Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history, science and legend of the ninja or shinobi. Feudal Japan’s espionage specialists might not have resembled the characters in your favorite action movie, but they’ve become fictionalized staples of global popular culture while keeping to the shadows of history.
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And it seems this week, rob you've got ninjas on the brain. You have ninjas on the brain, in the brain, coming out of the brain, going in and out in secret. What brought you to the topic of the ninja for today's episode.
Well, I mean, on one level, obviously, I've always been a ninja fan, a big, big fan of the pop cultural ninja. As we'll get into, you know, just because by virtue of growing up when I grew up in the various interests that I have. But then, of course, also, as I've mentioned the show before, my family and I recently went on a trip to Japan. We got to visit, I believe, a couple of historic sites that have ties to the historic Nina, and so I thought, well, now it's the time. Let's this is the ideal time to jump into the subject of the ninja with the acknowledgement that's it gets a little complicated in places. It's not as cut and dry as some people might expect it to be. But there's a fascinating weave of fiction and hidden history and also legends and myth totally.
But I also hear what you're saying about coming of age in an era where there was just ninja fever in like US pop culture.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I think this would be a great place to start and maybe compare notes on sort of our generational influences regarding the ninja. I'm a little older than you, so I might be exposed to some things earlier that you were not, like the Big Divider being like teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. By the time they came around, I was very into them, but I at the time thought that I was too old to be into them, So I had this kind of like should I shouldn't I relationship with the teenage mutant Ninja Turtles? Then of course I should have, and I'm glad that I did to the extent I did. But for me, looking back, I would say, like the earliest exposures I had to ninja media in the US, I would say, certainly, you have the g I. Joe ninja characters, storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. One wore black and was you know, goodness, I can't remember which one was the good cart back. I think maybe the good guy wore black and the bad guy wore white, which even at the time was like stuck stuck out as stuck out as being a little unbelievable because even as a kid, you know that the ninja is supposed to move through the shadows. Why is this ninja wearing all white? It seems like he's made some style choices that may backfire on him later on.
I was just looking up to see if Snake Eyes was one of the G I. Joe action figures I had, and I think it was.
Yeah. I definitely had one or both of these guys, and they would go on all sorts of you know, ninja related adventures with the other action figures. Inevitably a small screwdriver would become involved and and G I. Joe Man would be.
Dismembered swapping heads and stuff. Yeah, yeah, well, I think I had some of the same main obviously teenage meaning ninja turtles. I fortunately, I think when I first came to them, did not have to deal with the internal turmoil of thinking I was too old for them. That does that sounds rough.
But I don't know rough is the right way to describe it. But you know there is it is that that conundrum if the peer pressure is there to make you feel like you need to get in a hurry to grow up, but you really are not ready to put aside things like ninja turtles. You know, at the time it may feel like a conundrum, but you know, Ninja turtles are awesome.
Yes, But there was also I know what you're saying, in that it was not just a craze in say, adult focused media in the US in the nineteen eighties. Though there was that, and we can talk about some examples, but there was a very kid friendly version of the ninja archetype that showed up in a lot of kid focused movies, like, for example, the Three Ninjas series.
I don't think I ever saw any of these, but these were like kid Ninjas. This was maybe this was Power Ranger inspired to a certain extent.
Possibly I think I only ever saw the first of these movies, never made it to Three Ninjas High Noon at Mega Mountain, but I don't remember that much about it. I think there are three brothers, and there are kids who are learning the ways of the ninja, and some like robbers, come into their house like Home Alone style or something and they use ninja ninja techniques on them?
What could be all bad if Victor Wong? Isn't it right?
Yeah?
Looking back on ninja movies that I watched, also think a major early influence was that I must have seen this in like my uncle's house. There were sometimes movies playing, like RoboCop that I ended up watching way too early, And I do specifically remember watching at least a big chunk of the nineteen eighty one Manaham Golan directed ninja movie that starred Franco Niro, I believe as a ninja titled Enter the Ninja, and I remember it like horrifying and enthralling me to varying degrees because you had some, you know, a fair amount of like ninja mayhem going on, and then also some rather grotesque moments that I probably shouldn't have seen it at early age.
I think that's like a hyper violent movie, isn't it. Yeah?
Yeah, I remember it being hyper violent, But I also have not rewatched it since I was a kid, so I don't know what was actually violent and what was maybe just ridiculous and a little like unbelievably gory, or if it like holds up as an actual gore fest. Oh.
