There is No Such Thing as Fiction
How Itō Gingetsu's dodgy methodology screwed up 'ninja' history for more than a century
The journalist and writer Itō Gingetsu is in many ways the guy we have to thank for the mess that ‘ninja’ history ended up becoming. As we discussed in the previous post, Gingetsu’s 1909 book Shadow Magic and Illusion Magic (Ninjutsu to yōjutsu) argued that the magical powers depicted in Edo-period plays and prose fiction were in fact refracted accounts of things that real people had actually done. As one example, Gingetsu pointed to a well-known scene in the Japanese kabuki play we’ve been discussing, Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai (Meiboku Sendai hagi, 1777). In this scene the main villain Nikki Danjō magically transforms himself into a rat; and this, according to Gingetsu, must really have been based on someone who trained himself to move so fast that the guards could not take his movements in and believed they had seen a rat darting across the room.
You Need a Bullshit Filter
I think Gingetsu’s argument is a load of nonsense, as you’ll probably have gathered, and to explain why we need to talk about methodology. That’s not the most promising way to start a paragraph, I admit, so let me put it another way: good methodology is about making sure you’re not giving your reader a load of bullshit. To give a very simple example, in most academic work you’re expected to cite your sources. We do this because we’ve learned that when someone isn’t transparent about the evidence that supports their claims, that’s often a red flag about how they’re going about their work. In similar vein, medical science has learned to use things like control groups, randomization, placebos, and double-blinding when testing treatments so as to decrease the likelihood that what seems to be evidence of effectiveness is actually down to random chance, people getting better on their own, or whatever. So if “methodology” is too academic jargon-y, feel free to think “bullshit filter” instead.
Though hardly life-or-death like medical trials, there’s a proper methodology to working with literary texts, too. If we want to do anything historical with a work like the play Precious Incense, which we know to be fiction but which is based on real events, we’ll want to be careful to distinguish between the “based on” bits and the bits that are complete fiction. We do this because we don’t want to run the risk of telling our readers that a scene in the play represents something that really happened when it’s actually the product of the playwright’s imagination. Scholars have in fact done this with Precious Incense - the earliest article at the linked-to database is from 1920 - and that’s all useful literary-historical criticism.
It probably won’t shock you to hear that Gingetsu makes no effort to do this in his 1909 book Shadow Magic and Illusion Magic. I can’t tell from Gingetsu’s writings whether he knew that Precious Incense is based on real historical events, but if he did he makes no attempt to use that fact to support his arguments. His book does not mention (e.g.) Nikki Danjō’s real-life analogue Harada Munesuke, nor does it say anything much about the actual historical turmoil within the Date clan on which the play is based.
So there’s an obvious problem with Gingetsu’s approach, which is that he is using a work of historical fiction without bothering to figure out which bits are history and which are fiction. The closest he comes to addressing this obvious problem is to argue that fiction must be based on some real-world element, that you cannot take something completely without foundation and make it seem believable.
Except that you can, and humans have been doing exactly that for thousands of years. Gingetsu’s argument works at a very abstract, macro level, but breaks down when applied on the level of specificity at which he wants to use it. Spiders exist and are obviously the inspiration for Peter Parker’s powers in Spider-Man, but anyone who tried to argue that Spider-Man is based on a real-world vigilante with amazing rock-climbing skills had better have some pretty damn good evidence if they don’t want people to look at them funny. Gingetsu’s “rat = human with super-speed” theory, then, is basically a wild-ass guess. He’s asserting rather than seriously arguing the point, apparently under the impression that the fictional play itself is all the evidence that’s required.
A Whole Different Bag of Rats
Now, if this were just one particular goofball writing in 1909, the issue wouldn’t be particularly serious. The problem lies in the fact that for a century or so after Gingetsu, almost every ‘ninja’ writer has followed his flawed methodology, as expressed by the below two pillars:
Works of fiction are sufficient in and of themselves to support historical claims, because…
Any given event in a work of fiction is always based on something real that actually happened.
