Science! Progress! Democracy!...and Ninja

The postwar one-two punch that made tales of magic into history

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The main point I’ve been trying to make over the last few posts is that a fairly big part of ‘ninja’ history consists not of doing history as most of us know it, but rather of reading works of literary fiction in some very odd ways.

We’ve covered, for instance, how in 1909 the journalist and writer Itō Gingetsu introduced the idea that fictional depictions of magic were always in some sense based on real events, and we’ve also seen a range of applications of that idea well into the 1960s. Gingetsu’s argument, as I pointed out a few posts ago, is a quintessentially modern one. It’s cut from much the same cloth as the idea that what ghost stories really reflect is psychological imbalance - people seeing things, basically - and it’s a viewpoint that could only have emerged after the coming of Western-inspired modernity in Japan during the Meiji period (1867-1912). But modernity on its own doesn’t fully explain how we got to the point of people watching wacky ninja sex comedies and assuming that they must embody some kind of historical truth. To understand what’s going on here, we have to look at the zeitgeist of postwar Japan, particularly that of the early 1960s.

Vorsprung Durch Technik, Japan Style

Almost from the moment that the Pacific War concluded in 1945, postwar Japan decided it was going to be about science. For those who think of present-day Japan as high-tech paradise, the land of the Nintendo Switch and the Washlet, it may seem surprising that this needed to be said. In fact, though, in terms of international trade profile, prewar Japan had mostly been known for its textile industry, not for high-tech stuff at all. There’s a persistent (though untrue) story, for instance, that when the synthetic fabric Nylon was developed in 1935 the name was chosen because it’s short for “Now You Lose, Old Nippon” - the idea being that the invention of a synthetic fabric would loosen Japan’s grip on the worldwide textile industry.

So science was a big part of the postwar national reinvention, and one of the things driving that was the perception that Japan lost the war because the US had had better science. The most obvious manifestation of scientific superiority would be the two A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war, which, as gruesome as they may have been, were undeniably the result of cutting-edge science. Yoshikuni Igarashi’s fantastic book on images of the body in postwar Japan quotes a newspaper report of remarks by Japan’s first postwar education minister, Maeda Tamon, a couple weeks after the end of the war:

We were defeated by the enemy’s science. This fact is proven by one atomic bomb dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The new education minister Maeda at his inauguration spoke of his sincere desire for rebuilding culture in a broad sense, including science, and founding the nation on scientific knowledge.¹

Igarashi further notes that Japanese impression of highly advanced US science was only strengthened during the Occupation (1945-52) period by US authorities’ making available drugs such as penicillin, which had been almost unobtainable in wartime Japan, and chemicals such as DDT, all in the interests of improving public health. (That last one would turn out to work a bit too well, but you get the idea).

It wasn’t just the government, either; images of science and progress as key to Japan’s revival were everywhere in pop culture too. To give a somewhat random example, one of Kurosawa Akira’s first postwar films, the 1948 Drunken Angel, is set in a bombed-out suburb of Tokyo, where an ornery alcoholic doctor who runs a clinic next to a cesspit tries to get his patients to embrace the future and clean, scientific living. A recurring image in the film is an advert for a brand of vitamin B-2 pills, known at the time under the brand name Wakaflavin (ワカフラビン). The advert in question pops on screen maybe six or seven times in the film as a whole:

Kurosawa Akira, dir., Drunken Angel (Yoidore tenshi 酔いどれ天使); Tōhō Studios, 1948.

The message is clear: Better living through science! Or if you prefer, we could point to the original 1954 Godzilla, in which the titular monster awakened by atomic testing is defeated by the appliance of even more advanced science, namely the terrifying weapon known as the Oxygen Destroyer (which, btw, is Made in Japan).

It Must Be True. It’s Scientific.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone that this campaign to science-ify Japan worked pretty damn well. One of the more high-profile successes in this regard was the unveiling of the Shinkansen high-speed train in 1964, which took place ten days before the start of the summer Olympics in Tokyo that year. The timing wasn’t a coincidence; the idea was to present the Shinkansen and have visitors to Japan travel on it, all by way of Japan saying to the world: We’re back, baby, and this time, we’re scientists!

The first Shinkansen goes into operation in October 1964. Source

OK, fine, this is all very interesting, but we’re here for the ninja, so what does this have to do with them? The answer is that this rhetoric of science and progress as key elements in Japanese national identity had a pretty big impact on ‘ninja’ history, which was after all gathering speed during the mid-1960s, exactly the same moment Japan was showing off the Shinkansen to a justifiably envious world. This invocation of ‘science,’ I’d argue, was the ‘two’ of a one-two punch that had started with Gingetsu and his modern take on fictional wizards from the Edo period.

The influence of ‘science’ on ninja history took two main forms. The first, and the one most relevant to our discussion here, was the insistence that the new ‘ninja’ - the strictly mundane heroes who did what they did through amazing physical training, not magic - reflected the truth of what the ‘ninja’ actually were. And what was more, to understand ‘ninja’ that way was in fact “scientific,” the major buzzword of the day. The second point of influence was a range of claims that the historical shinobi themselves had in fact been scientists, long before even the concept of science had even taken shape, but that requires a post to itself, so we’ll cover that at a later date.

