The Truth About Ninjas
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
If you do anything for Halloween this weekend, chances are pretty good you might see a child (or an adult) trick-or-treating (or partying) dressed as a ninja. Maybe it’ll be a generic ninja, or maybe a specific one, like a Naruto character or a Ninja Turtle.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); Today, ninjas are all around us. They’re in our movies and comics and video games; they’re even in our everyday language (“I can’t believe you ninja’d that in there at the last second!” “Come join our team of elite code ninjas!”). Far from their origins in medieval Japan, ninjas are now arguably that country’s most famous warrior type. We talk about pirates versus ninjas, after all, not pirates versus samurai. There’s a huge divergence between historical ninja and the fantasy ninjas of popular culture. For example, everyone knows that ninjas were warriors who stuck to the shadows and never revealed their secrets— yet watch some anime or play a video game and you’re likely to see ninjas portrayed as the flashiest, most conspicuous characters around. Like a lot of well-known fantasy archetypes, the ninja have a real history, but aside from some basic core attributes, writers and artists around the world feel free to interpret the word however they want. The two strains of ninja—“real” ninja versus pop-culture ninjas—aren’t as separate as you might assume. In fact, the tension between the two is one of the things I love most about them. Ninjas as we know them today are a complex mixture of historical inspiration and modern imagination, defined by the intersection of two seemingly contradictory identities. The true story of the ninja is fascinating. The people known Y1 com Game today as ninja (they pronounced it “shinobi” then) rose out of small villages in the Iga and Kōga regions of Japan. By necessity, they became experts in navigating and utilizing the resources of the dense mountain forests around them. Because of their relative isolation, they served no lord and ruled themselves through a council of village chiefs. In the Warring States period (c. 1467 – c. 1603), people from these areas frequently found work as spies and agents of espionage, work that made good use of their skills in navigation, observation, and escape. The villages of Iga and Kōga were eventually attacked by one of the greatest warlords of the era, Oda Nobunaga (an event that forms the loose inspiration for, among many other things, the underrated Neo Geo fighting game Ninja Master’s[sic], by World Heroes developer ADK). The villages banded together and fought the invading armies with guerilla techniques—techniques enabled by their superior knowledge and mastery of the terrain. That’s pretty much textbook ninja action, right there. By the end of the Warring States period, the ninja were enfranchised and integrated into the government’s systems of power. Their most famous leader, Hattori Hanzō, received an official salary equivalent to millions of dollars today. He became so much a part of the establishment that they named a gate in the Shogun’s palace after him, y1 com games and today there’s a train line named after that gate: Tokyo’s Hanzōmon Line Serious researchers and students of ninja history and Y1 COM practice often take pains to remind us that the real-life ninjas they study were decidedly not cartoon characters. The real story of the ninja, they often say, is better than anything that’s been made up about them. That’s true in some sense: the history of the ninja is definitely worth understanding. It weaves together many threads of Japan’s culture, its philosophy, and even its spirituality. But I have to admit: I love the goofy pop-culture version of ninjas, too. A couple hundred years after the people of Iga and Kōga took on Oda Nobunaga, the ninja had become mostly obsolete. It was a time of peace, and nobody ordered many spy missions or assassinations anymore. This was when fanciful illustrations of black-clad ninja began to show up in woodblock prints by artists like Hokusai and others. Then, in the 1950s, a popular light novel called The Kouga Ninja Scrolls pushed the ninja far into the realm of fantasy. It was about star-crossed lovers who came from rival ninja clans. Each warrior of each clan had their own weird superhuman techniques: one of them could slice through his enemies with magic strands of women’s hair, one of them could breathe poison from her mouth, and so on. It was sort of like the X-Men—everyone had their specific power, they all had tangled histories with each other, and the outside world feared and hated them. Ninjas continued their pop-cultural ascent in the west thanks in part to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel You Only Live Twice, though it was probably the 1967 movie adaptation that had the greatest impact. It featured “Japanese secret service ninjas,”hilariously shown training “in secret” in broad daylight on the lawn in front of Himeji Castle, one the country’s biggest tourist sites. By the 80s and 90s, ninjas were more or less loosely understood as the product of a school of martial arts you could take called ninjutsu (“nin techniques”). American-made stories featuring ninjas like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 3 Ninjas, Surf Ninjas, Beverly Hills Ninja, Mortal Kombat, and so on contributed to the ninja’s rise to fame, even if the portrayals were not always very… elegant, shall we say. Let’s pause for a moment to meditate on a particularly fine example of ninja cinema. This is a compilation of scenes from the 1987 Hong Kong film The Ninja Showdown: (Man, where do I start with this thing? The way they talk? The way they run? The fact that they’re all white? The headbands that literally just say “Ninja” on them? The part where they throw actual frisbees at each other? The part where the dude just stops and shouts “Niiiiiinjaaaaaa!” at the sky?) The Ninja Showdown may be the epitome of silliness, but it can be difficult to make a non-campy ninja movie. A lot of the actions we equate with ninjas are a stone’s throw from physical comedy—we visualize fanatical acrobats
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