'Ninja' Historians and Primary Sources - It's Complicated
What the 'Toilet Ninja' Myth Tells Us About How 'Ninja' History is Written
In the last couple of posts we considered the Uesugi Kenshin ‘toilet ninja’ myth, where it comes from, and why it might have gotten started in the first place. In today’s post, I’d like to consider a few examples of how English-language ‘ninja’ historians have handled the Kenshin story, because they’re revealing as to how ‘ninja’ writers seem to think history is supposed to be written. There appear to be two particular assumptions at work here: one, it’s OK not to be transparent about your primary sources; and two, it’s OK not to know what the primary source for a claim is.
[Citation Needed]
Good history is supposed to be based on primary sources. Primary sources can come in all kinds of forms, whether that’s diaries, historical chronicles, official records and documents, eyewitness accounts, or whatever. Academic books are uniformly expected to cite their sources, and many are very up-front about the primary sources they’ve been using. Consider Princeton historian Tom Conlan’s new book Kings in All But Name, for instance, which mentions that it’s using “new archeological and textual evidence” to make its case for the Ōuchi clan of western Japan as leading a prosperous and even stable domain during the Warring States period, contrary to the prevailing image of the Warring States period being a time of chaos and fragmentation. Conlan has done the work in the primary sources, and the description of the book wants you to know that, because it suggests that Conlan is a good scholar and does original research.
‘Ninja’ historians, by contrast, seem to be oddly squirrelly about the primary sources that underpin the claims in their books. I can tell you from extensive personal experience that one of the biggest frustrations as an academic reviewing ‘ninja’ histories is that it’s often very difficult to determine the primary source evidence for most of their claims. When Donn Draeger first published the ‘toilet ninja’ myth in his 1969 Asian Fighting Arts, for instance, he gave no source for the story, and the relevant bibliography to the book refers only to “unpublished writings,” plus a bunch of secondary works in English.1 The second sighting was in Draeger’s 1971 Ninjutsu, a book which has no citations or bibliography at all, so in neither case would a reader be able to tell where Draeger’s version of the story had come from (though we figured it out in a previous post).
The same observation about lack of transparency could also be made concerning Andrew Adams’ best-selling 1970 Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, which went through thirty-six editions to 2008, or Turnbull’s 2003 Ninja: AD 1460-1650, which went through at least ten editions to 2013. These are probably the three best-selling ‘ninja’ books of the last sixty years in English, and there’s not a single source citation among ‘em. Now, you could argue, as some popular historians do, that general readers don’t care about that sort of thing and don’t want to see the page cluttered up with superscript notations. Fair enough, but general readers probably do care about being misled, which seems to happen a lot more often when a writer isn’t citing. It’s also not that hard to be unobtrusively transparent about your sources - assuming you do actually care about transparency in the first place.2
More cynically, you might argue that it’s in ‘ninja’ historians’ own interests not to be transparent about their sources, because if they were, it would become obvious how shaky the evidence for their claims is. If Draeger had been fully transparent about his sources, someone might have noticed much sooner that he was sourcing quite a few of his ‘ninja’ case studies from a children’s book, and I doubt that would have done much for his overall credibility.3
History as Personal Authority
And perceived credibility, for the English-language ‘ninja’ historian, is very important. For writers in the English-speaking world, there’s a lot of potential status and prestige to be gained from the perception that you are an authority on the mysterious Orient and can interpret it for your eager readers. In this way of thinking, the writer is like an oracle revealing the secrets of the East; and if that’s how you think of your task, it kind of makes sense that you wouldn’t be fully transparent about the sources of your revealed knowledge, because they’re your trade secrets, so to speak.
I think some of our problems in English-language ‘ninja’ history arise from the fact that it’s often existed at the intersection of two very different fields, historical writing and martial arts. Providing sources to back up your claims is completely standard practice in historical writing, after all, but asking Draeger or Hatsumi to do the same would probably be viewed as a challenge to the sensei’s authority from a martial arts perspective. I wonder if this might explain why Draeger didn’t disclose where the ‘toilet ninja’ story had come from: it was his knowledge, his source of authority to be writing the book in the first place.
Something similar to this is the only explanation I can think of for the below, which precedes Kacem Zoughari’s retelling of the ‘toilet ninja’ story in his 2010 Ancient Shadow Warriors:
Once the Takeda family was crushed in Nagashino, Oda Nobunaga attacked his rival Uesugi Kenshin. Without revealing any source, here is how the death of Uesugi is reported, according to one of the most famous ninja anecdotes:
Uesugi Kenshin was wary of the ninja of Oda and had taken utmost precaution…4
…wait, what? “Without revealing any source”? What the hell does that mean - Zoughari knows what the source for the story is, but isn’t going to tell you?