Actually, as far as cartoonified movie Ninja Go, I recently before I knew you were going to want to talk about this on the show, just like last week with my friend Ben, I watched a movie called Ninja three The Domination, which is a sequel to Enter the Ninja's.
Right, this is like the third one in that the canon film's Ninja series, Right.
That's right. So this entry is about an LA aerobics instructor who gets possessed by the ghost of a ninja hit man who wants revenge against the police who put a stop to his Ninja rampage on a golf course, which took place on a golf course in which he like single handedly destroys a helicopter and a bunch of other stuff. And then the aerobics instructor is possessed by the ghost of the evil Ninja and then falls in love with one of the cops on the Ninja Spirits Naughty list, so uh oh, and then she has to get the ghost purged out of her body by a mystical priest.
Or.
Actually, I think maybe that the attempt to do that fails, but it's sort of a cross between you know, it's a equal to enter the Ninja. So it's got that kind of sleazy nineteen eighties La van Halen guitar lick ninja movie feeling. But then it's also got elements of the Exorcist, and then it's also a cop movie and also just aerobics, you know, dance aerobics all over the place.
I am on board for all of that. That sounds amazing. We might have to consider that for Weird House, in part because on Weird House Cinema we have talked about the movie blood Beat in the past, which has a ghost samurai. So it seems fitting that we should have a film at some point that has a ghost ninja's.
Ghost ninja possession.
Now, obviously there are tons of additional Western ninja properties we could side here. There's so much kid stuff. Certainly video games are big, some being imports, like I do remember the Shanobi Arcade game, though I don't know how much. I don't know how strong the ninja vibes are in that one. But then eventually you get things like Mortal Kombat, which has you know, some version of Ninja's in them, often, of course with all sorts of crazy colors that that again don't make sense if you're if you're engaging with the idea of ninja as a stealth operative, but if you're engaging within the idea of ninja as a user of magic, then as we'll get into, then I guess Mortal Kombat isn't too unbelievable. And then during junior high, probably like early junior high, it ended up picking up Showgun and reading it, and there was a lot I didn't understand at the time. But then there's like a lot of just you know, ideas about Japanese history and Japanese culture that they're loaded in that volume. And it does contain a very memorable section that involves the shinobi the ninja. So we'll come back to that, because, as it turns out, the novel Showgun has a very important influence on the idea and the popularity of the ninja outside Japan.
Well, regarding the idea of the ninja outside of Japan and the word ninja as an enters sort of the English lexic. I came across a really interesting fact in a book that I'm going to reference a bunch of times in this series. It's been one of my main sources here by a British historian named Stephen Turnbull called Ninja Unmasking the Myth. This is one of the best looking historical books and investigating the history of the concept of the ninja in the English language. And what Turnbull says that really shocked me is that the word ninja with its current romanized spelling did not appear in any Japanese English dictionary until the year nineteen seventy four, and there were plenty of Japanese English dictionaries before this, going back to the nineteenth century. Before the mid twentieth century, the favored Japanese pronunciation for the same concept the same kanji idiographs was shinobi mono or shanoby no mono. But there's an alternate pronunciation of the same idiographs nin ninsha or ninja, which became the dominant way of expressing the idea out loud in English in English contexts, at least I guess, beginning in somewhere in the mid twentieth century or the nineteen seventies or so, but I don't know. That's just surprisingly late to me. I've read in a few sources that consciousness of the idea of the shnobi or ninja in English speaking cultures traces in large part to the nineteen sixty seven James Bond movie You Only Live Twice, which is pretty fun, does have some great ninja action, and it is also wildly racially and culturally problematic, but apparently was a big sort of funnel of the idea of the ninja or shanobi into the international market.
Yeah, You Only Live Twice definitely a Bond film I saw as a kid, and I was surprised to learn of its historical importance to this topic. It's not a film that has ever stuck in my mind as being like, oh, this is important, this is bringing cultures together or anything like that.
Oh, but in some ways it kind of is, I mean nick like you know you can. There's a lot to criticize there, but also there are some great scenes of like the ninja training scene where they're like out there practicing all their skills and techniques on the target dummies. It's great.
So one of my main sources for this is an excellent and well sided book titled Ninja Attack. True Tales of Assassin, Samurai and Outlaws Outlaws by Heroko Yoda and Matt Alt matt All type referenced on the show before for some of his other writings about Japanese culture and Japanese popular culture. And in this book they point out as well that You Only Lived Twice was the first ninja screen appearance in international cinema. They write that while You Only Live Twice is the first international film concerning ninja, it was directly influenced by the nineteen sixty five film Shinobio, which was in turn inspired by the success of the various ninja short stories of Futaro Yamada, who lived nineteen twenty two through two thousand and one. This is a writer who is discovered by Atogawa Rampo, who we've talked about in Weird House Cinema because his writings have been adapted to the screen numerous times.
