Ninja is as Ninja Does

Can you practice ninjutsu without being a ninja?

The avenging son Kumawaka in action, as depicted by Yashima Gakutei 屋島岳亭 (dates unknown). Print from late Edo period. Part of a series entitled “Twenty Four Examples of Filial Piety in Our Land” (Honchō nijūshi kō 本朝廿四孝), suggesting that Kumawaka was being hailed as an exemplary son for avenging his father’s death. Source.

In the previous post, I noted that the ‘60s ninja writer Okuse Heishichirō had raised - and then mostly ignored - a fairly fundamental question as to what ninjutsu actually was. Okuse had attempted to distinguish between ninjutsu as a systematized, restricted body of knowledge on the one hand, and individual acts of cunning and creativity - what he termed “ninjutsu-like actions” (ninjutsu-teki kōi) - on the other.¹

To re-state Okuse’s model in slightly simpler terms, what we’re seeing here is two fairly different ways of thinking about the idea of ninjutsu, which I would term “general ninjutsu” and “specific ninjutsu.” General ninjutsu would be an extremely broad category, as it would include almost any military or paramilitary use of deception or manipulation. Okuse himself, for instance, observed that General Douglas MacArthur, the lead commander of the US Occupation of Japan, was very good at ninjutsu (ninjutsu no tatsujin), a statement that may well have been tongue-in-cheek but will probably raise a few eyebrows nonetheless.²

Specific ninjutsu, by contrast, would be the super secret ‘ninja’ skills that most of us have heard about - a consistent body of knowledge that was not available to others and which was passed down over time within a definable community. English-speaking ‘ninja’ authors have almost universally argued for this latter, specific form of ninjutsu, especially those associated with Bujinkan martial arts, for whom the “specific” definition is a major part of their marketing.

I realize that the above might seem like the kind of hair-splitting and quibbling over definitions that makes everyone hate academics so much, but bear with me and I’ll demonstrate that this sort of thing really does matter. The tension between the “general” and “specific” versions of ninjutsu, you see, has done some real damage to the coherency of attempts to narrate ‘ninja’ history more or less from the beginning. To give just one example today, it’s resulted in an almost comical level of disagreement among ‘ninja’ authors as to which Japanese historical figures can be identified as having been ‘ninja.’

Ninja History (Does Not Include Ninja)

A good place to start is with the case of early 14th century court noble Hino Kunimitsu, more commonly known by his juvenile name of Kumawakamaru or Kumawaka.³ Kumawaka’s main claim to fame derives from a story in the Taiheiki, a war chronicle compiled in the late 14th century we’ve referred to quite frequently. In the Taiheiki, Kumawaka travels from Kyoto to the remote island of Sado, off the north-west coast of Japan, in order to kill a man named Honma Saburō, who is responsible for the exile and later murder of Kumawaka’s father.

This is a famous story in Japan, the subject of a lot of dramatic prints such as the splash image for today, and it also happens to be among the sections of the Taiheiki that the late Helen McCullough translated back in 1959. So here’s an excerpt:

There came a night of violent rain and wind, when all the retainers on duty slept inside the guard quarters beyond the court-yard. And on that night Kumawaka took his way in stealth to Honma’s sleeping apartment, thinking, “This assuredly is the good fortune I have awaited!” […]

Going up to Honma Saburō, where he slept deeply, Kumawaka beheld a sword and dagger beside the pillow. He put the dagger into his belt, drew forth the sword from its sheath, touched it to Honma’s breast, and kicked the pillow, thinking, “To kill a sleeping man is no different from stabbing a corpse.” And when Honma awoke, steadily Kumawaka drove in the sword above his navel, all the way to the floor mat, and thrust it again into his glottis. Then, in no wise affrighted, he hid himself in a bamboo thicket to the rear.⁴

This is indeed pretty ninja-ish, and unsurprisingly Kumawaka gets a mention in a lot of ‘ninja’ media. But even back in his bad old days of ‘ninja’ credulity in 1991 and 2003, Stephen Turnbull thought that Kumawaka wasn’t a ninja:

