Ninja Movies Are Not Historical Documentaries
A Public Service Announcement
The way it often works in ninja history is that fictional works drive historical claims. This obviously should never happen - no serious historian should confuse fictional events with historical ones - but you have to remember that the first generation of ninja writers, in both Japan and the US, were not competent historians. In today’s post, we’ll look at how the influential yet completely fictional 1962 ninja movie Shinobi no mono appears to have been used as the basis for historical claims in the works of two foundational authors in the field of ninja studies, martial artist Donn F. Draeger and journalist Andrew Adams.
Donn Draeger: The Art of Total Nonsense
Donn F. Draeger, covered in these pages before, was an American martial artist who trained in Japan after the war. He’s the author of the 1971 book Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility, and remains a widely revered figure in the martial arts community. It’s regrettable, therefore, that Ninjutsu is a complete disaster as a work of serious history. The most glaring red flag is that it contains no citations or acknowledgment of sources, which is probably just as well, because one of Draeger’s main sources for his historical claims was a Japanese children’s comic book. It’s almost certain, given what I’ll discuss below, that Draeger also based a lot of his claims on the Shinobi no mono films.
The ‘ninja vs. samurai’ hypothesis, as we saw a couple of posts ago, appears in Draeger’s book as follows:
Since they were regarded as a pariah class and considered something less than human, ninja who were captured by warriors usually suffered a horrible death. They might be boiled alive in oil, or have their skin slowly peeled from their bodies.1
Boiled alive? Yeah, that’s Ishikawa Goemon, who, though he wasn’t a ninja in real life, famously met exactly that fate in 1594. That, unsurprisingly, is what happens to Goemon in the second Shinobi no mono movie. Here’s the cauldron, just before Goemon goes in it:
Having the “skin slowly peeled from their bodies”? That appears to be Draeger’s take on the Yohachi torture scene from the first film:
A Bad Day At The Orifice
According to Draeger, there was one particular method of torture favored for captured ninja:
One particular method of killing a captured ninja was designed to produce a lingering pain and a slow death. It consisted of suspending him, having been tightly bound on a wooden frame…
Tightly bound - yup. Suspended - yup. I think we have a reasonable idea where those ideas came from. And then?
…over a sharpened wooden stake…The entire load, ninja and frame, was made to hang directly over the stake. When the rope holding it became wet it elongated and the ninja would slowly be inched downward, anus first, onto the sharp point.2
Uh…yeah. That last bit is not in Shinobi no mono, something for which I think we can all be grateful.
Draeger was nothing if not consistent in his themes, eh?
All is not lost for the ninja, however, for it is within his power to escape his tormentors:
In his youth the ninja made special preparations to develop a unique body. Then, when bones were soft and ligatures and tendons pliable, he learned to stretch and manipulate his joints so that he might dislocate them, under control, from their normal positions. This strange skill came into good use in the event he was captured. If bound up by his captors he could effect his own release by appropriate dislocations and stretching actions.3
Wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly how Yohachi gets loose in Shinobi no mono. He dislocates his shoulder, slips the ropes, and then, after he’s loose, slams his shoulder against the wall to pop the joint back in, right in front of the dozing guard:
Hanging By a Thread
Now, this could all just be coincidence. Perhaps Draeger and Shinobi no mono were drawing their ideas from the same source, probably ninjutsu master Hatsumi Masaaki or alleged ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō. Perhaps, but the fact that plot points from Shinobi no mono keep cropping up in Draeger’s work over and over again is very suggestive, especially as I believe Draeger had been in Japan when Shinobi no mono was released, and was working closely with Hatsumi Masaaki, who was a consultant to Shinobi no mono’s producers.
The clincher, though, comes in Draeger’s accounts of supposed ninja assassination attempts later in the book. The dead giveaway is this story:
More than one ninja had attempted to kill the lord of Kuwana. All had failed, and those who had not had the foresight to kill themselves were tortured unmercifully. Totsuka Jiro, a lad of five, had lost his famous ninja father to the lord of Kuwana’s cunning…
Jiro hoisted himself quietly into the rafters above and behind the ceiling of the room in which the lord of Kuwana slept, then began his clever plan to end the life of the man who had ordered his father killed.
The rest of Draeger’s account is an almost a shot-for-shot reprise of Shinobi no mono’s climactic assassination scene, in which Ishikawa Goemon tries to poison Oda Nobunaga:
Jiro first drilled a small hole in the ceiling.
Peering down through it he could just make out the form of the lord sprawling on the bed, and he went about the next step of his plan.
He unwound a length of strong silk string and fed it down just a few inches from the sleeping lord’s face.
Jiro quickly opened a vial he was carrying, dipped a small stick into the poisonous liquid within the vial, and placed a few drops on the string that dangled from the ceiling.4
It’s the same in every detail; only the names of the killer and victim are different. Oh, and in Draeger’s version the technique works and the ‘Lord of Kuwana’ dies.
Film buffs might raise an objection here, however. The poison-thread assassination technique famously appears in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, where it’s used to kill off Bond’s Japanese love-interest, played by actress Wakabayashi Akiko. Draeger worked on You Only Live Twice, as a stunt double for none other than Sean Connery. Could Draeger have taken the details of the poison-thread technique from the Bond movie instead, then?
I don’t think so, because the details in the Bond version don’t match. The assassin in You Only Live Twice doesn’t drill through the ceiling and doesn’t use a ‘stick’ to apply the poison to the thread, as you can see for yourself. So I don’t think there can be much serious doubt that Draeger based his pseudo-historical ‘ninja’ story, as well as a lot of his other claims about ‘ninja,’ on his viewing of the film Shinobi no mono.
What this says about the scholarly rigor and historical reliability of Draeger’s Ninjutsu should be obvious. Unfortunately, much the same problem exists in another hugely influential book from around the same time, Andrew Adams’ 1970 Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, and it’s to Adams we’ll turn in the next post.
Donn Draeger, Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility: Facts, Legends, and Techniques (first pub. 1971, my ed. 1989, p. 26).
Draeger, Ninjutsu, p. 26.
Draeger, Ninjutsu, p. 34.
Draeger, Ninjutsu, pp. 119-122.