'Ninja Lady Magic': What Happened Next
Bad films matter, too
The ninja movie, it’s fair to say, is not a prestigious genre. Mostly, that’s the genre’s own fault; aside from the generally cartoonish image of the ninja as a whole, ninja movies have a reputation for being low-budget, poorly plotted, ineptly sensationalist crap. And in fairness, that reputation is often justified. Take for instance the first US-made ninja movie, Menahem Golan’s 1981 Enter the Ninja. I’ll save the full review of the film, an obvious attempt to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee’s 1973 Enter the Dragon, for another day. Instead, a single point will suffice to give you some sense of Enter the Ninja’s general production quality and overall feel.
The main character of Enter the Ninja is Cole, a former special forces soldier supposedly from Texas. The guy cast to play Cole was Franco Nero, an Italian actor who was actually pretty accomplished at the time, and went on to have an impressive career by most standards:
Nero, however, couldn’t master a Texas accent, so instead the film had another actor read his lines and dubbed him over in postproduction. Martial arts movies are famous for bad lip-syncing and crappy dubbing, so maybe that sort of thing was par for the course. The dubbing, in any event, wasn’t done particularly well and ended up adding a further layer of absurdity to what was already a very silly film to begin with.
Enter the Ninja, as you might expect, didn’t do very well critically. Quoth Richard Harrington, film critic at the Washington Post in late 1981:
the plot limps along looking for convenient excuses for ninja to enter into brawls […] none of the reasoning, acting, or dialogue is particularly bright, much less believable.1
Ouch. And yet, Enter the Ninja was reasonably successful commercially. Cannon Studios liked it enough that they approved two further ninja films, thus spawning a full-on trilogy. The next two were, in case you’re curious, Revenge of the Ninja (of course), and Ninja III: The Domination. (Do yourself a favor - go and read the first line under “Plot” at that link.)
The reason I bring up Enter the Ninja here is to illustrate the general point that ninja movies, as a genre, often defy conventional wisdom. They’re usually garbage from a serious critical point of view, yet often end up being quite successful from a commercial perspective. Academic film criticism, especially in Japan Studies, has a bit of a blind spot for these kinds of works, as the need to be a Serious Scholar has often steered the field towards those perceived as Serious Directors (like Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, etc), at least until comparatively recently. So although pulp stuff like ninja movies reaches a very large audience, it rarely gets much in the way of scholarly attention.
And The Award Goes To…
So we shouldn’t be too surprised to learn that, for all the weirdness of the film in terms of what appears on screen and what happened behind the scenes, Nakajima Sadao’s Ninja Lady Magic was reasonably successful commercially. It was also - and this one did surprise me - quite successful critically. Several film journals at the time gave it positive reviews, though some critics seem to have been just as baffled as we were, with the tabloid-ish weekly Asahi Arts (Asahi geinō) naming it as one of their top five “weirdo films” (henteko na eiga).2 The following year, 1965, Nakajima even won Best New Director at the Kyoto Citizen’s Film Festival, seemingly on the strength of Ninja Lady Magic.
Most significantly, the film did well enough at the box office that Tōei Studios allowed Nakajima to go to work almost immediately on a sequel.3 This was Ninja Magic: Painted Lady (Kunoichi geshō), adapted from another novel by popular writer Yamada Fūtarō and released in December of 1964, two months after Ninja Lady Magic:4
I haven’t seen this yet, but it’s available to ship to the US from Tōei’s website. Perhaps I should grab a copy. Let me know in the comments if you do - or don’t - want me to.
From the description Tōei offers, it seems that the action in Painted Lady is set during the 1640s, some decades after the original Ninja Lady Magic in 1615. The film centers on some surviving retainers of the destroyed house of Toyotomi, who find some hidden clan treasure and use it to attempt to overthrow the ruling Tokugawa dynasty. Sexy ninja hijinks presumably ensue.
