I have a small note on the critical approach to various information within the ninja lore. While Draeger in his "Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility", chapter Special Skills of the Ninja seriously mentions how the ninja from their youth learned to dislocate their joints in order to be able to get out of bounds (Did he get this from Shinobi no mono?), and his work is one of the sources of the Czech book "Japonská bojová umění" [Japanese Martial Arts] (by Ivan Fojtík, 1993), one of the first publications introducing ninjutsu as a martial art in the Czech language, the Czech author provides a footnote: "The stated idea raises doubts: a limb with frequent dislocations does not perform its normal functions well." (p. 144) Although copying, there is a solid sign of a critical thinking towards the source info by Fojtík. Btw., the dislocation of joints still seems to be a thing https://youtu.be/bZ-4_SV713M?si=zQWBa3slTOwRi56V&t=139 :)
I have no medical background at all, but I think that the dislocation thing is indeed possible. Harry Houdini was widely rumored to dislocate his shoulder to escape from straitjackets, though I don’t know whether that was what he actually did or not. Whatever the case, as you say I can’t imagine that training in doing that would be good for overall physical health and strength. That said, if the alternative was to be tortured to death, as it is in Shinobi no mono, I guess you would find a way.
Your point also reminded me of something else in Igarashi Yoshikuni’s “Bodies of Memory,” by the way. He writes a bit about the Japanese women’s volleyball team, who won gold and became famous as the “Witches of the Orient” (東洋の魔女), and is particularly interested in their training regime, which was apparently so physically extreme that it began to do serious physiological damage to them. Igarashi suggest this is a continuation of wartime militarist insistence on spirit over body, but given that a lot of ninja history was heavily influenced by early 60s cultural products like Onmitsu Kenshi, Anpo, etc, I wonder how far the Ninja as super-athletes thing takes influence from the Olympics. I know that Itō Gingetsu and Fujita Seiko had already made the case for strict physical training as key to the ninjutsusha, but then I read Okuse talking about how Ninja could beat the best Olympian high-jumpers and it makes me wonder. I also seem to recall Adams claiming somewhere that Japanese Olympic coaches had sought advice from ‘ninja,’ though like a lot of Adams’ stuff that could well be bullshit.
What I find interesting is the following: We've seen the black-or-white perspective – if one "mythical" thing about ninja is "scientifically" explicable, then *all* must be true (somehow). That still seems to hold for a lot of people (perhaps more within Bujinkan, where a lot of people accept a sort of cult-ish nature of the stuff – "If the Grandmaster claims this, there must be true, i.e. rational/scientific explanation, to it, because he's the ultimate authority and he wouldn't make things up, lie etc. ..."). All the stories about invisibility, flying, escapes, transfigurations of a ninja have an explanation – if you have the know-how that the 'ninjutsu' (as martial art) provides. In the early text published in Czechoslovakia and the Czech republic in the 90s, however, often a more critical views are hinted: It is being said that... Stories are being told that... But this or that doesn't seem to be plausible, this seems to be a made up stuff etc. There is no "citical ninja theory" back then, of course, so no attempts to explain it otherwise (besides "this info is probably just a made up stuff"). But I can see quite a few signs of doubts in the transmition of the information. I wonder if it has to do with the authors being aware that the info was filtered by English or German language sources, and doubting them. Perhaps they didn't even trust their own proficiency in dealing with English and German texts – and rightfully so; there are quite a few claims in the Czech materials that the hole in the center of a senban shuriken was used for torture, to pull nails (爪), not nails (釘) #lostintranslation :-)
I've noticed elements of that too in the English-language stuff from about 1990 or so onward. If you read e.g. Turnbull's 1991 Secret Warrior Cult with a critical eye, there are plenty of signs that he thought some of the material he was being presented with was dubious. He notes, for instance, how Draeger and Adams don't give sources for a lot of their claims, obviously doesn't take Hatsumi's "ninja war machines" seriously, thinks that the mizu-gumo is "hilarious," etc etc. But this mild skepticism completely disappears from his later works (2003 onward). I'm not sure exactly why, but I would imagine that commercial considerations played a role - books claiming to tell THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE NINJA are almost always going to sell better than ones whose message is, "well, there is a small historical basis to this, but we have to look carefully at each thing and assess it."
You also have to account for the fact that a great many 'ninja' writers come to the topic first and foremost from a martial arts background. Martial artists are, on the whole, a pretty fractious bunch (go and read the letters pages in almost any issue of Black Belt, for instance), and the English-language lit is full of open skepticism regarding the bona fides of basically everyone in the ninja world - Fujita Seiko, Hatsumi, Okuse, Nawa Yumio, Kawakami Jin'ichi, whoever, there's someone out there who has more or less called them a fraud in print. Admittedly this tends to take the shape of "everyone who claims to be teaching the REAL ninjutsu is a fraud, except for the guy I happen to be working with." It's selective skepticism, admittedly, but I suppose it's there nonetheless.