You can see what I thought of this from my annotations to my copy of Ancient Shadow Warriors:
For me, as a professional academic, this is incredibly weird - what possible reason could you have not to simply cite the source? What do you gain from openly signalling to your reader that you’re concealing information?
No Source? No Problem!
To my second point, about it being OK in ‘ninja’ history not to know what the source for a claim is, consider Turnbull’s account of the ‘toilet ninja’ story in his 1991 Secret Warrior Cult. The text makes clear that Turnbull got the story from Draeger’s Asian Fighting Arts, though it also makes it clear that Turnbull didn’t know what Draeger’s source was:
The story, with much detail, appears in Draeger’s Asian Fighting Arts published in 1969, though no reference is given, and all subsequent re-tellings are clearly taken straight from this book. I have been unable to find any earlier account of it, though a colleague has pointed out that it appears in a martial arts journal published in English and French in the early 1950s […]5
I can’t shake the feeling that the story was included in Secret Warrior Cult largely on the strength of Draeger’s perceived authority. Draeger had written not one but two books about ‘ninja’ and the martial arts, so he must have known what he was talking about; he must have had some source for the story somewhere, right?
Funnily enough Turnbull does much the same thing with another dubious anecdote, that of how the ‘ninja’ Ishikawa Goemon tried to poison Oda Nobunaga:
The American author Andrew Adams claims that Nobunaga survived an assassination attempt at the hands of the semi-legendary ninja Ishikawa Goemon. As so much of the Goemon story is pure fiction it is difficult to asses its authenticity, and Adams gives no source for the anecdote […].6
Here again, it’s clear that Turnbull knew that Adams had provided no source for his story. He included it anyway, I guess because Adams had written a best-selling book on the ‘ninja’ - so Adams must have known what he was talking about, right?
Bro, Just Trust Me
The Uesugi Kenshin ‘toilet ninja’ story is quite revealing on a kind of meta-level, because it allows us to see how a good portion of ‘ninja’ history depends less on clearly cited primary source evidence, more on some variant of ‘just trust me.’
Draeger tells the story in 1969 with no source, then Turnbull picks it up in 1991 and 2003, as does Zoughari in 2010, then Lockley in 2019. And so we go on our merry way, with nobody at any point knowing what the original source might be. The process is a little bit like the game Telephone or the retelling of urban legends, in that the evidence for the claim doesn’t really matter. The important thing is to retell the story, and after all, there’s got to be some basis for it, right? We’ll just trust that Draeger knew what he was writing about - he did write two books on the topic, you know.
Or, in a different sense, Draeger and Zoughari were both saying ‘just trust me’ in choosing to withhold sources from their readers. Draeger never cited and included only the vaguest bibliography in his 1969 book, while Zoughari apparently decided he could just refuse to tell the reader what his source for the ‘toilet ninja’ story was. The latter seems particularly pointless when you consider that Zoughari’s bibliography includes Draeger and Smith’s Asian Fighting Arts, so it’s not particularly hard to figure out where Zoughari got the story.
I am, as I have noted previously, working on an in-depth review of Zoughari’s book, which I hope to be able to bring you before too much longer. In the meantime, let’s change topic once again and spend some time covering the kunoichi, the supposed female shinobi, and their role as seductress-assassins.
Draeger and Smith, Asian Fighting Arts (1969), p. 193.
To give one example that’s on my bookshelf, Erik Larson’s brilliant The Devil in the White City (2003) adopts the approach of endnotes linked to the main text by page number and the first few words of the sentence they refer to. So, the quote “The gloom that fell upon the crowd was heavy and chill” on p. 17 is sourced as: “17. The gloom: Chicago Tribune, February 24th, 1890. It’s elegant and unobtrusive, allowing readers to ignore the sources if they don’t care about them but making sure that every claim is fully documented.
If you haven’t read Devil in the White City, pick up a copy now - it’s an amazing book and a fantastic example of how to write popular history.
One of the more depressing things about this is that Draeger, who by all accounts was extremely generous with his time and widely admired by almost everyone in the field of English-speaking martial arts, apparently had ambitions to establish the study of martial arts as a serious academic discipline. This hasn’t really happened even to this day, and I know that some ‘ninjutsu’ historians remain frustrated by the way in which so-called mainstream academics don’t take their work seriously. One of the biggest reasons for that, though (aside from the fact that most academics are huge snobs), is that English-language ‘ninja’ historians keep doing stupid shit like using fictional works as historical sources, all but guaranteeing that no academic would take them seriously even if they did read their stuff, which they generally don’t.
Zoughari, The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan (Tuttle, 2010), p. 51. Emphasis mine.
Turnbull, Secret Warrior Cult (1991), p. 54. Emphasis mine.
Turnbull, Secret Warrior Cult, p. 54. Emphasis mine.