For what it’s worth, Ninja Magic: Painted Lady also seems to have done pretty well at the box office, since afterward Tōei offered Nakajima the chance to work on a third kunoichi film. Perhaps wisely, Nakajima said no, as I assume he didn’t want to get pigeonholed as the master of ninja-related sex comedies.5 Although mildly embarrassing in retrospect, starting out with two kunoichi movies doesn’t seem to have done Nakajima’s career any serious damage. He would never become a megastar, remaining mostly a journeyman director known for yakuza pics and historical dramas, but he was consistently productive and carried on working into his 80s, his last film credit coming in 2019.
Sex Sells, Japan Edition
It’s worth taking a little time to contextualize Ninja Lady Magic within the ‘60s film industry in Japan as a whole. The film as I’ve presented it probably seems more goofy than racy, but by the standards of the early 1960s in Japan it really was pushing the envelope. Although I’ve elected not to screenshot any such moments, the film does feature female nudity (top half only), which was very unusual in 1964, and there’s also kissing:
Not particularly exceptional or shocking by Western standards, of course, but even as late as the 1960s it was rare for Japanese-made movies to show a kiss onscreen, since kissing in Japan is generally understood as sexually charged, rather than sweet or romantic as it often is in the West.
As I mentioned in the previous post, a lot of the motivation for the racy-for-the-time content can be explained by Japanese movie studios losing audience share to TV. What we see in Ninja Lady Magic was not only edgy on its own terms, but had the advantage that it was something TV programs couldn’t really replicate. Pretty quickly, Japanese movie producers realized that sexual or violent content was one area where movies had a leg up on their broadcast competitors; in fact, within a year or so of Ninja Lady Magic’s release we’d see the beginnings of the genre of so-called Pink Films, essentially soft-core porn produced by the major film studios and tightly regulated by Japanese film censors. Nakajima’s producer at Tōei, Okada Shigeru, appears to have been very aware of this aspect of the film biz, since multiple sources suggest Okada repeatedly urged the director and scriptwriter to literally sex up their scripts by providing more in the way of nudity.6
To be frank, Okada comes across as something of a sleazebag in the accounts of the making of the kunoichi films. Nakajima, for instance, recalls that the demands for more nudity in Ninja Lady Magic and its sequel went down poorly with almost everyone else at Tōei studios:
It was unthinkable back then for an actress to remove her clothes, so even if you went to talk with them about it, it was common for them to refuse…We got hammered in the tabloid press over the issue, and were subjected to some pretty chilly looks from the more morally upright staff at the studio. We also got people with no connection to the shoot showing up to try to catch a glimpse, so we ended up having to hire security guards when we were shooting scenes with the actresses.
Scriptwriter Kuramoto Sō also recalls that he and Nakajima were too embarrassed to do a test reading of the script to Ninja Lady Magic in front of Okada because of its sexual content,7 and Nakajima recalls that when word got out about what he was doing it not only cost him a possible collab one of his friends, the friend decided to drop him entirely.8
What Have We Learned?
By way of wrapping all this up, there are a few points I’d like to draw together from our discussion of Ninja Lady Magic. One is that for all their low-rent reputation, I do think ninja films are worth taking seriously as cultural products. Even if we might not use them as models of storytelling and cinematography, they’re still useful to us in a variety of ways.
Another point worth making is that if we look at ‘ninja’ films as a genre during the mid-1960s, supposedly “realistic” ninja films like Shinobi no mono were not necessarily dominant. For many among the Japanese viewing public, and indeed in the cinema world, the terms ninjutsu or ninpō had little or nothing to do either with martial arts or with the skills of real-world spies and assassins. Instead, they were basically forms of magic, quite often the wackier the better.
The final and perhaps most important point is that what we’ve been discussing here - slightly sleazy novels and films about magical seductress-assassins - is basically the whole of the kunoichi thing. As I’ve pointed out previously, it’s a mistake to think that these films are refracted representations of historical female assassins (the “based on” argument I dissected a couple of weeks back). It’s the other way around - the historical claims come into circulation as a direct result of the popularity of works such as Ninja Lady Magic.