So how did ninjas end up in James Bond.
Well, it involves the screenwriter, who was of course Roald Dahl, who lived nineteen sixteen through nineteen ninety. You know, we often associate with Willie walk in The Chocolate Factory and various other works, but he was a screenwriter on You Only Live Twice and apparently went on a research trip to Japan to prepare for this, And while in Japan he watched the movie in question, that nineteen sixty five Ninja film, and realized, well, this is what the screenplay needs, we need ninja and ninja were added. Good choice. Yeah, yeah, and again you know, popular, big budget film that is exactly the thing that will propel a new concept into the public mindset. Now, this book gets into the overall sort of tangled web of pop culture ninjas and in and out of Japan, going all the way back to things like a seventeen seventy eight kabuki play that involves ninja. And they actually have a lovely flow chart that includes everything from Ninja scroll to kill Bill. I'll come back to more of what they have to say about ninja, popular culture, and ninja fiction here in a bit.
Now, I think maybe we should do a rundown of some of the common characteristics of the twentieth century movie Ninja, the international market movie Ninja. So usually this ninja is a stealthy assassin dressed head to toe in cloth coverings, usually black cloth or a black costume, with a mask that covers most of the face except maybe like an opening for the eyes or some other kind of gap in the face covering, but otherwise head to toe, head to toe black cloth.
Yeah, that's just the iconic idea of a ninja. You can't say the word ninja without picturing that.
On some level, what does the ninja do well? The ninja is a master of martial arts combat with a batman style belt of special tools and weapons, often including a grappling hook for climbing, smoke bombs to hide an escape, and pointed metal throwing stars that can be thrown with deadly accuracy.
Right along with of course the katana for some sword play, maybe various other little shorter sword, yeah, shorter swords, and various you know, various gadgets has required generally all related to stell then assassination.
They are often depicted as capable of almost superhuman acrobatics, bordering on the ability to fly, And I think it's interesting Turnbull actually points this out in his book that it is often within settings that are taken as otherwise realistic, or within fictional settings where magic is not otherwise assumed to exist, that ninja have these apparently supernatural abilities. You know, it's not a full fantasy world, it's like realistic setting but the ninjas can basically fly. Yeah.
Yeah, we'll get into more on that in a bit. I'd say other aspects of the pop culture ninja is that the ninja there's no like Ninja by night, blank by day. Ninja are generally depicted as being like fanatics, as being completely devoted to their art of stealth and assassination, and in generally and oftentimes they're you know, villains and sometimes secondary villains and a lot of properties, So there's not a lot of effort given to develop their characters outside of the adversary that they're presented as.
Yeah, sometimes they're presented as members of a sort of secret international brotherhood of some kind that they belong to some corpus or body of similarly trained people. In some cases, I do think there are sort of alter ego you know, Clark Kent Superman ninjas. In fact, I think there is one in Ninja three, the Domination. Oh okay, so I think it pops up from time to time, but I agree that most of the time, in like American movies, it's as if all they ever do is like sneak around and do stealth missions.
Right and have great, great eyes. We really want to have really expressive eyes in your cinematic ninjas, you know, because that's all you're going to see of the actor at least, and when they're in ninja.
Mode, brows that narrow dramatically. Yeah, there's one more thing I came across in Turnbull that I really liked regarding, like the ninja's obscure tools techniques. There's one that is from a novel by Yamato Futaro, who you mentioned a minute ago is writing these influential ninja stories and novels in the nineteen fifties. This is from a nineteen fifty eight novel called Coca Ninpocho, which Turnbull says is basically a mostly accurate historical setting, but the ninjas within the story can turn their hair into porcupine quills, which they like shoot off and launch his weapons, So like weaponized hair.
