No, The Forty-Seven Ronin Were Not Ninja
How Not to Do Art History, Part #2
In our previous post we saw that although there are plenty of depictions of figures in black outfits in Edo-era pictorial art, these figures are basically never ‘ninja’ in the modern sense, nor are they usually examples of historical shinobi. Rather, the black hood indicates that, for whatever reason, someone wants to keep their identity a secret. We saw for instance that visitors to a city’s brothel districts might wear hoods so that others didn’t recognize them, and we also saw that robbers might wear black hoods (cell #17) to conceal their identity, as in the case of the satirical story Grilled and Basted Edo Playboy from 1785. In these cases, the black hood is the Edo-period equivalent of a bank robber wearing a bandana over the lower half of the face or a ski mask, and it does not mean that a character is a trained spy or assassin.
Given that the works we’re discussing are fictional, the black hood also tends to make an appearance when the characters in a story are up to all kinds of hijinks and zany schemes, particularly when said zany scheme depends on the victim not realizing the identity of the person in black. In the above story Grilled and Basted Edo Playboy, for example, the figures in black are actually the main character Enjirō’s father and elder brother, and the ‘mugging’ is staged in an attempt to scare Enjirō into abandoning his dissolute playboy lifestyle. The success of this scheme, obviously, depends on Enjirō not realizing who the figures in black are.
The Play’s the Thing
Another fun example is the famous puppet and kabuki play Kanadehon Chūshingura, which is usually translated into English as The Storehouse of Loyal Retainers.1 Chūshingura, as I’ll refer to it from now on, is basically the story of the legendary Forty-Seven Ronin. If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a group of forty-seven samurai whose lord Asano Naganori was condemned to execution in 1701 for drawing his sword in the Shogunal palace and attacking one of his rivals, Kira Yoshinaka.2 The ronin felt that Asano’s execution was unfair and/or that the whole situation was Kira Yoshinaka’s fault, so they determined to avenge their lord. They then waited for two years before finally murdering Yoshinaka in a night ambush on his mansion in early 1703.
Sensational as the story is, it’s basically true, as the main events did indeed happen more or less as described. The Forty-Seven Ronin’s tale was, however, retold and fictionalized in any number of subsequent ways, one of the most popular being Kanadehon Chūshingura. First performed in 1748, this became one of the most popular Japanese plays of all time and is still staged today, though usually in truncated form - it’s eleven acts in all, and even modern Japanese audiences don’t usually have the patience for that. If you’re interested, you can find modern performances of the play as kabuki or as puppet theater (the latter starting at 4:07) on YouTube.3
So what’s the ‘ninja’ connection? Well, consider this print by Utagawa Kunisada II.4
You’ll immediately notice, I hope, the two guys in black on the left-hand side of the print. Stephen Turnbull certainly did, as he includes this as a color print in his 1991 Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult, correctly attributed to Kunisada and identified as a scene from Kanadehon Chūshingura, though with the title “The Forty-seven Ronin as ninja” and the text reading, in part, “It shows two perfect ‘ninja,’ holding a woman captive and shining into her face a dark lantern.”5
What is happening in the play, then, and what does this picture actually depict?
Who Was That Masked Man?
To find out, I read the play. Yes, I know - this is not exactly revolutionary methodology when doing art history, but it genuinely doesn’t seem to occur to the vast majority of ‘ninja’ historians to do this, which tells you something about how casual and sloppy most of them are about the materials they’re using. Checking Kanadehon Chūshingura wouldn’t have been particularly hard, since it’s one of the most famous Japanese plays, like, ever, and even if you can’t read Japanese it’s been translated into English at least three times. This sort of thing is what gets ‘ninja’ historians into trouble over and over, as they hang the label of ‘ninja’ on prints without any real understanding of what the image actually shows.
Anyway, so, with regard to what’s going on here - well, like a lot of kabuki and puppet theater plots, it’s complicated. You can read a full summary of the tenth act here, if you’re interested, but I’ll try to summarize the scene and its background as concisely as I can below.
Basically, our main man is Amakawaya Gihei, a merchant who is helping the ronin with supplies as they plan their upcoming revenge mission.6 In order to maintain operational security, Gihei has intentionally removed most of his family and servants from his house, including his wife Osono. Osono’s family, realizing that Gihei is up to something, then come and ask that Gihei grant Osono a divorce.7 Gihei has no choice but to agree to this lest he give the ronin’s plans away, so he grants Osono the divorce papers, only to learn that Osono’s family plan to marry her off to a richer man almost immediately.
Skipping over a bit more of the plot, the ronin are so impressed at Gihei’s self-sacrificing nature that they decide to help him out. Loyal wife that she is, Osono comes back to the house one more time to ask Gihei to take her back, which Gihei stoically refuses to do. As Osono is leaving, she is accosted by a man who cuts off part of her hair and steals her divorce letter. This, we later find out, was Ōwashi Bungo, one of the ronin.8 Without the divorce papers, Osono’s family cannot easily remarry her, and even if they try, no family will take a woman whose hair has been cut off. However, in due course the hair will grow back, by which time the Ronin will have accomplished their revenge mission, and Gihei and Osono can then be safely reunited. So basically a happy ending, though the whole thing definitely qualifies under the ‘zany schemes’ heading.