The insistence by [Japanese scholars] Yamaguchi and Sasama that this is the first ninja assassination does not therefore seem to be borne out by a reading of the full text.⁵

The Taiheiki also contains the earliest account of a ninja-like assassination. The assassin was not a professional ninja, but…for someone who was not a professional assassin his preparations were commendably thorough.⁶

The obvious comment would be: well, if he’s not a ‘ninja,’ what’s he doing in a book about ‘ninja’? Or perhaps the “professional” qualifier is important, and we should think in terms of professional and amateur ‘ninja,’ like with golf?

I’d suggest that Turnbull’s uncertainty over Kumawaka reflects exactly the tension I talked about above. Turnbull has started out by assuring his readers in 2003 that he’s going to write about ninjutsu as the specific activities, training, and culture of the real-life people who were the basis for the pop-culture ‘ninja.’ In practice, though, his evidence doesn’t consistently allow him to do that, and in order to fill the book’s pages he’s had to shift to writing about assassination as a general topic instead. This is why I asked in the previous post what the focus of ‘ninja’ studies was actually meant to be, because in practice its focus seems to get pulled over to clandestine warfare in general at the expense of shedding light on the specific practices of the supposed ‘ninja.’

No He Wasn’t. Wait, Was He? No, He Wasn’t.

So you’ll probably get the sense just from this one example that managing the tension between the general and specific versions of ninjutsu is a problem, and it’s one that ‘ninja’ writers haven’t dealt with terribly well. A further example would be Ishikawa Goemon, the famous thief about whom I published an academic article a few months ago:

Ishikawa Goemon (top) prepares to throw a knife at a fictionalized version of the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi in this scene from the 1778 play The Golden Gate and Paulownia Crest (Sanmon gosan no kiri). Source

To be fair, Goemon is credited with being skilled in the “arts of stealth” (shinobi no jutsu) in a number of Edo-period fiction and plays, though his specific presence in ‘ninja’ lore is more attributable to his appearances in the Tachikawa Bunko Sarutobi Sasuke ninjutsu novels from 1914 onward, and then in the Shinobi no mono film series of the 1960s. From a strict historical point of view Goemon probably did exist, but we really only know two concrete things about him, that he was a thief and that he was executed by being boiled alive. This prompted the 1960s Japanese critic Adachi Ken’ichi, who became very interested in the ‘ninja’ phenomenon, to write in 1967 that the association between Goemon and ninjutsu was “a product of the imaginations of gesaku [popular fiction] writers and kōdan [oral] storytellers…it absolutely does not emerge from historical fact.”⁷

Adachi’s observation didn’t stop Stephen K. Hayes from including Goemon in his list of historical ‘ninja’ in 1985:

Though none of the ninja families of Iga or Koga would call him one of their own because of his reputation for using ninjutsu to aid him in stealing for his own personal gain, no history of legendary Japanese ninja names would be complete without that of Ishikawa Goemon. There are many theories as to where he was born, but no concrete information. Three popular theories regarding Goemon’s birthplace include Hamamatsu in Enshu, Oshu’s Shirakawa, or Ishikawa Village of Iga Province.

Thought to have originally been a genin agent of Iga ryu ninjutsu, Goemon was killed on August 24th, 1594, the legends claiming he was boiled to death in oil. Though Ishikawa Goemon’s name is not listed in the Bansenshukai written record of Iga ryu ninjutsu, the notorious bandit hero appears often in the world of novels and theater as the greatest thief in the history of Japan.⁸

Honestly, Hayes has lost me here: I’m genuinely unsure whether he’s trying to say that Goemon was a ninja or that he wasn’t. The bit about Goemon being disavowed because of his thieving reflects the widespread idea that ‘ninja’ had a moral code not to steal or otherwise use their skills for personal gain, something that I think is ultimately traceable to a passage in the 1676 ‘ninja manual’ Bansen shūkai.⁹ But the list of which Goemon is part comes right after a section where Hayes has complained about “cultural stereotyping” and assured us that real ‘ninja’ were unfairly maligned as murderous monsters, so I’m honestly not sure what to think.¹⁰ I feel kinda like we’re approaching “no true Scotsman” territory here; if ‘ninja’ were forbidden to steal, then Goemon being a thief would mean he…wasn’t a ninja? Or perhaps he was just a bad ninja. You know, as opposed to all of those morally upstanding specialists in murder for hire.