The idea, then, was that the stories of wizards who could turn into rats or become invisible were the product of an unscientific age; the “scientific” and “rational” way to understand ninjutsu was that they were really highly-trained warriors. This claim, that the newly emergent ‘60s view of ninja was “scientific,” pops up absolutely everywhere in the ninja literature. Here’s Hatsumi Masaaki quoted talking about ninjutsu in an article accompanying a 1961 photoshoot:

“It isn’t mysterious at all,” he explains. “It is based on a logical theory and is rational.”²

Donn Draeger the same year:

Actually there is nothing mysterious about ninjutsu. All of the skills within the system can be explained logically and are based on sound, rational principles, perfected by constant and rigorous training.³

Yamamoto Satsuo, director of the influential 1962 film Shinobi no mono, pitching the movie to his boss Nagata Masaichi in 1961:

[Nagata] A ninja? You mean somebody who makes a symbolic sign with his fingers and then transforms himself into a [rat] or toad?” […]

[Yamamoto] “No, this is different. What you described is the old kind. What I am talking about is the scientific techniques a ninja uses.”

I then went on to talk about the role ninjas had played in Japanese history and how their practices were in fact based in science.

Jay Gluck, in 1962:

One of the arts developed and used by the Japanese ninja, and his Chinese ancestor, was that of sai-min-jutsu, what we would term in English, hypnosis…This scientific art was lost to mankind for centuries until its rediscovery by the European Mesmer…⁴

Okuse Heishichirō, in his 1963 How To Get Ahead Using Ninjutsu: Ninja Arts for Corporate Workers:

Many people, on hearing “ninjutsu,” will say “ah, turning into a toad and disappearing in a cloud of smoke.” However, I now realize that ninjutsu, which I thought at first was semi-mystical, is actually scientific and rational.⁵

Film critic Ogawa Tōru, in a 1963 review of Shinobi no mono:

This film deals with the historically famous ninja of Iga, and shows us that ninjutsu is not about disappearing in a puff of smoke, but is actually a set of fully scientific and psychological techniques. For example, dislocating one’s joints to escape from the ropes in which one is tied up is something that is done today, and when [the actor] Nakamura Yutaka does finally get loose, places his hand on the wall to support himself, and with a crick puts his joints back in place, that all seems very realistic and scientific.⁶

In case it’s not clear, Ogawa is talking about the scene in Shinobi no mono where the ninja Yohachi escapes from Nobunaga’s goons after being tied up, which we discussed a few months back:

Yamamoto Satsuo, dir., Shinobi no mono (Daiei, 1962).

She Blinded Me With Science

The message discipline on display here would impress most politicians in 2025, let alone 1964. The idea is that “scientific,” “logical,” and “rational” thinking shows us that ninjutsu is not in fact the magic that we know from popular literature; what appears to be magic is actually the result of real-world physical training. It would follow that sticking with what Yamamoto called the “old kind,” the shadow mages, was the opposite: unscientific, illogical, and irrational. And nobody would want to be unscientific and irrational, certainly not in the country that came up with the Shinkansen.

Though none of the figures quoted above put it this way, what they were in fact proposing was an ethics of literary criticism, a framework for how you should interpret Edo-era literary works like The Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai and Jiraiya or even 20th century works like the Tachikawa Bunko Sarutobi Sasuke novels. The effect of this rhetoric was essentially to create a split in ideas of ‘ninja,’ between the supposedly old shadow-magic type (like in Ninja Lady Magic) and the new, supposedly scientific and rational type as seen in Shinobi no mono. Where Gingetsu had proposed that you could read literary works as refracted history, 60s ninja discourse tried very hard to insist that you should.

But I don’t think the rhetoric of “rational/irrational ninja” actually did what its advocates wanted it to do. For one, all of the above writers were proposing a framework for reading literary works without really acknowledging that that was what it was, or thinking very hard about how to use said framework. With few conceptual limits to it, the ‘magic is really real’ framework could be applied to virtually any text, even postwar ones where such a rubric made little sense. Mining a 1964 ninja movie like Ninja Lady Magic for some kind of historical truth about ninja, as Donn Draeger seems to have done, is ridiculous on its face, but I’m convinced that is what did indeed happen.

Second is that in Japan itself, the ‘shadow mage’ version never really went away, despite attempts to paint the magic-type ninja as old and unscientific. The debut of the “scientific” ninja did nothing at all to dent the popularity of writers such as Yamada Fūtarō, and now, of course, we’ve got Naruto, one of the most popular global anime out there and very firmly in the ninjutsu-is-magic camp.

Third, the “it’s scientific” argument is arguably a category error, because what it’s trying to do is attach a quality of “scientific” or “unscientific” to an activity, namely literary interpretation, where such judgments are close to meaningless. After all, I’m not certain what it would mean for there to be a genuinely “scientific” or “rational” reading of a play or a poem in the first place. This last point is why I have repeatedly argued that ‘ninja’ history appears deeply confused by the existence of the literary imagination; all of the writers quoted above appear to be assuming that “scientific” reading of works of literature reveals the historical truth that they must contain, rather than considering that such works might be a form of creative expression.

To lean into this point a bit more, for our next post I’d like to explore an attempt to do precisely what I am talking about, to understand films like Ninja Lady Magic as art, and see what happens. Specifically, I want to discuss a 2006 article providing a French Neo-Surrealist take on the kunoichi, which, as you would expect, is going to be lit.

1. Maeda Tamon 前田多門 (1884-1962); as quoted in Igarashi Yoshikuni, Bodies of Memory (Princeton UP, 2000), p. 69.

2. Ray Falk [photo credits], “The Art of Invisibility” Argosy May 1961, p. 30.

3. Donn Draeger, “Invisible Men with Secret Weapons,” This is Japan no. 9 (September 1961), p. 209.

4. Jay Gluck, Zen Combat (NY: Ballantine Books, 1962), p. 112.

5. Okuse Heishichirō, Ninjutsu shoseihō: Sarariman ninpō (Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1963), p. 12.

6. Ogawa Tōru, “Ninja wa teikōsha tarienu ka” Eiga hyōron no. 20 vol. 2 (January 1963), p. 19.