What I’d like to do for the rest of this post is to showcase Gingetsu’s logic as deployed by a whole bunch of other ‘ninja’ writers. To start with, fifty years on from Gingetsu, we find author and playwright Murayama Tomoyoshi making a virtually identical argument in the first installment of his novel series Shinobi no mono (1960):
Ninja often used rats in their techniques of escaping from foes.
They would carry some rats in a bag with them, release them unexpectedly, and flee during the moments in which the enemy’s attention was diverted. Stories such as that of Nikki Danjō, who made a mystic sign with his hands and transformed into a rat, are exaggerated and embellished versions of this technique.1
I want to pause here so you grasp how completely insane this is. Murayama is making a strong historical claim - ‘ninja’ often used rats to distract enemy guards - and his supporting evidence is - wait for it! - that a fictional character in a 1777 play used magic to transform himself into a rat.
This is nuts. It’s not even in the ballpark of sound historical reasoning.
We might also note that although Murayama is basically following Gingetsu’s methodology here, his “must have been” is quite different from Gingetsu’s. Gingetsu thought that the “rat” was really someone moving very fast, which the guards interpreted as a rat. Murayama, though, says no - it was really a ‘ninja’ who was carrying a bag of literal rats which he used to distract the guards, so the guards thought that the ‘ninja’ had turned into a rat.
So we have two possible “must have beens” here. Which one is correct? Can we find some evidence to support either claim? Perhaps Harada Munesuke was known to have a pet rat, for instance? Surely Gingetsu and Murayama looked beyond the literary text to try to support their claims?
LOL, nope. We don’t do that in ‘ninja’ history. Both of them are just flat-out guessing. Remember, the fiction itself is all you need.
The Olympian Ninja
Four years on from Murayama, in 1964, the Olympics came to Japan. This was a huge event, more or less Japan’s re-entry onto the world stage after the horrors of the Pacific War, and it got a lot of attention, not least from ‘ninja’ ‘historian’ Okuse Heishichirō, whose 1964 book Ninja Techniques: Secret Teachings and Real Examples has a section at the end titled “The Olympics and Ninja.” This contains a transcript of a conversation between Okuse and the audience at one of his talks, in which an audience member, apparently with the Olympics on their mind, asks him about ‘ninja’ athletic prowess. Okuse proceeds to assure his audience that yes, the ‘ninja’ were in fact athletes at a literally Olympian level:
“[S]o let me ask, in the high jump how high do you think a ninja could really go?”
[Okuse] “Nine feet is what I’ve heard, if I remember. Someone lighter, say for instance Sarutobi Sasuke - I know he’s a fictional character, but real ninja of Sasuke’s caliber, I think, could maybe go even higher. I understand that the benchmark for an average ninja was nine feet.”2
Even today, nine feet would comfortably break the world record for the men’s high jump, but that’s not the point. What I want to draw your attention to is Okuse’s completely effortless shift from fiction to history. Within the same sentence, we go from from acknowledging that Sarutobi Sasuke is a fictional character to using his amazing agility in the stories as proxy evidence of historical ‘ninja’ prowess.
Gingetsu’s methodology, which Okuse appears to have fully grasped here, insists that literary fiction is always based on things that really happened. So the fictional Sasuke’s incredible agility is proof of the skills of real ‘ninja.’ As before, you don’t have to do anything as mundane as actually support your point with additional evidence; the assumption itself is enough.
The Elusive Spark of Truth
It’s not surprising, then, that six years later in 1970, the best-selling author Andrew Adams gives us this opposite a print of Nikki Danjō:
Supernatural tales claim that the ninja was able to fly, walk on water, live underwater like a fish, become invisible at will, sink into the ground, flow through stone walls, disappear in a puff of smoke, and even transform himself into a snake, frog, bird or insect. Improbably as these stories may seem, there is a logical explanation for each one, a spark of truth behind the billowing screen of smoke.3
It’s been sixty-one years, but the basic contours of Gingetsu’s methodology are still plain to see; the phrase “spark of truth” is a pretty neat encapsulation of Gingetsu’s pillar #2. A very similar argument can be found in 1971 and 1985 in the works of Donn Draeger and Stephen K. Hayes, but I don’t think we need to reprise them here.
