’ in the English-speaking world. Since most English-language ‘ninja’ history is uncritical and unoriginal, this has led to other writers reproducing his claims. Joel Levy’s 2008 Ninja: The Shadow Warrior, for instance:
Several books and woodblock print collections of the [Edo] period feature ninja raping both willing and unwilling victims, putting their talents of breaking and entering, stealth, and rope-tying to evil use.6
No, they don’t. They’re not ‘ninja.’ And then, in 2010, Kacem Zoughari’s really awful The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan tells us how:
Ehon Futami-gata (1803), a book of illustrations attributed to Hokusai (or possibly to Utamaro) shows a ninja raping a woman. All the details of the clothing of the ninja are represented perfectly there. This painting is one of the first to show the ninja as a man in black.7
Nope. This is horseshit. He’s not a ‘ninja.’
The above are just the examples I could find with a quick glance at the printed literature, by the way. I’m sure I could find dozens of online echoes of this nonsense - like here (NSFW), for instance - but I think we’ve made our point.
The subject, as you can tell, annoys the hell out of me, but let no-one say I’m not thorough in my arguments, so let’s do one more just to prove the point that the black-clad figures are robbers. This print (again, NSFW) is from Ehon takaragura (translatable as something like “Book of Erotica: Storehouse of Treasures”), another collection of erotic art published around 1800 by the artist Kitagawa Utamaro.8 The image depicts a man in black robes hiding behind some sliding screens and shining a light on a couple making love. Turnbull, inevitably, captions this in 1991 as:
PLATE 12 The ninja ‘Peeping Tom’
In this titillating book illustration by Utamaro, a ninja shines his dark lantern into a bedroom as he slowly draws his sword.
Nope. He’s a burglar, not a ninja, a reading confirmed by a couple of details in the picture itself. One is the shaded lantern, which we saw in the Chūshingura print from last time around, and which often appears in Edo-era art in the hands of burglars, bandits, or robbers. The other is the saw in the figure’s belt, which tells us he’s coming equipped for housebreaking and has happened to stumble across the couple after breaking into their house.
For comparison, consider cell #17 of this story, which is an illustration to the semi-comic fictional work Fast-Dyeing Mind Learning (Shingaku hayasome-gusa, 1790).9 What’s happened is that the main character Ritarō, having been led into depravity in the brothel districts by some evil spirits and lost all his money, is now turning to burglary to keep himself afloat.10 You can see the hood for concealing the face (though here it’s a white one), as well as the saw and other tools at his feet as he’s breaking into the store-house. So the visual elements in the picture are consistent with other examples of robbers, meaning that the dude in the ‘Peeping Tom’ picture should be interpreted as a burglar.
How Did This Happen?
By now I’m sure you’ve grasped the nature of the error that ‘ninja’ historians keep on making. It’s a bit like watching an episode of the Lone Ranger and then concluding that (a) historical cowboys really did wear those kind of eye-masks, and (b) everyone you see wearing an eye-mask is a cowboy.
In his 2017 book cited above, Turnbull suggests that the cause of the error is “minds clouded by the movie image of the ninja.” That’s where it starts, certainly, but it has much more to do with some quite specific failures of historical methodology, one which ‘ninja’ historians as a group seem especially prone to committing. Even if your mind is “clouded by the movie image of the ninja,” you can still avoid these kinds of mistakes - if you understand how concepts can be invented in the modern period and misread back into history, if you take the time to actually CHECK what a print depicts, and if you don’t write your books by uncritically repeating what you’ve read elsewhere.
There is plenty more bad art history we could talk about, but I think we’re done here for now. What we’ve covered illustrates the general principles at work, and hopefully understanding those will prevent anyone else from screwing up in the same way. So there’s not much point in continuing to beat a dead horse with yet more examples, though I will periodically come back to point out bad art history when we do more in-depth studies, like the full review of Zoughari’s book or the story of Manabe Rokurō, the dude depicted in the print on the welcome page.
In our next post, then, I’d like to move away from the bad history and take some time to do some better work. For next time, then, we’ll consider how the claim that ‘ninja’ wore black might have gotten started.
Katsushika Hokusai 葛飾北斎 (1760-1849). More commonly known simply as Hokusai.
Shunga 春画.
Ehon futamigata 艶本婦他美賀多. Believed to have been published around 1805.
Hillier, The Art of the Japanese Book (1987) 1:507; Berry, “Rethinking Shunga: The Interpretation of Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period” Archives of Asian Art Vol. 54 (2004), p. 13.
Turnbull, Ninja: Unmasking the Myth, pp. 116-117.
Joel Levy, Ninja: The Shadow Warrior (2008), p. 178.
Zoughari, Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan (2010), pp. 20-21. I’ll write more about Zoughari’s book in a later post, but the publisher, Tuttle, really needs to take a hard look at itself for this one, if for no other reason than that the footnotes are disorganized to the point of uselessness and the editing appears to have been non-existent.
Kitagawa Utamaro 喜多川歌麿 (1753-1806); Ehon takaragura 艶本多歌羅久良.
Shingaku hayasomegusa 心学早染草 (1790), written by Santō Kyōden 山東京伝 (1761-1816). If you’re curious, Shingaku (lit. ‘mind learning’) was an eclectic religious movement that arose in the Edo period, and the work is basically a semi-humorous morality tale that reflects Shingaku teachings to some extent.
Ritarō 理太郎. If you check the illustration linked above, you’ll see the graph 理 on the figure’s jacket lapel, which tells us who he is.