For our purposes, there are a couple of key points. One useful question to ask with Edo prints is whether the hood and/or black outfit is mentioned in the text or is simply the artist’s interpretation of the scene. In the Chūshingura case it actually is mentioned in the play script, more or less, as it describes the figure as “a big man with only his eyes showing” (me bakari dashita ōotoko).9 I think the black ‘ninja’ mask is a reasonable interpretation of that, and other artists clearly agreed. It’s what the illustrator in the 1917 translation above went with, if you care to go back to the top and check, and it’s also what the earlier artist Keisai Eisen went with in depicting the same scene, as we can see here.10 Note that there’s only one assailant in the play script, the second print, and the 1917 illustration, so the addition of the second man in black in Turnbull’s print was probably Utagawa Kunisada’s own creative interpretation.
We might also consider Osono’s reaction to being mugged by this scary masked figure. Since everyone in 18th century Japan knew precisely what a ‘ninja’ was, she immediately realizes what’s up and screams, “Help! Help! I’m being attacked by ninjas!”
Actually, no. Just kidding. Like just about everyone else at the time, she interprets the masked figure as a robber, and because the mugging comes at the end of what’s already been a really bad day for her, her reaction is to say, “If that man was a thief of combs or hair-pins, I would rather he had killed me!”11 So her interpretation of the event and the dress of the man in question is that she’s been mugged, and I’d argue that contemporary Japanese viewers of the print would also have understood what we think is a ‘ninja’ mask as signifying a robber.
All of what I’ve argued above is pretty consistent when you take the time to look at it - the black hood is a visual motif signalling that someone’s identity is being concealed, no more, no less. In the Chūshingura context, the ronin/mugger Ōwashi Bungo has to keep his identity a secret as he steals the letter and cuts off Osono’s hair, because if he is identified the jig will probably be up for him and all of his buddies. So the black outfit here doesn’t have anything to do with ‘ninja’ in the sense that we understand the term, or even really the historical shinobi.
You’ve probably realized this by now, but the ‘ninja’ historian’s generally slapdash approach to using Edo-era art as proof for the historical reality of the modern ‘ninja’ really annoys me. For one thing, the end product is badly misleading; the intended audience for these books has no expertise in Japanese art and so has to take it on faith that the content of the print is being accurately described, which quite often it’s not. For another, the 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.
Unfortunately we’re not done yet, not by a long shot - there’s still plenty of really shitty ‘ninja’ art history that needs deconstructing. So that’s what we’ll carry on with in the next post, and just so you know - any fans of Katsushika Hokusai might want to look away now…
Kanadehon Chūshingura 仮名手本忠臣蔵. Written by Takeda Izumo II 二代目竹田出雲 (1691-1756) and two other well-known playwrights.
Asano Naganori 浅野長矩 (1667-1701); Kira Yoshinaka 吉良義央 (1641-1703). It’s worth noting that despite many confident assertions on this topic by pop historians, we don’t actually know what the precise reason for Naganori’s attack on Yoshinaka was, and it appears that the ronin didn’t either. See Henry D. Smith II, “The Capacity of Chūshingura: Three Hundred Years of Chūshingura” Monumenta Nipponica 58-1 (Spring 2003), p. 4.
If you click through to watch the videos, you might wonder why the play doesn’t use the names Asano Naganori and Kira Yoshinaka. The reason is that the Tokugawa government didn’t really allow any kind of public discussion of current events, so play that were ‘ripped from the headlines,’ which quite a few were, often re-situated the events hundreds of years in the past. Chūshingura is doing exactly that by using the real-life 14th century warlords En’ya Takasada (=Asano) and Kō no Moronao (=Yoshinaka).
Utagawa Kunisada II 二代歌川国貞 (1786-1865).
Turnbull, Secret Warrior Cult, 1991, plate #20 in unpaginated color section between pp. 96-97. You might, if you’re reading carefully, notice Turnbull’s scare quotes around ‘ninja’ and consider that he probably knew that the figures were not ‘ninja’ in the sense that his book was arguing for. The more time I spend reading Turnbull’s earlier work, the stronger my impression that he knew how weak the evidence for some of this stuff was even as early as 1991, but that’s a topic for a later post.
Amayakawaya Gihei 天河屋義平. Not a real person, but he is based on an actual merchant named Amanoya Rihei 天野屋利兵衛 (1661-1733) who did provide support to the ronin.
Osono お園. Not a real person (as far as I know).
Ōwashi Bungo 大鷲文吾. Also not a real person, though probably based on Ōtaka Gengo 大高源吾 (1672-1703), one of the actual ronin.
目計リ出した大男. If you want to check for yourself, there’s a complete script available online here, and it’s the bottom half of p. 41 of the PDF. Bear in mind, though, that even if your Japanese is really good play scripts are a whole other ballgame, and are often very difficult to read if you don’t know the conventions and/or have a good grasp of classical Japanese as well as modern.
Keisai Eisen 渓斎英泉 (1790-1848).
Kushi kōgai no nusutto nara isso koroshite koroshite, to. 櫛笄の盗人ならいつそ殺して殺してと.