The “spark of truth” argument explains an otherwise very odd bit in Stephen Turnbull’s 1991 Secret Warrior Cult, concerning the supposed ‘ninja’ Hachisuka Tenzō. This story, which Turnbull got from Hatsumi’s 1964 children’s book, involves Tenzō spinning around so fast he becomes a human drill, and by so doing he digs himself a hidey-hole in order to evade his pursuers:
This cannot have happened - humans can’t do that - but the story somehow made it into Turnbull’s book as apparent historical fact nevertheless. What’s weird is that Turnbull, in his rendering, elides the obviously fictional “human drill” part of Hatsumi’s story, writing instead that Tenzō escaped into a “hole in the ground, which he had already prepared”:
I’ve often wondered why Turnbull did this. He had to know that Hatsumi’s story couldn’t possibly be true, so perhaps Gingetsu’s second pillar, that all fictional stories are somehow real, might have been in the background. Perhaps Turnbull told himself that there must have been a real ‘ninja’ account underneath the exaggeration, and so Turnbull guessed at what that might be, then subtly edited the story to reflect what he thought the “real” underlying historical facts were. Clearly, like Gingetsu, Murayama, Okuse, and the rest, he didn’t consider the possibility that the story might simply be fiction.
Next, for a bit of variety, we have an author named Oda Hirohisa and his English-language book Real Ninja (2002). In this apparently self-published book, Oda, a medical doctor by trade, gives his readers the story of the warrior Katō Danzō. Among the many stories about Katō Danzō is one in which Katō supposedly swallowed a whole bull in front of a large crowd during the late Warring States period. This amazing feat could not literally have happened, obviously; instead, Oda assures us, what Katō Danzō really did was some kind of mass hypnosis of the onlookers:
Like another famous ninja, Seimei Abe, [Katō Danzō] used group hypnotism techniques. One of the most bloodcurdling legends describes him swallowing a cow. Although Tobi Katō hung on to the cow, people were hypnotized to believe that he was swallowing a real cow from the bottom.4
Feel free to insert your own joke about ‘ninja’ historians and “swallowing bull.”
Oda follows Gingetsu’s methodology almost exactly here, assuming that this fantastical story must have some real-world basis to it, and ending up with the absurd conclusion that Katō must have used group hypnosis. Or, y’know, the story might just be made up.
My final example comes from 2010, a full one hundred and one years after Gingetsu outlined his horribly flawed methodology. It’s taken from Kacem Zoughari’s Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors, which I’ve already dissected at considerable length elsewhere in these pages. The passage in question concerns an account found in the 14th century war chronicle Taiheiki, which mentions some demons with magical powers in 7th century Japan. The actual account from the Taiheiki is this:
In the reign of the Emperor Tenji [668-671] there was a man named Fujiwara no Chikata, who employed four demons known as Metal Demon [Kinki], Wind Demon [Fūki], Water Demon [Suiki], and Hidden Demon [Ongyōki]. Metal Demon’s body was so tough that arrows fired at it did not penetrate. Wind Demon could summon up a great gale and blow down enemy fortresses. Water Demon could summon floods to inundate enemy bases. The Hidden Demon could become invisible [lit. hide his form] and suddenly grab the enemy.
This section is not what Zoughari gives the reader in his book; instead, gives his own interpretation of this passage and misleads the reader into believing that that’s what the Taiheiki actually says. His interpretation takes it as read that this account of four demons really refers to men with amazing martial skills, who must have been early versions of the ‘ninja’. The Wind Demon, Zoughari claims, was a man who could
“sweep the enemy as a powerful blast of wind,” implying a manner of silent moving and fighting.
Never mind that that’s not what the Taiheiki says. These demons with magical powers must be evidence for the historical ‘ninja,’ because as Gingetsu taught us a century ago, all accounts of magic are based in reality.
There Is No Fiction
So look, by now you get the point. What we’re seeing here is the same fundamentally misguided approach to reading literary texts being rolled out over and over again in the interests of supporting the case for the historical ‘ninja.’