Yeah, yeah, the dark magic of the ninja. Now I want to come back to Showgun for a second here. Showgun, of course, it was a nineteen seventy five novel. There is a subsequent TV mini series about it based on it, and then there's been a more recent twenty twenty four adaptation of Showgun that is quite excellent. I loved it. My wife and I loved it. Everyone I've talked to has really enjoyed it, and they went to great pains with this adaptation to sort of make sure that it was grounded as properly as they could in history and in Japanese culture. Though James Colvell's Showgun is like an adaptation of history, I guess you would say it is. It is a work of fiction based on history, written by an outsider who who was interested in these things. But there is, of course this this pivotal sequence in the novel and in adaptations that involved the ninja, and it has been argued that Clavel helped introduce the concept of ninja into the West. I've also read it argue that like, for a while, this was a very successful novel, a lot of people read it like a lot of what many Westerners knew about about Japanese history in Japanese culture was based on this book. You know, It's like it was. It kind of had the same role as you only live twice in this regard, a very popular work of media that was for many people their their first or primary exposure to this different culture and different time period. Again, the novel's based on history, it's not one accurate. I think the recent TV series does a pretty good job of updating everything as far as I understand it, and so the ninja or shinobi that we see in it, they seem like they seem to have done what they could to sort of ground it more properly. Though I think they're still sort of reflecting the trappings of the ninja's pop culture glow. So they're not all dressed in black, and they're certainly not wearing white or you know, bright Mortal Kombat colors, but they are they are more recognizable as pop culture ninjas. Quick note on the word ninja plural and singular is ninja, but I am inevitably going to keep saying ninja's from time to time, So my apologies.
I've been thinking about that exact thing. I realized, Yeah, it's ninja is plural, but I bet I've already said ninja's. I can't stop myself.
Yeah, But on the Showgun issue, I turned to editor Henry Smith's book Learning from Showgun Japanese History in Western Fantasy. This is put out as part of the program in Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the editor and the authors here point out that ninjas in the novel Showgun Quote reflect the romanticization of the ninja in modern Japanese popular entertainment. So the idea here that what we see in the novel and inevitably in any adaptation, we see the ninja as this violent death cult of fanatical assassins. And as we'll be discussing, there's some truth to that, to their role in assassination and stealth and even military endeavors. But there's a lot more of the myth in the legend here in this usage of the ninja than anything.
Else, and the overtaking of historical fact by sort of myth and storytelling and romanticization of the ninja, that that tradition that goes way back. Actually it's not just a twentieth century thing.
And it's not just a Western appropriation of it or anything like that. Like it would be easier to sort of sum it all up if it were like, well, there's the Japanese reality of what ninjas were, and then westerner's got a hold of it, and of course they transformed it. There is some Western transformation of it involved, but for the most part, this transformation of the historic ninja into the pop cultural trope of the ninja. This all occurred within Japanese popular culture well in advance of anything James Bond got up to.
Yeah. One thing I think we should establish early, and this is something that is a major theme of this book by Turnbull that I've been referencing, is that apparently a huge amount of what is commonly said about the ninja, even in apparently authoritative books and museums and other historical sources, is based on text traditions that do not necessarily reflect what really happened in history. So there is sort of a ninja tradition, or maybe to be more phonetically accurate, a shanobi tradition that is Japanese in origin and does in many ways go back hundreds of years, but still may not be based on real figures and practices in history that the term shinobi originally referred to.
Yeah. Absolutely, Like in the past, I've heard people be as firm as to say the ninja didn't really exist, the ninja are a myth, and I think you could basically say that that's a true statement to some degree, Like the ninja as we see them in popular culture didn't really exist, but they are based on a thing that did, and it's fun to get into that and try and piece apart, like what was real, what was probably real, what isn't an embellishment, and why does that embellishment mean. In the book by Yoda and All, they point out that, like basically the term ninja or even snob, we're dealing with a colloquial term that can be translated to things like, you know, a clandestine person or one who is invisible. But historically they would have been known by a whole bunch of different colloquial terms, including, but not limited to, a few of these examples. So there's ninjutsu tuska, which means like a practitioner of ninjutsu the art of stealth. There's one called omitsu, which would have meant like the secret service. And then there are a couple here I want to include that I think are neat because they kind of hint at some of the other, like non stereotypical modern ninja things they would have been up to. There's one which we have translated to the shortcutters, which I rather like, you know, it's like you have some sort of a political, military, or social problem, and traditional honorable means of dealing with those problems are not achievable. So what do you need. You need a shortcut, and that's why you seek out the shortcutters.
That's very cool.
There's another one that I believe is ukami that I've seen translated as the silent watchers, And I think that's also important here because while, yeah, while while the historic ninjas would have involved themselves or been hired to deal in military and assassination type scenarios, they also might have been involved in entirely non violent affairs as well, things that we might typically describe more as like straight up spy and espionage business.
