Was 'Ninja vs. Samurai' a Real Thing?
Introducing the 'dirty work' and 'class warfare' hypotheses
Generally speaking the chain of reasoning for the existence of the historical ‘ninja’ goes something like this:
Japan’s warrior class (the samurai) had a strict code of honor, and would not fight in ways that they considered to be ‘dishonorable.’
‘Dishonorable’ tactics were nevertheless key to success in war, so successful samurai needed to employ them anyway.
‘Ninja’ stepped into the breach, to do what the samurai would not do.
You might call this the ‘dirty work’ hypothesis, the idea that historical ‘ninja’ did things that the honor-obsessed samurai considered beneath their dignity. This idea is pretty common in ‘ninja’ histories; here’s Stephen Turnbull, for instance, in 1991:
There was no place in this quixotic dreamworld [of honorable samurai combat] for a knife in the back, or the destruction of a fortress at dead of night by warriors who were never seen by their victims. Yet all these things happened and were vitally necessary for success. This was the dark side of the samurai tradition, the world of the warriors called ninja, who delivered victory by a process that reversed all that samurai ideals stood for.1
Joel Levy in 2008:
The samurai was expected to place honor about life, so that if he lost a battle, was captured, or failed in his duty to his lord ideally he was expected to commit suicide.
The tradition and philosophy of the ninja were the antithesis of the samurai way.2
Hatsumi Masaaki in 1981:
Ninjutsu developed as a highly illegal counter culture to the ruling samurai elite, and for this reason alone, the origins of the art were shrouded by centuries of mystery, concealment, and deliberate confusion of history…This hesitancy to openly acknowledge the ninja’s role in the forging of modern Japan stems perhaps from the glorification of the samurai concept and ethic that became very popular after the Meiji Restoration (1868).3
Sometimes the ‘dirty work’ hypothesis is combined with the ‘class warfare’ hypothesis, which adds the claim that the historical shinobi were usually from lower-class commoner backgrounds, in contrast to the higher-class samurai, and so the samurai looked down on ‘ninja’ as both socially and morally inferior to them. As Turnbull writes a few years later in 2003:
…[That ninja were feared and despised by samurai] may be due to the fact that many ninja had their origins in the lower social classes, and that their secretive and underhand methods were the exact opposite of the ideals of the noble samurai facing squarely on to his enemy.
This paradox, that ninja were beneath contempt and yet indispensable, is a theme running through the whole history of ninja warfare.4
And Levy again:
The ninja’s roots were in poor farming communities that were looked down upon by the haughty and aristocratic samurai.5
You get the picture. The basic idea, that samurai and ‘ninja’ were in some sense opposing groups or rivals, is pretty widespread in pop culture generally, as well as the allegedly historical studies I’ve cited above. It’s probably not a coincidence that one of the main antagonists in Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu is the obviously-samurai Lord Garmadon:
or that one of the enemy minions is just one letter off, being named ‘Samukai:’
The main problem with the chain of reasoning I gave above is that the first step, idea #1:
Japan’s warrior class (the samurai) had a strict code of honor, and would not fight in ways that they considered to be ‘dishonorable.’
is nonsense, and obviously so to anyone who has even glanced at primary source accounts of medieval Japanese warfare. Medieval Japanese warriors had absolutely no problem with deception, night ambush, assassination, spying, sabotage, arson, psychological warfare – you name it, they did it.
What’s Honor Got to Do With It?
One of the basic problems with the ‘dirty work’ hypothesis is that it assumes we can clearly identify medieval military tactics that would count as “underhand” or a “reversal of samurai ideals.” Let’s take a fairly basic example, namely ambush tactics, or attacking an enemy with the advantage of surprise. If you believe Turnbull and Levy, medieval warriors refused to do this, preferring to challenge their opponents openly and directly:
[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…6
And:
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…7
But as I pointed out some months ago, the idea that warriors announced themselves loudly before meeting in single combat is a misunderstanding of the romanticized world of the Tale of the Heike and other medieval war tales. As Karl Friday and other historians have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that actual medieval warriors really did this, because (a) battles are loud, and (b) stopping in the middle of combat to give a speech would probably get you killed.8 Serious historians of Japan have known this since the 1960s.
As for refusing to attack from ambush, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, even if we stay in the romanticized world of medieval war tales, attacking from ambush seems to have been a standard warrior tactic. Consider this, from Nihon gaishi, where the Minamoto warrior Minamoto no Tametomo discusses tactics with a court noble just before the Hōgen Disturbance of 1156:
Tametomo stepped forward and said, “I have been in twenty great battles and two hundred lesser ones; I have scythed and plowed my way through the nine provinces of Kyushu. When attacking a numerically superior enemy, the surest path to victory is to attack at night; and so I ask that you allow me to launch a surprise attack on the Takamatsu Palace this very night. I shall set fires on three sides of the palace, and wait in ambush on the remaining side.” […]
But then Minister of the Left Fujiwara no Yorinaga said, “Tametomo is young and hot-blooded. All of the battles of which he speaks were private feuds among country bumpkins, and can hardly have any bearing on the wars of kings and emperors. The nature of the conflict is that two emperors are locked in a struggle for control over the realm, so we must take the field with a grand and stately army…”
[…] Tametomo withdrew, but in private he heaped scorn upon Yorinaga, saying, “Pfah! What does a long-sleeved court noble know of war? My elder brother Yoshitomo knows his military tactics, and is surely about to do what I was going to do.”9
The point here is that it’s the nobleman Yorinaga, not the professional warrior Tametomo, who seems obsessed with fighting in the ‘right’ way. Rather, Tametomo is pretty clear that an ambush is the expected and the best tactic. He’s proven right shortly afterward, and the noble Yorinaga ends up looking like a fool.
