Welcome to Critical Ninja Theory!
What's this newsletter about?
Welcome! I’m Rob Tuck, an academic at Arizona State University. My background is in Japanese literature and history – you can check out my profile page here.
So, ninja. You know the guys – black-clad, shuriken-throwing, master assassins of medieval Japan. Clans of rigorously trained expert killers from whom no warlord was safe, led by shadowy ninja masters and available to the highest bidder.
Yeah. Those guys didn’t really exist.
The ‘ninja’ most of us know and love is in almost all respects a literary construct, emerging from creative works such as plays, movies, and novels during the 20th century. Most of what we think we know about ‘ninja’ is literally fiction, and it’s mostly quite recent fiction, created during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
OK, but hold on – I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that there actually is an historical basis to the ‘ninja.’
Right – it is true that Japanese historical texts refer to people known as shinobi, who appear to have been basically spies. And if you go searching for info in the written or online literature on the topic, you’ll find plenty of claims that ‘ninja’ and shinobi were basically the same thing. This kind of stuff, for instance:
Two problems, though. First, the degree of overlap between what we can reasonably prove about shinobi and what the English-language literature claims about ‘ninja’ is pretty small. Second – and this is important – judged as history this stuff is unbelievably awful. If you take away only one thing from this post, let it be this:
Almost all ‘ninja’ history, especially in English, is garbage.
The whole field, unfortunately, is hampered by massive problems of evidence, citation, and basic critical rigor. If you’re fond of howling historical errors, we’ve got ‘em by the truckload, up to and including the tendency to mistake fictional works for historical events.
Yes, I’m serious. English-language ‘ninja’ history routinely presents fictional characters as if they were real people.
This pisses me off, because English-speaking readers with an interest in Japan deserve better than this garbage, and so this newsletter is my way of doing something about it. If you want to know how I got on to this topic in the first place, start here; and if you want to see what I’ve been writing lately, check out the list of my most recent posts.
Come with me, then, on a journey into the extremely weird and occasionally hilarious world of the ‘ninja.’ I post twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, so consider subscribing if you don’t want to miss anything.