And often I think I've seen the word ukami translated as spy. Yeah, And that leads back to how I think many of the earliest understandings of the ninja or shanobi have to do with spying and infiltration in warfare, and so to situate the classical understanding of the nin within a conceptual context, I wanted to talk briefly about the precedent of using spies and infiltrators in war and Turnbull does this by making reference in his book to the classic Chinese text The Art of War by sun Zu or Turnbull calls him sun Z. I guess they're different ways of pronouncing the name, but I think I'm gonna say sun Zu because that's more familiar to me. So this is a classic Chinese text, usually dated to the fifth century BCE. Apparently many of the authors of the Tokugawa period who wrote the Tales of the Shinobi establishing a lot of this lore, would have been very familiar with Sunzu in the Art of War and other sort of warfare manuals of this type. And apparently Sunzu talks about the concept of a secret agent, referring to it with the Chinese character khan, which means the space between two objects or discord. So this refers to the use of secret agents to undermine alliances and sew division within within societies or within within armies. And sons who actually sort of lays out a taxonomy of five different kinds of secret agents. I thought this was interesting. So first of all, you've got your incon or native agents. These are villagers of an enemy's province or country. He says, you can't really expect them to do like risky work or carry out difficult missions, so they are mainly useful for just gathering general information about the enemy's disposition, maybe like where the enemy is or the direction of travel and so forth. Then after that you've got nikon, which are inside agents. These are officials of the enemy government drafted to your side by bribes or pay. These agents can supply much better quality information and they are especially useful for creating discord within enemy ranks. And if you want to identify these people, you can look for officials within the government who have been slighted in some way, like maybe being insulted or passed over for promotion. Find someone who has power who thinks that your enemy has treated them unfairly. After that you've got yukon or friendly agents. This apparently refers to double agents. So the enemy has spies as well you are. If you want a double agent, you can recruit the enemy's spy to actually spy for you or to feed false information to their masters. Classic double agents set up. Yeah, then there's one called chi khan, which means dead agents. This one is interesting and pretty cold. It's the idea of expendable allies who can unknowingly be given false information which they believe to be true, and then sent deliberately into enemy capture, so when information is extracted from them, it will mislead the enemy command.
Yeah, that is cold.
But then finally you get to Chokan, the last of the five, who are called living agents, and what Turnbull says about them is the following quote. They go boldly into enemy territory and return with valuable information. For this purpose, men who are pre eminent in intelligence are selected. They have the ability to withstand great hardship and have the social skills to gain access to those of the enemy who are closest to the seat of power. These are the classic spies envisaged by the ninja myth. So to be clear, these are not being called ninja or anything in this context. This is a much earlier work, but it's establishing this sort of principle within warfare and within the taxonomy of spies and secret agents, that there's already this idea of this like James Bond spy kind of figure, or this ninja, this person who is who is an agent who can strike out on their own, who can act and has some kind of like has capability, has powers, and they can go into hostile territory and carry out a mission to gather information or sow discord or do whatever is needed.
Yeah, and of course, in all of this, sun Zoo is codifying like realities that already existed in warfare. One thing that Yoda and all point out is you can look into various old texts and some ancient texts, and you can see allusions to this kind of spycraft. There are apparently examples from the Old Testament that also involve, you know, something you could interpret us as spy work and espionage, like you go out on this mission, do this thing, you know, so, you know, again codifying realities that were already present, but meaningfully doing so meaningfully and in a very influential way that with the ripples are going to spread of course, out of China, through Japan and ultimately globally.
I do think it's kind of interesting that if you think beyond the concept of just the ninja and to the broader idea of like any character in fiction who is depicted as having like peak abilities in almost every domain, like they know everything, they're the smartest, they speak all these languages, they're you know, unbeatable in hand to hand combat. I would say the most common profession this character has is spy. Isn't that kind of interesting?
It is interesting? Yeah, I mean on one level, I think it it's a realization of the intense level of danger that individuals like this would put themselves in. Like even if they're you know, not involved in an actual like ninja movie fight and stealth sequence, you know, it's like the intense danger of engaging in that level of deception and betrayal, you know, like on just like a social level and a legal level, like you're in you're engaging in a high level of danger. Now, another interesting thing we didn't mention this when we talked about the trope of the ninja in popular culture, But another thing you frequently see you will see examples of ninja is who, you know, use modern gadgets and or are robots or cyborgs. There's a lot of fun to be had there. But a lot of times the ninja is depicted as an operative even in like a modern or nineteen eighties nineteen ninety setting, who depends in large part on traditional even archaic weapons used with great skill. But like if a ninja needs to you know, get past a you know, computer console on a security door. You're more likely to see that movie Ninja throw a throwing star through it, right, or shoot it with a bow and arrow, as opposed to get down there and stick in a USB stick or start you know, hacking the computer system.
