Manabe Rokuro, The Ninja Who Wasn't
The story of a medieval hero and his badass sister (Part #1)
Back when I was setting up the site, I chose the above image to use on the main welcome page to Critical Ninja Theory. It depicts a warrior named Manabe Rokurō, who has crept into the castle of the warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) with a view to assassinating him.1
The print is a striking one - it’s a dude in the classic ‘ninja’ outfit, sword in hand, trying to kill someone - and it screams ‘ninja’ to pretty much everyone. ‘Ninja’ historians obviously think so too, because quite a few of them have chosen to use this print in their discussions. It’s the cover image for the first edition of Stephen Turnbull’s 1991 Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult, for instance:
It’s also there in black and white in Turnbull’s 2003 Ninja: AD 1460-1650:
It’s in Kacem Zoughari’s 2010 and 2016 Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors (p. 54), and more recently, it’s also the splash image for this Spanish-language account of ninjas published by National Geographic in 2021:
You get the point. Clearly, the above writers all see this print as pretty significant in terms of the historical shinobi.
I noted a couple of months ago, though, that Western ‘ninja’ writers have a bad habit of using Japanese prints without really understanding what those prints actually show. As I wrote at the time:
[T]he way in which ‘ninja’ historians take five seconds to look at a print and shout ‘ninja!’ without bothering to understand the story being depicted strikes me as a little disrespectful to the art itself, and maybe even to the culture that produced it.
So in this post and the next few that’ll follow, we’ll do what the average ‘ninja’ historian can’t be bothered to do. We’re going to make sure we understand what the print depicts and track down the actual story behind it. We’ll find that it’s well worth the effort, because the resulting story, an epic tale of righteous loyalty, revenge, and family drama, is going to be far more interesting than the superficial and ahistorical ‘ninja’ reading.
Chronicle of Lord Regent Hideyoshi
So, the Manabe Rokurō print is part of an 1883 series entitled New Selections for the Taikōki (Shinsen Taikōki), produced by the artist Utagawa Toyonobu (1859-1886).2 I won’t go into too much detail about the artist and the series today; instead, if you’re interested, you can see some other prints from the series here, and there’s a useful discussion of the collection in English here.
What, then, is “the Taikōki”? To give it its full title, it’s True Account of the Chronicle of Lord Regent Hideyoshi (in Japanese, Shinsho Taikōki), and it’s a mid-19th century historical narrative.3 Chronicle of the Regent, as I’ll refer to it to save space, tells the life and times of the conquering warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-1598), the second of the three great unifiers of Japan.
Despite the “true account” bit in the title, Chronicle of the Regent is basically a semi-fictionalized account of Hideyoshi’s life, a lot more historical novel than documentary history. It was compiled between 1852 and 1868 by samurai scholar Kurihara Nobumitsu (1794-1870), also known by his pen name of Ryūan.4 What’s interesting about Chronicle of the Regent in particular is that for his sources Ryūan appears to have drawn on stories of Toyotomi Hideyoshi from the world of kōdan oral storytelling.5
Let me pause here to briefly explain what kōdan is. It’s basically a popular form of spoken-word entertainment, a little bit like music-hall or stand-up comedy, where a performer sits on a stage and tells engaging stories about historical events. It’s still practiced to some extent to this day, and you can see modern versions on YouTube:
Kōdan was a very popular form of entertainment across the 19th century, and as we’ll see moving forward, surprisingly influential on the development of the ‘ninja’ myth. Note, however, that despite the historical setting and focus on real-life historical individuals, kōdan stories are fundamentally a form of literary fiction. The stories were heavily embellished or simply invented out of whole cloth, because the point was first and foremost to entertain.
Partly because he had risen from a peasant background to become the most powerful man in Japan, Hideyoshi was a popular topic for kōdan performers. This was especially true in the area around the city of Osaka, because that was where Hideyoshi had his main castle and where his son Hideyori made his final stand against the Tokugawa clan in 1614-15.
So to recap, Chronicle of the Regent is a heavily embellished, semi-fictional account of Hideyoshi’s life, in which a lot of the embellishments were inspired by popular oral storytelling. For this reason, no serious historian would use Chronicle of the Regent alone as a source. This point is quite widely acknowledged; if you look up Chronicle of the Regent in the authoritative Dictionary of the Japanese Language (Nihon kokugo daijiten), you’ll see it describes Shinsho Taikōki as “of little value as an historical source,” but also notes that it had an important literary impact in that it “provided material for later works of prose fiction and plays.”6
Keep in mind this last point, because if there was one thing that Japanese literary creators were good at, it was variation. The same basic story could be, and was, adapted, reworked, and re-invented in any of a dozen different ways, and while we might now see this as lack of originality, that was simply how literary production worked during the Edo period (1600-1867) and well into the modern period too.
History, Fiction, and Entertainment
So right off the bat, we have reason to be very cautious about using this print as evidence for any historical claim. The print itself was created more than 300 years after the supposed events it depicts, and the episode it’s illustrating is from Chronicle of the Regent, a text that is also nearly 300 years removed from the events in question and which freely mixes historical fact with fiction.
This provenance alone is probably reason to omit the Manabe Rokurō print from any serious set of claims about the historical shinobi, or at the very least to present it with careful and heavy qualification as to its factual status. That, of course, is not what Turnbull and co have done; as we’ll see in the posts that follow, the captions usually provided to the piece in English-language histories state as simple fact that Manabe Rokurō tried to kill Nobunaga, even though it’s far from being established fact at all.
In the next post, then, we’ll take a look at what we can find out about Manabe Rokurō and his maybe-factual maybe-not assassination attempt.
Manabe Rokurō 真鍋六郎 or 間鍋六郎; Oda Nobunaga 織田信長.
Shinsen Taikōki 新撰太閤記; Utagawa Toyonobu 歌川豊宣.
Shinsho Taikōki 真書太閤記.
Kurihara Nobumitsu (Ryūan) 栗原信充 (柳菴).
Kōdan 講談.
Nihon kokugo daijiten 日本国語大辞典; the quote is shiryōteki kachi wa hikui ga, nochi no engeki ya shōsetsu nado ni daizai o teikyō shite iru (史料的価値は低い; 後の演劇や小説などに題材を提供している). See “Shinsho Taikōki” in Nihon kokugo daijiten. Accessed through Japan Knowledge, but also available online at https://kotobank.jp/word/真書太閤記-537896.