The Rise of the Evil Sorcerer
Kabuki character Nikki Danjō gets reborn as a 'ninja'
Direct your eyes, if you will, to the print above. The guy on the left in the grey robes is an evil sorcerer by the name of Nikki Danjō. The rat in the middle with the scroll in its mouth is, funnily enough, also Nikki Danjō, as I’ll explain in a moment. Our man here is the main villain of a 1777 Japanese kabuki play titled The Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai (Meiboku Sendai hagi), which was written by a group of writers including the playwright Nagawa Kamesuke and first performed in the city of Osaka.1 As you would expect from a sorcerer, Nikki Danjō has a range of magical powers, including the ability to transform himself into a rat and to become invisible. In the scene depicted he’s just been using these powers to retrieve a scroll that contains evidence of him conspiring against his lord’s clan, the Date of the Sendai domain. Being in the shape of a rat Nikki Danjō has had to grab the scroll with his mouth, which is where it stays as he transforms back, so as we’ll see below a lot of prints depict him in human form with the scroll held in his mouth.
The scene is quite famous among kabuki aficionados and is known as the “Under the Floor” (yuka no shita) scene. This is because the guy in red on the right, Otokonosuke, is a loyal retainer of the Sendai domain and has hidden under the floorboards in at attempt to catch Nikki Danjō in the act, an endeavor in which he is only partially successful; he catches the rat, but Nikki Danjō transforms and gets away.2
Precious Incense is still performed today, and you can see the “Under the Floor” scene at 1:30:30 or so in the below video:
Like many kabuki plays, the plot of Precious Incense is very complicated and I’m not going to try to explain it in full here.3 Suffice it to say that the main drama revolves around a group of disloyal retainers plotting to manipulate the succession plans of the rightful lord of the domain and thereby take control of Sendai for themselves.
Also like many kabuki plays, Precious Incense is more or less based on actual events. The Sendai domain was a real place in northern Japan, covering what is now Miyagi Prefecture and parts of Iwate and Fukushima as well. There had been some serious unrest in the domain a century or so before the play premiered in 1777, mostly during the 1660s and 1670s and revolving around the unhealthy combination of ambitious senior vassals plus a lord who was possibly unfit to lead. These events are known as the Date sōdō or Date Dispute, after the Date (pronounced dah-tay, btw) clan, who were the hereditary rulers of the domain.4 Nikki Danjō, too, is probably based on a real person, a high-ranking samurai named Harada Munesuke of Kai who was killed during an outbreak of violence between competing domain factions in 1671.5
Japanese stage drama went in for this ‘ripped from the headlines’ thing fairly often, although in practice the action on the stage usually took place in a fictionalized historical setting hundreds of years before the actual events. This was done to avoid the ire of the Tokugawa censors, who really didn’t like depictions of current events, though given that the Date Dispute was more than a century old in 1777, it wasn’t exactly “current.” This explains why the action in the play centers not on the Date but on the Ashikaga clan, whose heyday was the 14th and 15th centuries.
The ‘Ninja’ Connection
So, what does any of this have to do with ‘ninja’ history? The simple answer is that prints of Nikki Danjō can be found absolutely everywhere in the English-language ‘ninja’ literature, mostly in works published during the twenty-five years from 1966 to 1991. He’s right there at the start of Andrew Adams’ path-breaking article on ‘ninja’ in Black Belt magazine in December 1966, for instance:
It comes as no surprise to find that Adams seems to have only the haziest understanding of what the print is actually about. It’s kind of ridiculous to call the scroll a “secret ninja document” - it’s a list of Nikki Danjō and his fellow conspirators - and Adams gets both the name of the actor and of the character wrong (it should be Ichikawa and Nikki Danjō rather than Ikakawa and Niki Danzo). In fairness Adams corrects these details when the print appears again in his 1970 book Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, where the caption reads:
FAMED KABUKI ACTOR Danzo Ichikawa presents an imposing re-creation of ninja Niki [sic] Danjo weaving one of the secret kuji-kiri finger signs on this ancient scroll from the Edo period (1616-1867).6
It’s not just Adams, of course. Donn F. Draeger’s 1971 Ninjutsu, which was almost as widely-read as Adams’ book, contains the following drawing:
It’s not exactly the same, but it’s pretty clear where Draeger got the inspiration from. It’s hilarious to note how the artist added a sword on the figure’s back, presumably in the interests of making this pseudo-Nikki Danjō more ninja-y.
Stephen Hayes gets in on the act, too, in his 1985 The Mystic Arts of the Ninja:
And then, inevitably, we have Stephen Turnbull, with some variations on a theme in his 1991 Secret Warrior Cult:
Do They Know He’s a Fictional Character?
So we can see that almost all of the most prominent first and second generation ‘ninja’ historians leaned pretty hard into Nikki Danjō, apparently believing that the character - or perhaps more accurately the prints - could be used as evidence to support their case for the historical ‘ninja.’