Yeah. I really have a picture in my mind of somebody like chucking a throwing star into a computer and like sparks shoot out of it. Yeah, that's that's how you get past security.
But an important point that Yoda and altamaic about the the the myth of the Ninja and the modern idea of the Ninja versus the historic reality as we understand it, is that these individuals would not have been picky about like what level of technology that they used. In fact, they would have used like the latest advancements available, such as gunpowder for example. So it's kind of just a virtue of us spinning modern tales about an older pop cultural idea than anything like. So, yeah, if the Ninja had access to James Bond spy gadgets, they would use those James Bond spy gadgets like they are like any espionage operative out there. They'll make use of the best tools available to pull off the deed.
Now, another interesting way of understanding that the ninja character archetype, by contrast, is something that the Turnbull highlights in the book, which is the idea of the ninja as the quote dark antithesis of the samurai, another historical character. Now, again, this is something that is not necessarily a historical reality. This is something that is That is how the ninja archetype is reflected within storytelling and tradition, not necessarily historically real, but within these traditions you can see that see the contrast here. The samurai are warriors who are nobles. The ninja are often represented as commoners. The samurai are depicted as loyal and honorable, the ninja as treacherous and mercenary. The samurai fight their enemy face to face, while the ninja sneak up on people, you know that, stab people in the back. And as a spy, the ninja must always survive the mission at all costs to deliver the gathered intelligence, whereas the samurai is very often depicted as dying selflessly in battle and maintaining having an honorable death. And so in all these ways, within the storytelling tradition, the ninja could often be seen as positioned as like the the the negative mirror image of the samurai warrior trope.
Yeah, yeah, I think that that is key, and it does seem to get into some historic realities like, for instance, the idea that that that apparently ninja would have very often been lower born men and women as opposed to warrior class individuals. So there is this like the social distinction there. But and then also when it comes down to what stories are told and celebrated, the stories of the samurai were celebrated and told and retold, and legends were told about them far ahead of anything like this with the ninja. The ninja would would have been essentially been the dirty tricks department for any feudal lord looking to solve some sort of again political, military, or social problem that they couldn't their wise approach, and it was not something that you would have talked about in polite society. Like the shnobi and the various colloquial terms would have been synonymous with trouble. They weren't to be celebrated, even if you prize their skills secretly, and in employing them you would have hoped to retain plausible deniability over whatever was about to happen. In general, we may we may get into some you know, some some examples to the contrary, but in general like this, this was this was the dirty tricks department.
But yes, to come back to your point, despite the later profusion of valorizing tales, you know, often at the time, people, uh, people, people don't feel so excited or proud about I don't know, deception in warfare or secretive military activities, even if they are necessary to winning.
Sometimes, yeah, better to celebrate the tale of the noble and victorious samurai than the the shnov that you pay to go in and stab somebody in the back. Now, I want to at a quick note, I mentioned men and women, and on the subject of female ninja, they did apparently exist, though the reality was likely nowhere near what image may be summoned in your head here. You know, the various pop culture ideas of a female ninja. Yoda and all point out that there's no indication that any female ninja ever engaged in combat of any kind, or again that we have no direct evidence or writings of that. But female spies at the very least would have been able to move through parts of society that would have been less accessible or inaccessible to men, or move in ways that men would easily overlook. They might disguise themselves as entertainers, as prostitutes, as household staff, and of particular note, as transient Mico holy women. So these would have been the modern version is this. They tend to Shinto shrines and so forth. But this would have been like a loose knit order, so not a lot of like you know, you can't like check the papers as much of these individuals, and they would have traveled around, So it's a great cover story. If for any female ninjas, female spies that would have been utilized, it would have been an ideal cover. And these are sometimes referred to as the kono ichi, but very little is known about them. The use of female spies may have been considered even more taboo than just using spies or shnovi in general. And we really only have legends about a single named female ninja. This would have been the sixteenth century figure Mochizuki chi Yojo. It is thought that she was a real person, but we don't even know the like one correct pronunciation of her name. But still it was probably a real person. Based on what I've been reading. But anyway, all of this makes sense because again, this is about not playing by the rules. This is about breaking the rules, doing the taboo thing in order to achieve your military political goals. And so in that case, you know, all cards are on the table there, Rob.
So you found something about like the earliest references to ninjas in their all black costume.