I could easily give other examples of Japanese warriors attacking from ambush, just from the same chapter of the same text. Here’s Kiso no Yoshinaka, apparently planning to do exactly what Tametomo would have done:
The Western [Taira] troops captured a forager from Yoshinaka’s army, and asked him, “What is the Northern Army planning?”
He said, “They are planning to ambush you under cover of darkness.”
The westerners were terrified and fled, and as each fought with the other to get over the Ataka Crossing, more than a thousand of their troops were drowned.10
The legendary Minamoto ancestor Minamoto no Yoshiie, too, seems to have known what to look for in combat during his campaign in northern Japan in 1087, with an assist from Sun Zi:
While still several leagues distant from the Kanezawa stockade, far off in the distance Yoshiie saw a flock of wild geese flying in confusion, and said, “That means there’s an ambush.”
He sent forth his troops to investigate, and finding that matters were just as expected, his troops took the enemy prisoner and put them to the sword. Yoshiie said to his men, “Sun Zi’s Art of War tell us that ‘when birds are in disorder, there is an ambush.’ Had I not studied this text, I would have been in mortal danger.”11
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Samurai Weren’t Stupid
It’s often struck me that the claim that samurai followed a strict code of honor in combat is another way of saying that medieval Japanese warriors samurai were basically stupid, deliberately choosing sub-optimal military tactics for obscure social reasons. A moment’s thought would suggest that this is highly unlikely; any military force that fights in only one predictable way isn’t going to last very long. What’s more, warriors who didn’t ‘fight fair’ would gain an almost insurmountable advantage over those who did, for obvious reasons.
This sort of thing is why Karl Friday - a vastly better historian than Turnbull and his ilk - has gone so far as to argue that the concept of fair and unfair tactics in medieval Japanese warfare simply didn’t exist:
The notion that certain sorts of tactics might be “fair” while others were “unfair” was […] all but extraneous to bushi [warrior] culture. The whole concept of “unfair tactics” is, in fact, meaningless to analyses of early samurai warfare because, for the principals involved, it simply did not exist at the time.12
This would seem to be consistent with the above-quoted passages, which suggest that ambushes and night attacks were absolutely a standard tactic for medieval warriors. Although the examples I’ve given above are mostly from the 11th and 12th centuries, there’s every indication that this pragmatic philosophy remained in effect for the next several hundred years. The Forty-Seven Ronin in 1703, quite famously, struck down their enemy with a night ambush, and were hailed ever after as examples of how samurai should behave.
The point I’m trying to make is that a lot of the rationale for the presence of ‘ninja’ in medieval Japan rests on a romanticized, inaccurate, and anachronistic idea of how Japanese warriors really fought. We may, in fact, come to consider the possibility that we don’t really need the notion of ‘ninja’ at all; rather, we just need a more accurate understanding of medieval warfare.
In the next post, I’d like to continue working with Nihon gaishi to look at a few more examples of how medieval combat often unfolded in surprising ways, ones that run counter to our idea of ‘honorable’ samurai behavior.
Turnbull, Secret Warrior Cult (1991), pp. 9-10.
Joel Levy, Ninja: The Shadow Warrior (2008), p. 15.
Hatsumi, Ninjutsu: History and Tradition, pp. 7-8.
Turnbull, Ninja: AD 1460-1650, p. 5.
Levy, The Shadow Warrior, p. 15.
Turnbull 1991, pp. 9-10.
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.”
Friday, “The Culture of War,” p. 148.
Rai San’yō, Nihon gaishi kōgi (1933), p. 182. Kanbun text: 爲朝進而言曰。臣大戰二十。小戰二百。以芟鋤九國。以小擊衆。每利夜攻。臣請今夜襲高松殿。火其三方。而要之一面。[…] 賴長曰。爲朝年少負氣。所言皆鄙人私鬬之事。安可施之帝王之戰耶。兩帝爭國。當用堂堂之陣。[…] 爲朝退。私罵曰。唉。長袖者。惡知兵哉。家兄有謀。將出我所欲爲。This same exchange is mentioned to make much the same point in Friday p. 141, although the text being translated is different.
Nihon gaishi kōgi, p. 264. Kanbun: 西兵獲我芻者。問曰。北軍何謀。曰。謀夜襲。西兵怖走。爭渡安宅渡。溺者千餘。
Nihon gaishi kōgi, p. 174. Kanbun: 去柵數里。望見雁行亂曰。是有伏也。縱兵搜索。果獲鏖之。謂衆曰。兵法言。鳥亂者伏也。我不學則殆矣。
Friday, “The Culture of War,” p. 145.
"If you fight fair you ain't fighting."