There are any number of reasons to reject Gingetsu’s methodology. One is that, as we see above, it encourages laziness. With Gingetsu’s methodology, you are under no obligation to do the hard historical work to support your case; instead, all you have to do is make a wild-ass guess as to what something in a work of fiction might really have been, and then you move on.
But I’m a literary scholar by training, so I find something even more disturbing in this methodology, and it’s this: the underlying idea is that fiction as such doesn’t exist. To use this methodology, you are forced to deny that people can just make things up, because the approach depends on the assumption that all works of creative literature must be based in some way on things that really happened.
I find this assumption not only wrong but depressingly anti-human. Humans are creative! We do make things up! It’s one of our more interesting features, frankly. So I’m bound to point out that Gingetsu’s methodology doesn’t just lead to bad history, it’s awful as literary criticism as well. It’s crude, lazy, and one-dimensional, taking an entirely instrumental view of works of literature that shows no real interest in their value as works of literature. I see no evidence that Gingetsu or any of the writers who came after him bothered themselves to understand how Precious Incense came into being, how it might have adapted the events of the Date succession dispute on which it’s based, or even just its overall artistic and literary qualities, how it works as a play. It reminds me a lot of the way ‘ninja’ historians routinely abuse works of Japanese pictorial art, rarely taking the time to understand what’s being depicted and dipping in only as far as is needed to provide the most superficially plausible support for their argument. Whether play, novel, picture, or what, it has a guy in it who looks vaguely like a ‘ninja,’ so that’s all that matters.
It’s also clear from the above that ‘ninja’ studies is not really capable of policing itself. The above examples show that its major exponents are not seriously thinking about what they are doing, and that ‘ninja’ history has never been a self-critical or self-correcting field like most major branches of academic history, which have had (and still do) all manner of debates on proper methodology and the nature of historical truth. This may have begun to change with the establishment of the Mie University Ninja Center in 2017, but it’s really damning that over a span of more than a hundred years, no ‘ninja’ writer that I am aware of thought to say, “Hang on a minute, fellas, we might have got this wrong. We need to think a bit more carefully about how we use works of fiction, or we’re going to end up misleading our readers.”
So yeah. I find exploring Gingetsu’s methodology to be fascinating, because it’s so obviously wrong, and yet nobody seems to have noticed that it’s wrong or thought very seriously about how to do better.
Anyway, by way of wrapping up our discussion of Gingetsu and Nikki Danjō, for next time I’d like to take a more charitable perspective on Gingetsu, to consider what I think he might have been attempting to do in his writings. It wasn’t necessarily to found an historical movement, I don’t think, but I’m not convinced that those who came after him necessarily understood what he was trying to do, so it’s worth thinking about him in a bit more detail.
Murayama Tomoyoshi, Shinobi no mono (2003 ed), 1:243-44. Japanese: 忍者はネズミを多く遁法に使う。袋に入れて持参したネズミを、不意に放って、敵の注意がそれに奪われる瞬間に逃げ去るのである。仁木弾正のように、印を結んでネズミに化けて逃げる、というよな話は、この術を誇張したものである。
Look, I generally like Murayama, but he really is talking out of his rear end here.
Okuse, Ninpō: sono hiden to jitsurei, (1964; my copy 1995), p. 295. The section is titled Orinpikku to ninja オリンピックと忍者 and the main Japanese text of Okuse’s remarks is: 「それなら伺いますが、あなたは一体、忍者の高飛びはどの程度飛ぶのが本当だとお考えですか。」
「確か九尺と聞いています。もっと身の軽い、たとえば猿飛佐助ーまあ、これは架空の人物だとは知っていますが、その佐助級の実在の忍者はもっと高く飛んだっていうじゃないですか。普通の忍者は九尺が標準と承知しています。」
Adams, Ninja: The Invisible Assassins, (1970; my copy 1989), pp. 23-24.
Oda Hirohisa, Real Ninja (Ninja Publishing, 2002), p. 40.