Yeah, this is this was really interesting because you know, the iconic vision of the of the ninja, as we've been discussing, is that of the ninja and all black, you know, blending into the shadows, creeping along the rooftops and so forth, like you just you can't separate that from the pop culture idea of the ninja. But this seemed, this idea that they wore all black and trooped around like this apparently did not emerge in Japan until around eighteen seventeen, or at least that's when we see the first known print, the first known image of a ninja wearing this sort of garb, and it actually ties into a very important figure in Japanese art history, Katsushi Kuhoku Sai, who, if you're not familiar with his name, you're very familiar with at least his most famous piece, and that is the great wave of kind of Gatwa. This artist lives seventeen sixty through eighteen forty nine.
And so what do we see in his woodblock featuring a ninja.
Well, we see something that is just instantly recognizable as a modern ninja. Like you could not mistake this for anything else, right, because it is a man all in black, everything covered except his eyes, and he's climbing a rope and you just know he's climbing. You know, he's climbing somewhere he's not supposed to be, or he's returning from that place having assassinated somebody, or having stolen some important scrolls or something to that. To that effect, Now, where does this come from? I mean, I'm you would be tempted, and I think would be very understandable to guess, well, you're just you're making an assumption that if you're up to secretive things, you might wear all black to blend in, right, I mean, it makes sense, and it it has been pointed out that, you know, it would be ridiculous to say, no historic ninja's ever dressed like this, because in the art of espionage, it you know, it might make sense to do so at some point, but it's been interpreted that what we see here is essentially like a use or a repurpose of what in Japanese theater is known as a kuroko, which is someone that is dressed all in black, essentially a stage hand that is there to aid in the production in ways that you know, that don't distract from the key performance. And this is something we see in theater arts around the world as well. You see it in puppetry, for example, you want an invisible puppeteer, then you have them just wear all black and black over their faces as well, so they blend into the background and don't distract from the central performance.
Yeah, when I've done theater, you know, people working backstage were dressed in all black, and I guess the idea is you're you're just less likely to be seen that way. But yeah, hern Bul talks about this that in traditional kabuki theater, there were these figures, the corogo or the coroko, who would wear all black to like move scenery around or maybe like help the actors change costume within view of the audience or something. But they would be dressed in black and they would have a mask over their face, and this would symbolize it would not only make them stand out less visually, but also apparently would like symbolize invisibility.
Yeah, so what we're looking at here is interesting. It's kind of a mash up, a visual mashup of the idea of the invisible ninja and the mostly invisible presence of the stage hand. And of course the stage hand is literally manipulating reality, but in a way that is supposed to be secondary to the performers. Also interesting to think about that a lot of these productions are going to involve samurai, you know, so you're going to have like the samurai in the forefront doing all the really important dramatic stuff, but in the background there are these almost invisible characters who are doing something else, something that that we're not meant to know about.
Yeah, but of course, the ironic thing about like dressing in a full black costume head to toe is that if somebody saw you and you were wearing this costume you were you would instantly stand out in reality, like with not in the context of a stage play or something. And so yeah, it's it's a contradiction to what would actually be said in most of the texts that talk about ninja or shanobi going way back, they say, oh, you know what these people would do is wear a disguise, so you blend in with the people that you're trying to infiltrate. Yeah.
So yeah, in general, when we think about what would a ninja look like, what would a shnobi look like, they would just look like anybody else. The best way to move from point A to point B through the people is to look like the people, and so that's what they would have done. I guess James Bond does this. I can't remember. James Bond's always wearing it. He's always going places where you wear a tuxedo anyways, so I guess it's like he's doing that. But you know, in general, like a spy is going to want to blend into the crowd. They don't want to stand out. You know, It's that you want to be the least interesting looking person in the room because nobody is supposed to know you're there.
I guess it actually highlights a tension between the reality of intelligence gathering and spy work and the sort of the media demands, which is like, when you want to read a spy story, you want it to be the most thrilling and exciting thing possible. So you want the spy hero to be like to stand out, to be notable and exciting in every way, And in reality, if you were doing spy work, you would want to be the least exciting, least notable looking person on earth.