Excellently written.
I have a small note on the critical approach to various information within the ninja lore. While Draeger in his "Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility", chapter Special Skills of the Ninja seriously mentions how the ninja from their youth learned to dislocate their joints in order to be able to get out of bounds (Did he get this from Shinobi no mono?), and his work is one of the sources of the Czech book "Japonská bojová umění" [Japanese Martial Arts] (by Ivan Fojtík, 1993), one of the first publications introducing ninjutsu as a martial art in the Czech language, the Czech author provides a footnote: "The stated idea raises doubts: a limb with frequent dislocations does not perform its normal functions well." (p. 144) Although copying, there is a solid sign of a critical thinking towards the source info by Fojtík. Btw., the dislocation of joints still seems to be a thing https://youtu.be/bZ-4_SV713M?si=zQWBa3slTOwRi56V&t=139 :)
I have no medical background at all, but I think that the dislocation thing is indeed possible. Harry Houdini was widely rumored to dislocate his shoulder to escape from straitjackets, though I don’t know whether that was what he actually did or not. Whatever the case, as you say I can’t imagine that training in doing that would be good for overall physical health and strength. That said, if the alternative was to be tortured to death, as it is in Shinobi no mono, I guess you would find a way.
Your point also reminded me of something else in Igarashi Yoshikuni’s “Bodies of Memory,” by the way. He writes a bit about the Japanese women’s volleyball team, who won gold and became famous as the “Witches of the Orient” (東洋の魔女), and is particularly interested in their training regime, which was apparently so physically extreme that it began to do serious physiological damage to them. Igarashi suggest this is a continuation of wartime militarist insistence on spirit over body, but given that a lot of ninja history was heavily influenced by early 60s cultural products like Onmitsu Kenshi, Anpo, etc, I wonder how far the Ninja as super-athletes thing takes influence from the Olympics. I know that Itō Gingetsu and Fujita Seiko had already made the case for strict physical training as key to the ninjutsusha, but then I read Okuse talking about how Ninja could beat the best Olympian high-jumpers and it makes me wonder. I also seem to recall Adams claiming somewhere that Japanese Olympic coaches had sought advice from ‘ninja,’ though like a lot of Adams’ stuff that could well be bullshit.
What I find interesting is the following: We've seen the black-or-white perspective – if one "mythical" thing about ninja is "scientifically" explicable, then *all* must be true (somehow). That still seems to hold for a lot of people (perhaps more within Bujinkan, where a lot of people accept a sort of cult-ish nature of the stuff – "If the Grandmaster claims this, there must be true, i.e. rational/scientific explanation, to it, because he's the ultimate authority and he wouldn't make things up, lie etc. ..."). All the stories about invisibility, flying, escapes, transfigurations of a ninja have an explanation – if you have the know-how that the 'ninjutsu' (as martial art) provides. In the early text published in Czechoslovakia and the Czech republic in the 90s, however, often a more critical views are hinted: It is being said that... Stories are being told that... But this or that doesn't seem to be plausible, this seems to be a made up stuff etc. There is no "citical ninja theory" back then, of course, so no attempts to explain it otherwise (besides "this info is probably just a made up stuff"). But I can see quite a few signs of doubts in the transmition of the information. I wonder if it has to do with the authors being aware that the info was filtered by English or German language sources, and doubting them. Perhaps they didn't even trust their own proficiency in dealing with English and German texts – and rightfully so; there are quite a few claims in the Czech materials that the hole in the center of a senban shuriken was used for torture, to pull nails (爪), not nails (釘) #lostintranslation :-)
I've noticed elements of that too in the English-language stuff from about 1990 or so onward. If you read e.g. Turnbull's 1991 Secret Warrior Cult with a critical eye, there are plenty of signs that he thought some of the material he was being presented with was dubious. He notes, for instance, how Draeger and Adams don't give sources for a lot of their claims, obviously doesn't take Hatsumi's "ninja war machines" seriously, thinks that the mizu-gumo is "hilarious," etc etc. But this mild skepticism completely disappears from his later works (2003 onward). I'm not sure exactly why, but I would imagine that commercial considerations played a role - books claiming to tell THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE NINJA are almost always going to sell better than ones whose message is, "well, there is a small historical basis to this, but we have to look carefully at each thing and assess it."
You also have to account for the fact that a great many 'ninja' writers come to the topic first and foremost from a martial arts background. Martial artists are, on the whole, a pretty fractious bunch (go and read the letters pages in almost any issue of Black Belt, for instance), and the English-language lit is full of open skepticism regarding the bona fides of basically everyone in the ninja world - Fujita Seiko, Hatsumi, Okuse, Nawa Yumio, Kawakami Jin'ichi, whoever, there's someone out there who has more or less called them a fraud in print. Admittedly this tends to take the shape of "everyone who claims to be teaching the REAL ninjutsu is a fraud, except for the guy I happen to be working with." It's selective skepticism, admittedly, but I suppose it's there nonetheless.