I wrote in the previous post that there probably is enough evidence to support the idea that the word shinobi in premodern Japanese sources indicates a distinctive role or identity. But of course, “role” and “identity” are not necessarily the same thing. I might take it upon myself to re-paint my living room, but I don’t think that would make me a “house painter” unless and until I started doing it regularly, preferably for money. So, while granting that shinobi do appear to have been a thing, let’s take a closer look at what they are actually doing in the original context, and see if we can draw any conclusions to help us understand how the term might have been used.
The ‘Honorable’ Samurai
It's probably a good idea first of all to clear up one fairly common misconception about the practicalities of warfare in medieval Japan. Some of my readers might imagine that the role of the shinobi was to handle all of the dirty work that other warriors supposedly regarded as ‘dishonorable.’ If you’ve read much in the English-language literature on the ‘ninja,’ you could easily have come away with that impression from passages such as this:
[the samurai] were loyal to their lord, fearless in battle, and faced squarely on to their equal and worthy opponents whom they challenged to single combat…[Ninja] delivered victory by a process that reversed all that the samurai ideals stood for. Ninja did not face squarely on to their opponents, nor did they allow them the opportunity of a challenge.1
Or this:
Honor was paramount, and to maintain that honor it was essential to fight in a noble, forthright fashion: the warrior met the enemy head-on, ideally in single combat, and announced himself, actively seeking as much attention as possible…The tradition and philosophy of the ninja were the antithesis of the samurai way. 2
The general idea is that your average samurai only deigned to fight on the conventional battlefield in single combat against worthy opponents, preferably after giving their name and a fifteen-minute recitation of their lineage. Meanwhile the enemy (I assume) resisted the temptation to put an arrow through the speaker’s neck and courteously waited for them to finish.
In fairness to Turnbull and Levy, the authors above, this is indeed what you see in medieval warrior tales like the 14th century Tale of the Heike. Here, as an example, the warrior Imai no Kanehira launches into a death-or-glory charge against fifty horsemen sent by his enemy Minamoto no Yoritomo:3
Kanehira dashed into the fifty riders alone. He stood in his stirrups and announced his name in a mighty shout, “You must have heard of me long ago; now take a look with your own eyes! I am Imai no Shirō Kanehira, aged thirty-three, foster brother to Lord Kiso! The Kamakura Lord Yoritomo must know that I exist! Kill me and show him my head!”4
The thing is, though, as almost every serious historian of medieval Japan since the 1960s has recognized, it’s highly unlikely that real-life warriors did this kind of thing, if for no other reason than that battles tend to be loud. The grand, stirring speeches and calls-out to opponents are almost certainly a literary convention, connected with the fact that for much of Japanese history war tales such as the Tale of the Heike were recited to audiences with musical accompaniment rather than being read silently, as we consume written texts today.5 (You can watch a modern-day Heike recital here, if you like – it’s pretty cool.) To add to this, a few minutes spent reading medieval war tales also make it clear that ambush and deception on the battlefield were not ‘dishonorable’ exceptions but very much the norm, and that no stigma attached to a warrior who made use of such tactics. (This, I’ll address in an upcoming post).
The fact that regular warriors seem to have done most if not all of what the shinobi were supposed to have done is a key problem if we are trying to argue for the shinobi as a meaningful category in medieval warfare. In his 2017 book Unmasking the Myth, Stephen Turnbull quotes Japanese scholar Yamada Yūji arguing that the oldest example of the mention of a shinobi comes from the 14th century Taiheiki:
One night, under cover of wind and rain, they [the Ashikaga] had an unusually skilled shinobi (ichimotsu no shinobi) get into the Hachiman shrine and set fire to the main hall.