Anyway, Turnbull then includes Goemon in his 2003 Ninja: AD 1460-1650 as a “semi-legendary ninja,” and Yoda and Alt refer to him as a “ninja-turned-thief” in 2010. In 2012, two years later, Japanese scholar Yoshimaru Katsuya then tells us that us that Goemon “was not a shinobi no mono; he was simply a prominent thief.”¹¹

All clear? Good.

Clear as Mud

Part of the problem is that the “general” versus “specific” versions of ninjutsu pull in different directions in terms of how they lead us to think about medieval warfare. For one thing, the notion of specific ninjutsu implies the existence of a discrete group of people more or less identifiable as ‘ninja,’ whereas general ninjutsu doesn’t necessarily; it’s possible that clandestine warfare was something that everybody did, and no particular identity attached to doing it.

That said, the “general” and “specific” versions of ninjutsu are not mutually exclusive, as it’s plausible that there could have been both ‘ninja clans’ and highly creative individual warlords at the same time. This is more or less what one of the earliest ‘ninja writers,’ Itō Gingetsu, appears to have believed. In his 1918 article The Ninjutsu, probably the first account of the topic in English and which you can read online, Gingetsu suggests that ninjutsu “came to be studied by soldiers in order to promote military efficiency” but also that:

there were even leagues of spies, among which the more famous were those of the Koga district in the province of Totomi [sic] and in the province of Iga also, where mountains facilitated practice in the art.¹²

Gingetsu’s starting position here is a reasonable one, I think, but I’d argue that what then happened is that the range of specific claims about the ninjutsusha and then the ‘ninja’ began to snowball, and by the 1960s had developed far beyond what the available evidence could reasonably support.

Even aside from the difficulty most authors have in identifying historical examples of ‘ninja,’ I think the idea of a postwar shift in emphasis from “general” to insisting primarily on “specific” ninjutsu also explains things like the kusari-gama, the association between ninja and shuriken, and even the ridiculous ‘ninja tofu’ I wrote about a while back. In each case, these are all things that lots of people used (or ate), but they somehow ended up being pressed into service to support a series of much more specific contentions about the supposed culture of the historical shinobi.

This awkward nature of the postwar ‘ninja’ writer’s task, of being obliged to use mostly general historical evidence to support highly specific claims about ‘ninja,’ explains a lot about why ‘ninja’ history developed the way it did. It explains, for instance, why it’s so common for modern fictional characters to end up in supposedly historical accounts. Unlike his real-life namesake, Shinobi no mono’s Ishikawa Goemon actually does dress in black, use shuriken, and try to assassinate major warlords; so if you’re struggling to find enough real-life figures who fit the mold of the post-60s ‘ninja’ to fill your book and are not very careful about primary sources, he’s going to be an attractive candidate.

It also neatly explains the ‘samurai vs. ninja’ thing we dissected several months back; if you’re having a hard time explaining why the ‘ninja’s’ specific form of clandestine warfare is meaningfully different from that of the samurai as a whole, just posit an ahistorical notion of samurai honor, and bingo, you have a solution that’s easy for everyone to understand: ‘ninja’ can be defined as the ones who did what the samurai wouldn’t. It’s nonsense from an historical point of view, but it’s easy to understand.