So part of the reason I’ve tried to highlight the ridiculous nature of the film itself is to draw attention to the equally absurd nature of how ninja history comes to be written. What we’ve got here is a bunch of goofy male sexual fantasies which, when viewed in their original context, no reasonably intelligent adult could possibly take seriously. And yet somehow, over time, even this ludicrous material proves capable of morphing into supposed historical fact.
To wrap up our little trip to the movies, then, I’d like to conclude by providing some specific examples of how Ninja Lady Magic and other films like it turned out to be entirely capable of exerting an influence on subsequent ninja histories.
Richard Harrington, “‘Enter the Ninja’; Exit the Wise” Washington Post (Saturday 26 December 1981, p. D5).
Asahi geinō アサヒ芸能; henteko na eiga へんてこな映画. See Nakajima Sadao, Yūgeki no bigaku: Eiga kantoku Nakajima Sadao 遊撃の美学 映画監督中島貞夫 [Guerilla Aesthetics: The Film Director Nakajima Sadao] (Waizu Shuppan, 2004), p. 113; quoted here.
Per scriptwriter Kuramoto Sō, “to my surprise it was a big hit” (おどろいたことに大ヒットした), and this is corroborated by a number of other sources. Kuramoto, Yabureboshi moeta 破れ星、燃えた [The Shattered Star Burned] (Gentōsha, 2023; ebook edition).
Kunoichi geshō くノ一化粧. It’s an adaptation of Yamada’s 1962 novel The Ninja Scrolls: Heretic (Gedō ninpōchō 外道忍法帖).
A quick note on translation is perhaps overdue. Most English-language sources translate Kunoichi ninpō as “Female Ninja Magic,” which is passable but doesn’t strike me as quite right. The term kunoichi in the movie itself is not in fact used to mean “female ninja”; instead it denotes using ninja magic to assume the shape of a woman, as is made clear in the opening scenes with the Iga ninja. Translating Kunoichi ninpō as “Ninja Lady Magic” therefore seems a little more accurate and flexible, since it preserves the ambiguity in the original Japanese; you can read it as “Ninja Lady Magic,” i.e. magic used by female ninja, or as “Ninja Lady Magic” - i.e., magic used by male ninja to turn into a woman. Same with translating Kunoichi geshō as “Ninja Magic: Painted Lady,” since keshō (literally, make-up) has erotic connotations in Japanese, hence “Painted Lady,” but as used by Yamada in his earlier novels kunoichi-geshō is, again, a magic spell that allows a man to take on the form of a woman.
I’m available to consult on translating film titles, by the way. My fees are quite reasonable.
The third film got made anyway with another director. It was Ninpō chūshingura (‘Ninja Magic: Treasury of Loyal Retainers,’ 1965).
Okada Shigeru 岡田茂 (1924-2011).
Kuramoto Sō, Yaburehoshi moeta. The conversation as recalled by Kuramoto is actually kind of hilarious:
“[Kuramoto] “No goddamn way. I’m not reading that kind of stuff in front of someone.”
[Nakajima] “Dude, you were the one who wrote it!”
“Yeah, in collaboration with you. You read it.”
“It’s embarrassing!”
“It’s embarrassing for me too! You read it.”
“No, you do it!”
We ended up playing rock, paper, scissors for it, and I won, so Nakajima wound up reading the script to Okada.”
Movies vs. TV is by itself an interesting topic when dealing with the pop-culture (and dealing with the ninja *is* dealing with the pop-culture). As for the end of the 60s in Japan I suppose it wouldn't be irrelevant to look at the anime sereis of that time, and the way they took on (and/or contributed to creating) the contemporary ninja lore. Shows like Kamui gaiden or Sasuke, the huge impact of Shirato Sanpei, being out of the cinemas, but still penetrating minds of the whole generation... There is so much to get into. It would be great to read your views in the (hopefuly not too distant) future :-) (I'm not trying to suggest a competition with the Vintage Ninja's takes on the topic, btw.). Thanks.