I mentioned this example in the previous post, noting that this mention consists in its entirety of one fairly short line. Yamada, in his 2017 The History of the Ninja (Ninja no rekishi), singles this out as the earliest known example of a shinobi, and writes that “from this, we can tell that people with a skilled role (shokunō) called shinobi existed in the Northern and Southern Courts period [1336-1392].”6
I mean…maybe? I’m not sure that this single very short and rather ambiguous passage tells us as much as Yamada suggests. We might think that the fact that the shinobi uses weather conditions to cover his infiltration of the shrine is evidence of his special shinobi skills; Yamada, in fact, singles that out for mention. But using weather to cover your movements isn’t exactly evidence of amazing shinobi skills even in the context of the Taiheiki itself. In 1331, some seven years before this operation by the Ashikaga shinobi, a squad of fifty Hōjō troops does exactly the same thing in a successful surprise attack on the Emperor Go-Daigo’s position at Mt. Kasagi;7 as Helen McCullough translates the passage in question,
Our fame will be unequaled for all time; our loyalty will stand above that of a myriad men! Come! Under cover of this night’s rain and wind, let us secretly enter the castle precincts to amaze the men of the realm with a night attack!8
Note that the Japanese for “secretly enter the castle precincts” is jōchū e shinobiirite 城中へ忍び入りて, meaning that these warriors are engaging in shinobi-ing, but they’re all obviously regular Hōjō troops rather than specialist shinobi.
Tactics Vs. Identity
So as skilled as the Ashikaga shinobi may have been, there were other warriors who knew what he did and could do what he did. In fact, even staying with the Taiheiki, you get the sense that taking advantage of weather conditions was a standard tactic, since a few chapters later the Loyalist warrior Kusunoki Masashige escapes from the Hōjō siege of his fortress at Akasaka in much the same way.9 The Taiheiki tells us that that night,
a harsh wind came raising the sand, accompanied by a rain violent enough to pierce bamboo…the night was exceedingly dark [and so] the defenders cast off their armor, assumed the guise of attackers, and fled away calmly by threes and fives, passing in front of enemy battle-offices and beside enemy sleeping places.”10
Clearly, Masashige’s men were also aware that adverse weather conditions could be used to conceal troop movements. So to come back to Yamada’s “unusually skilled shinobi,” we have two problems. One is of exclusivity, in that it’s unclear whether the “unusually skilled shinobi” is using tactics or knowledge that other warriors don’t also possess. The second is of role vs. identity; we can’t tell from this passage whether the shinobi was a regular warrior assigned to the task or a specialist trained in the use of stealth. The balance of probability would suggest the former, since in the other two examples, the Hōjō troops and Kusunoki Masashige’s men appear to be rank-and-file troops rather than specialist units.
So it seems likely that much of the time shinobi is an ad hoc role rather than an enduring and permanent identity. In other words, shinobi might be understood as a set of tactics deployed when needed, and once a warrior had fulfilled that specific tactical need, there were few or no further implications for his status or identity. This, by the way, is broadly the conclusion of the few academics who have covered this topic. Writing in 2020, Serebriakova and Orbach state that:
During the Sengoku civil wars […] the term shinobi-mono was rare, and irregular warriors were usually not described either as a cohesive social or professional group, or as a well-defined warrior type.11
Constantin Vaporis likewise notes in his 2022 work The Samurai Encyclopedia:
Ninjutsu […] was an activity and did not confer on its practitioners a special identity. In this sense, there were no ninja.12
Defining the Shinobi, Defining the Ninja
The above should, I hope, make clear that it’s going to be critical to define exactly what we are looking for when we talk about ‘ninja’ and shinobi as a real historical phenomenon. It won’t surprise you to know that the majority of ninja historians don’t define their terms at all, seemingly seeking to cast as wide a net as possible. For me, if we want to make a clear connection between historical shinobi and modern ‘ninja,’ we’d need to demonstrate the following:
1) Specialization: that the shinobi repeatedly executed clandestine military functions that other warriors could not or would not do.
Put differently, if lots of other warriors could in fact do what a shinobi did, then we’d have to ask whether the term is meaningful as a marker of identity. It seems pretty clear that rank-and-file warriors were fairly frequently given military tasks involving stealth on a one-off basis or in specific tactical situations, and were not specialists.
2) Restricted knowledge: that in executing their clandestine military functions better than everyone else, the shinobi drew on a body of knowledge to which other warriors did not have access.
Secret ninja scrolls, basically. If you have a group of warriors who have figured out through general military experience how to move stealthily, then they don’t qualify. Rather, there has to be some element of shared knowledge or training for the shinobi.
