That Time Roald Dahl Did a Ninja Movie

...or did he? What exactly happened in the making of You Only Live Twice?

Sean Connery as James Bond, Tanba Tetsuo as ‘Tiger’ Tanaka, and Wakabayashi Akiko as Aki in Lewis Gilbert, dir., You Only Live Twice (United Artists, 1967)

The odds are that for most Westerners, the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice was their first introduction to the concept of the ‘ninja.’ The concept wasn’t totally absent from the English-speaking world before that, of course; the writer Itō Gingetsu had published an English-language article about what he called ninjutsusha as early as 1918, and if you were a reader of the pulp magazine Argosy or a close follower of martial arts culture from the early 1960s onward, there was a decent chance you’d heard of the ‘ninja,’ though they were still pretty niche at that point.

Your odds of knowing about ‘ninja’ were rather better if you were in Australia, weirdly enough, since the Japanese TV show Samurai Detective (Onmitsu kenshi, 1962-65) had been screened there from 1964 onward under the title The Samurai.¹ Onmitsu kenshi features a fair few ‘ninja’ in its plot-lines, and I suspect that its influence on what passes for ‘ninja’ history is much bigger than many realize (or would like to acknowledge). In particular, my strong hunch is that this fictional TV series is where Bujinkan ninjutsu master Hatsumi Masaaki got a number of his ideas as to what ‘ninja’ and ninjutsu had supposedly been, but that’s a question I’ll explore in another post.

The above exceptions aside, I think it’s fair to say that You Only Live Twice was the first really world-wide, mass-audience work to present the modern ‘ninja’ to English-speaking viewers. It also, as I pointed out in the previous post, features the famous poison-thread technique as seen in Shinobi no mono, and so I found myself doing a fair bit of reading on the making of You Only Live Twice as I was writing my recently-published article, to see if the film could shed any light on the topic. Most of the material relating to You Only Live Twice didn’t make it into the final version of the article for reasons of space, but it was interesting anyway, so I thought it was worth sharing here. The TL:DR is that I think a commonly-repeated narrative of the making of the movie, that the well-known author Roald Dahl added the poison-thread thing after seeing Shinobi no mono, is probably wrong, and that the motif was added by another screenwriter earlier in the process. I have yet to nail down precisely how this happened, though, so if anybody has any leads, I’m all ears.

Ian Fleming Meets the Ninja

As with most James Bond films, You Only Live Twice was based on a novel by the British author Ian Fleming. You Only Live Twice the novel was in fact Fleming’s last published work, as it came out in March 1964 and Fleming passed away that August. The novel, as many people have pointed out, is very different from the movie. In the novel, Bond is sent to Japan to kill the implausibly-named Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, who, it turns out, is actually the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in disguise. Shatterhand has a castle on an island in Kyushu, complete with a “garden of death” full of poisonous flowers.² Long story short, Bond disguises himself as a Japanese coal miner to infiltrate the castle, is captured but escapes, yada yada yada, and eventually kills Blofeld.

Cover of This is Japan magazine, vol. 9 (1962; actually published September 1961). Source

The story seems to have mostly been inspired by a trip to Japan Fleming took in 1962, during which he came across the concept of the ‘ninja.’ The ‘ninja’ thing was getting a lot of traction in Japanese media by 1962, and though I don’t know for certain what Fleming’s precise point(s) of contact with ‘ninja’ might have been, one of them was almost certainly Donn F. Draeger’s 1961 article “Invisible Men with Secret Weapons” in the English-language magazine This is Japan. The editor of This is Japan, Saitō Torao, was one of Fleming’s guides while he was in Japan, and Fleming acknowledged Saitō’s services by creating the character ‘Tiger’ Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service in the novel and film.³ Fleming himself had written an article for the installment of This is Japan prior to Draeger’s article, so he could hardly have been unaware of the magazine’s content, and the fact that Draeger would later serve as a stuntman on You Only Live Twice is worth noting, though that would be after Fleming’s death.