There’s one obvious and massive objection to this approach, though: Nikki Danjō is a fictional character.
From my point of view as a literary scholar, the use of Nikki Danjō as an example of a ‘ninja’ is incredibly weird. For one thing, it’s ignoring some pretty serious questions of methodology concerning how and when you can use literary works to support historical claims, but I’ll get to that in the next post. For now, I want to point out an even more basic problem, which is that I’m not entirely convinced all of the above writers knew that Nikki Danjō wasn’t a real person.
No, I’m serious. If you think nobody could make that mistake, I invite you to look at this 2015 ‘ninja’ book, which contains the following passage:
NIKKI DANJO. Nikki Danjo was a ninja said to have lived in the 1660s. It is unclear how many of the stories about him are true. He was said to use kuji kiri to transform himself into a rat.
Oh, for the love of…NO! HE DID NOT LIVE IN THE 1660s! It is absolutely clear how many of the stories about him are true - NONE OF THEM! HE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER!
I concede that the book linked to above appears to be self-published and isn’t the highest-caliber material available on the topic. But it’s far from clear that more established authors in the field recognized that Nikki Danjō was fictional, either. Let me re-quote Andrew Adams’ description of the Nikki Danjō print in his 1970 Invisible Assassins:
FAMED KABUKI ACTOR Danzo Ichikawa presents an imposing re-creation of ninja Niki [sic] Danjo weaving one of the secret kuji-kiri finger signs on this ancient scroll from the Edo period (1616-1867).
Reading that, is there anything in Adams’ caption that explicitly says Nikki Danjō is a fictional character? It wouldn’t be the only time in the book that Adams failed to realize that a character was fictional, since he was apparently under the impression that Sarutobi Sasuke was a real person.7
I’d also point out that the phrasing in the caption is such that I’m not sure a general reader would have realized what was going on; I can easily see how “imposing re-creation” could be understood as implying that the actor was playing someone who really existed. So if Adams did know, he’d be in sin-of-omission territory here; if your readership isn’t familiar with Japanese literature and/or history, you have an obligation to make the distinction between fictional and real individuals explicit so you don’t mislead your audience.
In fact, if you go back and look at Draeger and Hayes’ captions and use of the print, I’m moved to wonder whether a general reader would have grasped Nikki Danjō’s fictional status from the way their books present him, too. At the very least it’s fair to say that if Adams, Draeger, and Hayes were aware that Nikki Danjō was a fictional character, they didn’t go out of their way to make that clear to their readers.
Turnbull’s discussion of Nikki Danjō, for what it’s worth, is much better. He clearly does understand what the prints depict and what he’s dealing with; in fact, later on in the book he provides a pretty good summary of the play’s plot, along with the following explanation:
The plot is based on the true story of a succession dispute within the Date family of Sendai in northern Japan, whereby a senior retainer of the family was plotting to take control of the infant heir. In the play all the names are changed, as is the plot, and other characters are introduced, including the ninja Nikki Danjō […].8
This is all completely accurate, but the thing is, I’m still not entirely sure that this would make clear to the reader that Nikki Danjō existed only in the literary imagination. This is especially true given the general framing of Turnbull’s book, which is after all subtitled “The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult.” The thing about ‘ninja’ writing is that it overwhelmingly (though misleadingly) presents itself as a form of history, so it’s easy to see why readers who aren’t familiar with Japanese literature would approach the material with the assumption that people mentioned in the text really existed.
Anyway. Let’s stay with our sorcerer friend and the play Precious Incense for the time being. In the next post or two, then, I’d like to consider a few further problems with using the play as a source for ‘ninja’ history. Specifically, I’d like to think about whether it makes sense to call Nikki Danjō a ‘ninja’ in the first place, about how (or if) a fictional work like Precious Incense can be used to support historical claims, and, more importantly, why ‘ninja’ historians would want to do so in the first place.
Matthew Johnson, trans., “The Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai: Introduction” in James Brandon and Samuel Leiter, eds., Kabuki Plays on Stage Volume 2: Villainy and Vengeance, 1773-1799 (U of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 49-50.
Kanji: Nikki Danjō 仁木弾正 (no dates, because he’s a fictional character); Meiboku Sendai hagi 伽羅先代萩 (kabuki plays are often very unconventional in their use of kanji, btw;) Nagawa Kamesuke 奈河亀輔 (dates unknown; active 1772-1789).
Yuka no shita 床の下; Otokonosuke 男之助.
Date sōdō 伊達騒動.
Harada Munesuke of Kai: 原田甲斐宗輔 (1619-1671).
Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins (1970; my ed., 1973), p. 22.
Adams includes this Sarutobi Sasuke story in the book with no indication that it’s anything other than historical. The most charitable assumption is that he didn’t know Sasuke is fictional, because if he did know, then he was intentionally misleading his readers. Invisible Assassins, pp. 165-66.
Turnbull, Secret Warrior Cult, p. 130.