3) Contemporary recognition: that other warriors or individuals at the time recognized these warriors as being shinobi, or failing that, as being recognized specialists in stealth or covert warfare.
I bolded “at the time” because an awful lot of ninja history is anachronistic, consisting of 20th century writers hanging the label of ‘ninja’ on someone that nobody in his own time would have understood as a shinobi. A great example is the famous robber Ishikawa Goemon, whom some mid-20th century ninja writers tried to claim as a ‘ninja’ but who for the centuries before that was always and only a thief.13
So with the Taiheiki’s shinobi, for instance, we might give him a check-mark for being recognized at the time as a shinobi (although honestly, it’s not clear-cut, because we don’t know if he was a specialist or on a one-off mission). I don’t think he gets #1 or #2, though, because there’s ample evidence he’s not the only one who’s figured out you can use wind and rain to cover an attack on a fortified position. (As you would expect – you’d imagine that pretty much any reasonably astute warrior would realize this). Of course, it’s possible he had other skills beyond that - but the Taiheiki just doesn’t give us enough detail to work with, so we can’t say.
Stephen Turnbull, Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult (Firebird Books, 1991), pp. 9-10.
Joel Levy, Ninja: The Shadow Warriors (Sterling Books, 2008), p. 15.
Heike monogatari 平家物語 is a long war chronicle written maybe around 1330 that recounts the 1180-1185 war between the Minamoto 源 and Taira 平 clans. It’s similar in style to the Taiheiki and has many of the same issues of reliability and romanticizing. Imai Kanehira 今井兼平 (1152-1184) and Minamoto no Yoritomo 源頼朝 (1147-1199) were actually both Minamoto warriors, but the Minamoto had a bad habit of infighting, and in this episode they’re on opposing sides.
McCullough, Genji and Heike p. 381.
Karl Friday, “The Culture of War” in Samurai, Warfare, and the State in Early Modern Japan (2003), p. 148, writes that the practice of introducing oneself on the battlefield to a prospective enemy “is simply not credible battlefield behavior…It is, however, a very natural literary embellishment.”
“こうしたことから、南北朝期には忍びと呼ばれる職能の者が存在したことがわかる。” Yamada, Ninja no rekishi 忍者の歴史 [The History of the Ninja] (Kadokawa Sensho, 2016), p. 25. Not that it matters that much, but when Turnbull 2017 discusses this passage in Yamada’s book he appears to have misunderstood what Yamada was saying. Yamada writes that 普通には入り込めないところに夜の雨風の音に紛れて、特に秀でた忍びの者が密かに忍び込み, which as I have paraphrased above should be something like “a particularly skilled shinobi no mono secretly sneaks into a place that is normally not accessible by blending in with the sounds of the wind and rain at night.” Turnbull paraphrases this as Yamada noting “that in accounts of the time it is unusual to read about raiders carrying out such operations on rainy or windy nights for fear of losing contact with one another.” Yamada’s commentary doesn’t say that; in fact, as we’ll see below warriors using rain and wind as cover was not at all unusual. Possibly Turnbull misread 音に紛れて as something like “losing contact” and thereby misconstrued what Yamada is saying. See Turnbull 2017 p. 11.
Hōjō 北条; Emperor Go-Daigo 後醍醐天皇 (1288-1339); Mt. Kasagi 笠置山
McCullough, Taiheiki, p. 76.
Kusunoki Masashige 楠木正成 (?-1337). ‘Loyalist’ here means that Masashige is fighting to defend the Emperor Go-Daigo against the Hōjō, who are trying to depose the Emperor and replace him with someone more pliant. Masashige is sometimes claimed as the founder of a school of ninja techniques, though I think this is basically nonsense made up centuries later.
McCullough, Taiheiki, p. 90.
Serebriakova and Orbach, “Irregular Warfare in Late Medieval Japan,” p. 1000.
Constantine Nomikos Vaporis, The Samurai Encyclopedia: A Comprehensive Guide to Japan’s Elite Warrior Class (Tuttle Publishing, 2022), p. 222.
Ishikawa Goemon 石川五右衛門 (?-?1594).