Yeah. Absolutely so. I guess at this point we might summarize, as we kind of reached towards the end of this episode, that the Ninja is there's a historical like bedrock, and then there is all of this fiction and legend making and mythology on top of that. And one of the additional challenges here is that there's there's less historical record down there on the bedrock than one would like. There's a lot more fiction and legend making, and it can make things things difficult. It can make it difficult to sort of try to weed out what exactly is the historic reality of the Shanoby. And then these various groups that are described as Shanoby and there apparently are according to Yoda and A there are like three different ways of sort of looking at why this is the case. And the first is something that we've touched on already, and that is that, okay, if if Shanoby operatives were generally common born dirty tricks specialists who were you know, taboo to use and not something you'd brag about, they're totally not on the same level of cultural esteem and power as the samurai warrior class. So the samurai are going to get all the stories and the legends and the tales at least during their initial that the key period of operations here in the Ninja are going to be ignored for the most part. Now, another important thing to keep in mind is that the Ninja would have inevitably been a secretive bunch. They were working in the shadow, they existed under the radar, and Yoda and Auld actually signed an individual by the name of Musque Hatsumi, the last living descendant of the Tokukushi school of ninja, who stated that quote, if one can know the truth about ninjutsu, it isn't really ninjutsu. So this reminds me a bit of the nineteen sixty seven Japanese crime thriller Branded to Kill, which is a very stylish noir action picture about assassins. But in that movie, which again is very much work of fiction, that's not to be taken in reality, it's very surreal in some ways. But in that fiction, there's like this ranking of assassins, and there's supposedly a number one assassin, like the best assassin in the world of Japanese crime. But they are almost like a ghost. They might not even exist, or perhaps they've kind of transcended traditional existence by being the best at what they do. So yeah, I do like this idea, and I think there may be is something to acknowledge there that you're dealing with the secret of organization that wouldn't want there to be a bunch of records about what they did and what they're doing. They would have wanted to remain in the shadow. And then the third point they make is that during the heyday of the Sengoku era, the warring States of fourteen sixty seven through fifteen seventy three, roughly the ninja were not fun. They were synonymous with trouble and unrest. Again coming back to the idea of shinobi as an adjective as well, And it was only later, during the comparable piece and stability of say the Edo period sixteen oh three through eighteen sixty eight, that new generations had the luxury of turning and looking back to the horrors of the past to spin out new tales of their stealthy exploits for entertainment purposes.
Well, I think maybe we are out of time for part one, but there's a lot more to say about the ninja, trying to unravel the historical complexities, the differences between what we know and what is more likely some kind of historical fiction or invented tradition, untangling those differences, as well as getting into some of the great anecdotes and stories about historical alleged historical Ninja, as well as maybe some of the science of their tools and tricks.
Yeah, I think we can definitely spin off some ninja science in a subsequent episode. So excited to get into that later on. But we have a lot more to cover, various named ninjas of history and legend worth talking about some more about just how you know this, this interwoven idea of the ninja comes to fruition and so forth, So keep on the lookout for that. By the way, that book that I mentioned by Yoda and Alt Ninja Attack, this is one of three books that they put out. The other two are on Yo Kai and Yuri. If you look these up, you're going to notice that it has some very flashy, fun illustrations on the cover. I believe that the illustrator is Utaka Kondo, and it has like a very fun manga look to everything. But these are very informative, very well cited texts. I highly recommend them. There are a lot of fun that the Yo Kai book. I read with my son. We really got into that one. And yeah, you'll learn a lot about Japanese culture and history. So anyway, we're going to go and close out here, but write in. We'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on anything we discussed here, including your first exposures to the wonderful world of the of the pop culture Ninja. Where did what? What? Where? Was it? What did you see? Was it a video game? Was it a TV show? Was it a Japanese film? Uh? We we want to know. We're very interested in this in the global legend of the Ninja.
Did anybody out there ever beat Ninja Gaiden? Oh?
Man, I don't think. I don't think I played that one, but that is another huge ninja video game franchise.
Of note, we accept your tall tales about how you were almost to the last stage but then kept getting knocked off the ledge by that thing that spawns over and over.
Now, this is this one that you could actually beat, because I know there have been some of the In fact, I think there's a teenage meaning Ninja Turtle game for like any s that it was only later that that people realize, oh, you couldn't actually make some pivotal jump. That is, nobody could actually beat it.
I don't know we've talked about this before. Yeah, I remember that, but I don't know about Ninja, and I just remember it being hard.
They used to make the game, those games so hard. I did not miss it. Some people were nostalgic for impossible games. I occasionally play one of these and I'm like, no, I want to I want to be able to beat this and move on from it. This is not a lifelong struggle I'm signing up for.
Oh yeah, I'm with you there.
I don't know.
People play video games for different reasons, I guess, but if I play video game, I'm not looking to test my metal. I'm just like I'm trying to relax.
Like, yeah, I want to feel like a competent Ninja in this video game, not an incompetent one. I didn't sign up for a bunch of ninja fails.
Yeah, well there were a lot of those in that anyway. Okay, so I guess you know. We're wrapping up for today, but we'll see you next time.
Uh.
Huge, thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