An obvious corrective to the above problem would, of course, be for the field to develop and use a clear, standard definition of what exactly a ‘ninja’ was. If we could do that, we might go a long way toward resolving the question of whether (say) Ishikawa Goemon was a ‘ninja’ or not. I attempted to offer my own definition way back at the start of this Substack, but with the exception of a few authors, notably Turnbull, the field of ‘ninja’ studies has been conspicuously reluctant to offer clear definitions. You will no doubt have your own thoughts as to why this should be, but the result is that as seen above, ‘ninja’ history often has an ad hoc feel to it, a sense that the authors are making up and changing their definitions more or less as they go along, or even ignoring their own definitions when it’s convenient to do so.

So in the next post or two, I’d like to consider how we might go about the task of offering clarity. As a starting-point it’ll be helpful to consider how arguably the two other most famous social archetypes from Japanese history, namely samurai and ‘geisha,’ have been defined (or in a lot of cases, mis-defined), and see if we can learn any lessons from that.

1. Ninjutsu-teki kōi 忍術的行為.

2. “Makkāsā gensui wa ninjutsu no tatsujin” マッカーサー元師は忍術の達人. Okuse, Ninjutsu shoseihō (Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1964), p. 124.

3. Hino Kunimitsu 日野邦光 (1320-1361); Kumawakamaru 阿新丸. Dates and kanji per Kokushi daijiten, accessed through Japan Knowledge.

4. McCullough, trans. Taiheiki: A Chronicle of Medieval Japan, (Columbia UP, 1959), p. 48. Japanese text is here, starting with 或夜雨風烈しく吹て if you want to CTRL-F it.

5. Turnbull, Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult (Firebird Books, 1991), p. 51.

6. Turnbull, Ninja AD 1460-1650 (Osprey, 2003), pp. 7-8. Not to single him out or anything, but Turnbull spends an awful lot of time in his books on people he admits aren’t really ‘ninja.’ Here’s just what I could find in five minutes looking through his 1991 Secret Warrior Cult: “It may be straining the definition of ninjutsu somewhat to give this label to Kusunoki Masashige’s activities…” (p. 26); “The context makes it unlikely that the assailant is anything other than an opportunist” (p. 48); “It is doubtful whether the character of Nikki Danjō can be regarded as a ninja in terms of the definition we have adopted for this book” (p. 134); “Whilst he is dressed in black, it is unlikely this character represents a ninja” (also p. 134), and so on and so on.

7. Adachi Ken’ichi 足立卷一 (1913-1985), “Ishikawa Goemon monogatari no tsuiseki” [Tracing the tale of Ishikawa Goemon] in Adachi Ken’ichi, Taishū geijutsu no fukuryū (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1967), p. 24.

8. Stephen Hayes, The Mystic Arts of the Ninja (Contemporary Books, 1985), p. 7. Italics and lack of macrons per original.

I doubt Hayes was aware of this, but several of his details concerning Goemon are from explicitly fictional sources. The idea that Goemon was from Hamamatsu in Enshū (i.e., Tōtōmi Province, modern day Shizuoka) is from the late 17th century puppet play Ishikawa Goemon 石川五右衛門 by the dramatist Matsumoto Jidayū 松本治太夫 (dates unknown; active 1688-1736), which was first performed during the Teikyō era 貞享 (1684-1688). We also don’t know the date Goemon was executed during the summer of 1594 for certain, and the Japanese primary sources I’ve read don’t say anything about him being boiled in oil as opposed to water.

9. The text is a poem; my rough translation: “A shinobi who turns his back on the proper path and steals cannot expect the protection of the kami or the Buddhas.” The original is viewable here, the last line on the far-left hand side of cell #5.

10. Hayes, Mystic Arts of the Ninja, p. 2.

11. Yoshimaru, “Kinsei ni okeru ‘ninja’ no seiritsu to keifu” [The origins and lineage of the ‘ninja’ in the early modern period] Kyoto gobun 19 (November 2012), p. 113.

12. See here. The ‘sic’ is because Kōka was a region of the old Ōmi Province (近江), just to the east of Kyoto, not Tōtōmi (遠江), which was a couple of hundred miles to the east (roughly modern Shizuoka Prefecture).