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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on Ninja. Now, if you haven't heard the first two parts of this series, this is a case where you really should go back and listen to those before you listen to today's episode, because we lay a lot of groundwork, especially about the tricky historical questions about the sort of accuracy of a lot of the received knowledge about the ninja. And so if you are wondering about like how the ninja fit into real history versus pop culture and then sort of subsequent lore and legend, we talk more about that in the previous episodes. Today we're going to be focusing more on just some of the great bits of tech mixture and the anecdotes from that historical lore and legend, the stories of individual ninjas, the stories of the stories of tools and techniques and equipment and so forth.
Yeah, I mean, you basically can think of it this way. The ninja existed, true statement, the ninja are a myth and never existed. True statement depends on how you tease it apart, you know, and likewise a lot of this too, Like we'll get into specific examples of ninja tools or weapons, and you can say this never existed, and then you can also say, but I can buy one at the mall today, and so it's like, well it exists now, right, So it's it gets complicated.
This is a great time, I think, to discuss some of the various ninjutsu manuals that were published beginning in the Edo period, beginning under the Tokugawa Shogunate, that are the source of a lot of the ninja lore that we have today. So you can think about sort of like multiple stages of development of the ninja lore over the centuries. This is going way back. It's questionable whether some of the things reported in these manuals were actually used in the earlier periods, But these seventeenth eighteenth century texts have lots of great stuff in them that I think later gets picked up by authors, say in the twentieth century, and reprocessed and turned into the pop culture idea of the ninja. So there are multiple ninjitsu manuals, and I'm just going to list some common characteristics of them. So they will teach techniques of espionage, stealth, and intelligence gathering, including everything from how to infiltrate a building using different kinds of ladders to how to gag a prisoner. So they're full of descriptions of techniques. They pass along practical knowledge about real subjects, such as pharmacology like using herbs to achieve an effect in the body, and how to use gunpowders, so there is some amount of chemistry knowledge, at least as it was understood in the seventeenth century. In some of these books, they describe and illustrate tools and equipment such as cow drops. You know, these spiked spiked objects that would be used. You know, you'd throw them on the ground to slow the advance of an enemy or to deny them access to an area.
Yeah, makabishi, I believe, is the term for these. And these are interesting on their own terms because if you've played Dungeons and Dragons, you may have used these. You know, these are pretty common way to slow down an enemy. But apparently when you get into the history of their use in shnobi activities, like some examples of them may have been essentially organic or found items like essentially like throwing nuts, you know, or today's version would be like spreading legos all over the floor. That's not quite like a nature fact or a found item, but you know, you get the idea and then that you could progress from them into potentially like metal objects that are spiked and so forth. And speaking of those ladders, yes, ladders are absolutely a tool of the ninja. And if you are in the Dungeons and Dragons campaign and you're playing a rogue, go ahead and equip that ladder, bring that ladder with you, and dare your dungeon master to make you roll a dexterity check whilst climbing it. Ladders are great, trust the ninja on this.
My current rogue has a real affinity for climbing. He's got the I don't know it's level three or level four or wherever it is. You get to pick one of the feats, and he's got second story work where you know, you can climb at the same rate you can you can run.
That's great. Yeah, but I feel like we've been kind of just like a modern Ninja batmanification of our understanding of what rogues should have. Batman never carried a ladder but he probably should have carried a ladder. I think that would be great.
The bat ladder, I mean, the rope ladder, will you gets you a lot of places. I guess batman doesn't need a ladder because he has the unrealistic, the back claw thing that you can just shoot and will zip him up anywhere.
Absolute trust in the masonry the buildings he's interacting with.
Yeah, but anyway, all the stuff I've mentioned so far, that's the stuff you would imagine a ninjitsu manual to include. Right, you know, techniques about stealth tools. You could use, knowledge about pharmacology and gunpowder and things like that. But there are also things you might expect less. These manuals often emphasize spiritual and philosophical elements of the shnobi lifestyle, like some during the Edo period promote Confucianism with a strong emphasis on loyalty, which of course was favored by the Tokugawa shoguns. They sometimes also include moral discourses that serve as justification for shnobi activities, like it's okay to use lies and deception and trickery because they will help you win. They're what you have to do to win, and what's ultimately right is to be loyal to your masters and to help win in the conflict. And so so you know, you got to deliver that intelligence. It doesn't matter if you have to lie to do it. They sometimes also include more esoteric guidance, like the use of astrology or divination. They are often falsely attributed to a great hero or legend from history. They do not depict shnobi in black costumes and masks. They are not generally concerned with assassination, nor do they usually describe hand to hand combat or sword fighting techniques, as would come to be the calling card of Ninja in later movies. Once again, they are most often concerned with intelligence gathering, psychological warfare, and sabotage. And to this point, one of the manuals I'll mention in a minute actually specifies that your shinobi your spies should be selected based on intelligence and not physical strength, because these people were not primarily thought of as fighters, but as tricksters and observers gatherers of information.
Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, like your shnobi, are they going to be able to throw down with a samurai, an armed samurai like you know, one to one in some sort of a battle. I think there's a strong case to be made. No, the trickery if that, if that's sort of violent encounter where to occur, the trickery is going to make the difference, not the martial arts. I'm guessing that's right.
As we talked about in the last episode, the idea of shanoby as instigators of daring individual violence and hand to hand combat, that is more of the later movie ninja thing. The earlier emphasis is though there all there are lots of sort of shinobi warfare activities in shnobi attacks, sneak attacks by night. Most of the time, these manuals and early ideas of shinobi are are more focused on spying. For just one example of how these older military manuals might focus more on espionage strategy than on the type of combat focused ninja behavior we think of today, there was a sixteenth century military manual called the Kinetsushu, and this text was from earlier than the major ninjutsu manual. So this is not I want to be clear, this is not one of the ninjutsu manuals I'm talking about. This is a general warfare manual from a little bit earlier, and its focus is broadly on strategy and warfare, but it contains a sub section on espionage techniques, and it recommends things like the following. It says, before you go on a military campaign, send spies into the area that you're targeting to pose as merchants and craftsmen. And these spies should make maps of local topography and try to figure out the morale of locals, for example, by listening to whether people sing sad songs or happy songs. And you can also try to split loyalties within the region by doing things like have your spies make donations to local temples and shrines to win over the approval of the priests class.
And I'm guessing you had to be kind of selective about how you do it, Like, don't immediately set up shop and be like, hey, what do you think of the latest Lena del Rey album. You know, tease it out a little bit, make sure you have enough lead time to really immerse yourself in the local community.
Exactly right. Oh, and I should say, by the way, I mentioned it in the last couple of episodes, but just to flag again one of my major sources here. Also on the general facts about these ninjasu manuals is a book by a British historian named Stephen Turnbull called Ninja Unmasking the Myth from twenty seventeen, and so he highlights several important ninjasu manuals that I wanted to talk about for a moment here. These later manuals in the seventeenth century onward were more directly focused on ninjitsu, and they include texts such as the Gunpo Geoshu, which was published in the sixteen fifties, and the famous mansen shu Kai or benson Shukai from around sixteen seventy six, the latter of which has in some instances been referred to as the Ninja Bible, though this is probably a misleading way to characterize it. Mens In Chuki or bens in Chukai. The title means ten thousand rivers flowing together into an ocean, and in particular this one is the source of a lot of modern ninja lore. It contains details about ingenious ninja gadgets and equipment. It also contains different philosophies about spying and infiltration. It makes an interesting distinction between what it calls yonin and enin yonin meaning open infiltration, So this would be sneaking into somewhere by wearing a disguise, or being accepted by the target community, so you are within view, but you are disguising your intentions in some way. Meanwhile, en means invisibility or hiding, so this would be infiltration by sneaking by night or hiding under floorboards.
And that's where we get into some of these the elements of patients and endurance that we mentioned in the last episode. I believe like if you're going to have to hide under the floorboards for let's say forty eight hours, you know you're going to have to use some schanobi patients. That's right.
And that's one reason that there may not be as much difference between the idea of practicing endurance or patients and practicing stealth as you might originally think, like a lot of stealth is patience. In fact, you could even argue that the patience is very important when you are just being accepted within a target community or in disguise. Right, you've got to play the part for a long time to sort of make people comfortable.
Yeah, yeah, you got to actually run that business, Like, don't offer like really deep discounts. They're going to be suspicious. Don't act like you're not interested in making a profit one way or the other. Yeah, become a part of the community and then betray them.
Another interesting thing about these ninjitsu manuals is the thing that makes them really tempting to interpret is that sometimes they might include explanations and references that seem kind of circumspect, like they don't give all the details of what they're talking about. And then sometimes they'll have a note like additional information is only to be passed on by word of mouth.
Oh boy, that sounds very shanobi.
Yeah. One random detail that I love, by the way, just came across this in the book. This is about the gun pogoshu. It's the claim that in the ancient past, men of the regions Ega and Coca, which are places in Japan that are they have long been claimed as national headquarters of shnobi training. So the claim is that these these ninja from Ega and Coca would travel as secret agents, and while doing so, they would pose as yamabushi, which means street performers such as monkey tamers. So like the next time you see a busker playing a Goo Goo Dolls song on the sidewalk, or you see a guy dressed up as Superman in Times Square, you might wonder is this a ninja? Is this person gathering intelligence? Another interesting fact about the gun Pogoshu in particular is that some of its espionage advice is given in the form of a collection of poems, poems about spying.