The poison-thread thing, for what it’s worth, does not appear in the novel version of You Only Live Twice. Given the date of Fleming’s trip, 1962, we might wonder if he could have seen Shinobi no mono, since the film was released that same year. I think this is unlikely, though, as Shinobi no mono was released in December, after Fleming had left the country. ‘Ninja’ in general are mentioned in You Only Live Twice, of course, and in such a way as to make Hatsumi’s influence immediately clear:

All the men you will see have already graduated in at least ten of the eighteen martial arts of bushido, or “ways of the warrior,” and they are now learning to be ninja, or “stealers-in,” which for centuries has been part of the basic training of spies and assassins and saboteurs. You will see men walk across the surface of water, walk up walls and across ceilings…the secrets of ninjutsu are still closely guarded today and are property of two main schools, the Iga and Togakure, from which my instructors are drawn.⁴

In point of fact the ‘ninja’ aren’t really that important as such in the novel, being there mostly to add a little local color. Bond, who seems to see ninjutsu as a kind of challenge to his Western masculinity, snarks to himself that the Russians are probably better at assassination anyway:

Bond made appropriate noises of approval and amazement and reflected on the comparable Russian invention used with much success in West Germany, a cyanide gas pistol that left no trace and a sure diagnosis of heart failure. Tiger’s much-vaunted ninjutsu just wasn’t in the same league!⁵

Good ol’ Tiger even finds time for some casual Oriental cruelty, as depicted in the 1964 comic-strip version of the novel serialized in the UK newspaper The Daily Mail:

Ian Fleming, drawings by Ian McClusky, You Only Live Twice from Fleming et al, The James Bond Omnibus vol. 2 (Titan Books, 2011), p. 92.

Roald Dahl Meets the Ninja…Or Does He?

The main thing I was interested in through all of this was whether the development process of You Only Live Twice could shed any light on where the poison-thread technique in the film version had come from. Obviously it’s from Shinobi no mono, but I was curious to know if we could narrow it down any further and determine when it had happened or who was responsible for its addition. The addition had to have happened within a fairly small window, between the novel’s publication in 1964 and the movie’s shooting during the summer of 1966, and at first glance there’s one intriguing candidate, none other than the British author Roald Dahl.

Roald Dahl (1916-1990). Source

Though he’s more famous for his children’s books Dahl also worked very occasionally as a screenplay writer, and it so happens that You Only Live Twice was one of his handful of films. Now, if you do a bit of digging around the internet, you’re likely to come across the claim that it was Dahl himself who was responsible for the poison-thread thing, having seen Shinobi no mono while on a trip to Japan in (possibly) 1963. You can find this claim repeated in Animeigo’s DVD liner notes, on IMDB, on the excellent ninja movies fan site VintageNinja.net, and plenty of other places, so on first glance it seems that the mystery is solved.

The thing is, none of these claims specify a source, and I’m not at all certain that the Dahl-Shinobi no mono connection is accurate. Having read through several of Dahl’s many biographies, I can’t find any mention of Dahl traveling to Japan at any point before the spring and summer of 1966, once the shooting for You Only Live Twice was already underway.⁶ I’m not sure why Dahl would have gone to Japan, to be honest, because he was not involved in You Only Live Twice until the spring of 1966, quite late in its production cycle. It’s also notable that during the period when he’s supposed to have been in Japan and seen Shinobi no mono, 1963-1965, Dahl had a lot of bad stuff going on in his life that would have made traveling to Japan awkward to say the least. His daughter Lucy died of measles in December 1962, and his wife Patricia Neal suffered a series of cerebral aneurysms in 1965 as well. Of course, it’s completely possible that I’ve missed some key piece of evidence, but I’m puzzled that I can’t seem to confirm that Dahl was even in Japan before the summer of 1966, still less that he saw Shinobi no mono.

The other reason why I don’t think the poison-thread thing is Dahl’s addition is that there’s a fair bit of evidence that the script for You Only Live Twice was more or less complete by the time he joined the project. Dahl was in fact not the original screenwriter; that job had gone to an American writer by the name of Harold Jack Bloom, who had been working on adapting Fleming’s novel during the early spring of 1966.⁷ Dahl didn’t join the project until around April 20th 1966, at least according to the L.A. Times, and per director Lewis Gilbert’s recollection Dahl hadn’t been part of the film’s initial location and scouting party that had gone to Japan in the spring of that year.⁸

It appears that Bloom, for his part, had delivered a full draft of the screenplay by February 23rd, 1966, but the legendary Bond producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli hadn’t been happy with it, since Bloom apparently

came up with the idea of having these Ninja-like Japanese characters crawling all over Tokyo, and it just didn’t work.⁹

So we know that there was a fair bit of ‘ninja’ action in Bloom’s screenplay already, but also that the producers were unhappy with the script that Bloom had delivered, and that probably explains why Broccoli brought in Dahl a couple of months later. In the finished movie, Dahl is credited with the screenplay, while Bloom himself ended up being relegated to “additional story material.” The question of just how many changes Dahl actually made to the screenplay is not one I can answer for certain, but Bloom himself seems to have concluded that Dahl didn’t do that much, and Bloom was royally pissed off about that. Interviewed years later by one of Dahl’s biographers, Bloom complained that the final script was more or less what he, Bloom, had come up with, that he had “made up everything you saw on the screen” and “[w]e should have been given joint credit at the very least.”¹⁰

I’m not sure there’s any way to adjudicate this, short of having access to Bloom’s first draft of the screenplay (which I don’t, unfortunately). The first draft of Dahl’s screenplay, which appears to have been delivered on June 17th, 1966, is available for the princely sum of $239,000 (I’ll get right on that) and does appear to include the poisoning of Bond’s sleeping partner, at least per this summary. If Bloom’s claim that he had made up “everything” is accurate, that would presumably include the poison-thread thing, which Dahl then appears to have retained in his own draft. So, as far as I can tell it was Bloom who was responsible for the poison-thread thing rather than Dahl, despite Dahl’s mention of the technique in the 1967 Playboy article I quoted last time around.

I do intend at some point to come back to You Only Live Twice, because it’s a fascinating film for Japan scholars, and it also fits with a general theme of ‘ninja’ stuff showing up in media spaces that seem to have a lot to do with images of masculine aspiration. Bond is, in some ways, the ultimate male fantasy - he kills men, gets women - and I can’t help but notice that the way the ‘ninja’ thing worked in the US from the 80s onward had more than a few echoes of that kind of thing.

For now, I guess my findings are that although I think the existing narrative of Dahl’s connection to Shinobi no mono is probably wrong, I’m not 100% certain of my alternative explanation; there’s still room to discover when the addition of the poison-thread thing was made, and if it was from Bloom, how he learned of it. Perhaps he saw Shinobi no mono at some point during the spring of 1966, or was told about the technique by Hatsumi, Draeger, or one of the other ‘ninja’ advocates involved with the project.

Whatever the case, I just want to note that this sort of stuff is why it’s so much fun working on the ‘ninja’ thing, because of all of the little rabbit-holes it tends to reveal. After all, in what other scenario do, I, a specialist in 19th century Japanese literature by training, get to mess around with Roald Dahl, Playboy, and James Bond films?

1. Onmitsu kenshi 隠密剣士. It’s a drama series about a wandering samurai who is actually the half-brother of the Shogun and acts as a kind of secret police officer, traveling the land and rooting out plots against the Tokugawa government. I plan to do a series of posts on this show at some point toward the end of the year.

2. I mean, frankly, you sell your castle to someone with a name like “Guntram Shatterhand,” you’re asking for trouble. Also, I can’t help but note that Fleming’s garden of poisoned flowers bears a striking resemblance to Andrew Adams’ claim about how ‘ninja’ used poison flowers. No doubt it’s a coincidence.

3. Japanese graphs are apparently 斎藤寅郎. The ‘tora’ of the personal name Torao means “tiger,” explaining the character’s name in the novel and movie. Weirdly, I don’t seem to be able to confirm Saitō Torao’s dates of birth and death, which is odd given that he must have been fairly high status in the publishing world to be the editor of a magazine like This is Japan.

4. Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (Thomas and Mercer, 2012), p. 100. For those not already familiar, Togakure is the school of ninjutsu to which Hatsumi claimed to be the 34th master.

5. Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p. 104.

6. Dahl was definitely in Japan, in the southern prefecture of Kagoshima, by the summer of 1966, once filming had already started. See Robbie Collin, “‘Sean Connery? He never stood anyone a round’: Roald Dahl’s love-hate relationship with Hollywood” The Telegraph (UK), Feb 19^th 2021.

7. Obviously a different person from this Harold Bloom.

8. Dahl’s hiring as screenwriter is noted in Charles Champlin, “Hollywood’s Finest Around the World” Los Angeles Times April 20^th 1966; Gilbert’s recollections are per Jeremy Treglown, Roald Dahl: A Biography (Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 164.

9. Feb 23rd date is per Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films (The History Press, 2016), p. 157; Broccoli’s recollections per Albert R. Broccoli and Donald Zec, When the Snow Melts (Boxtree, 1998), p. 211; quoted in Field and Chowdhury, Some Kind of Hero, p. 157.

10. Treglown, Roald Dahl, pp. 164-65.