Wow. Wow, that's fascinating that. Yeah, this goes hand in hand with some of the things we've been talking about about disguising yourself blending in. But I guess sometimes like being the obnoxiously obvious person is also a way of blending into the background, Like nobody suspects the like the Time Square Elmo of Well, you may suspect the Times Square Elmo of things, but probably not espionage, right.
Exactly anyway, So, with all the caveats we've previously established about the historicity of what's in these manuals that, you know, we might regard them with some historical skepticism. Nevertheless, they do describe a lot of fascinating alleged tricks and tools of ninjasu. So I think we should just dive right in and talk about some alleged ninja techniques.
Yeah, I want to pick up talking a little a bit about the female shanobi or the kuno ichi, which I believe we mentioned in passing in the first episode. You know, the idea that we could have have both male and female ninja, and this does really stress the the reality that that that shinobi activities would have covered a lot of ground that isn't just concerned with assassination or military and military and you know, direct military adjacent combat adjacent activities, but get into all these areas of spycraft. And there is apparently, according to Yoda and Alt in their book on Ninja's that I that I cited in the previous episodes, there's no evidence that female shanobi ever engaged in combat, though of course there are historic examples of Japanese women serving as warriors, such as tome Gozen of the late twelfth century. So again not saying they weren't female warriors in Japanese history, and even that there weren't female shannoby operatives who engaged in combat, but there's no evidence of such, but there are writings about female shinobi operatives, and this makes sense for reasons we already stress like if you were going to engage in spycraft, you're you're going to take advantage of whatever tools are at your disposal. And there are going to be certain segments of society through which females are going to be able to travel with a little more ease or a little less notice and there, and as we mentioned last time, there is at least one named female ninja Mochizuki chi Yojo, and this individual is still somewhat of a mystery. There are some arguments that she didn't exist at all, but to an all lister existence as confirmed, so I guess there is a certain amount of evidence on one side of the argument to say that this person did exist in some form. Assuming she did exist, however, she would have been like a poet, a noble woman, and it's said that she was affiliated with the Takata samurai clan and to have presided over a team of the uruki miko or walking maidens, so she would have kind of like been a spymaster of female shanobi and so on the realistic end of things. If there's truth to any of this, whether we were dealing with the specifics of this individual or just the general idea that there were female spy operatives in Japan during the Warring States period, just as there have been female spy operatives in pretty much every culture. I think every culture, I think we're going to be a safe assumption these would have been female operatives who could travel around, often as Shinto holy women, as entertainers, or perhaps prostitutots. Now on the legendary end of the spectrum, however, female shenobi were often imbued with various powers that were linked to female sexuality and reproduction, and a lot of this has much in common with various witchlike belief systems from around the world, you know, even getting into ideas of like the monstrous feminine, you know, the the other ing of of the female and taking aspects of reproduction and sexuality and tweaking them into the you know, the demonic realm and so forth. But this also put me very much in mind of the benajesrit from Frank Herbert's done as well as their later series counterparts, the Honored Matre, were kind of like a splinter of the benajestert who are their opposition. So I wanted to run through some of the powers and abilities attributed to them, again, we're dealing very much with the legendary supernatural end of the of the the ninja pop cultural world here and not his reality. Though perhaps you know, if you read between the lines, you can sort of see like realistic spycraft, you know, at the heart of some of these legends. So according to Joda and All, there were several abilities that were said to be linked to conception, such as the power to remove an unborn child from the womb, change its features, and then return it to the womb. Also the transfer of an unborn child from one woman to another, and the ability for female shinobi to choose to have a baby with any partner they've slept with over the last ten months. This last one I found pretty interesting because some organisms actually do engage in female sperm storage, a form of sexual selection by which sperm cells are retained by the receiving female for a period, sometimes a prolong period of time before using said sperm. Human beings do not do this, but you do find some organisms that do.
I recall reading about sharks.
Yes, yes, sharks are a great example, and yeah, sometimes this involves post copulatory cryptic female choice. I believes the terminology via various methods. So it is interesting that, yeah, this is a supposed ability of legendary mythic female ninja, but you have to go into the animal world to find examples of it in reality. Now, it should also come as no surprise, given the sort of fem fatale nature of female ninja and pop culture, that some of their weapons are related to seduction and sex. If go ahead and maybe skip fifteen seconds of this if you just want to skip the very mild details here, but here they are. They include death by orgasm, death by reversing the male's reproductive ejection, shall we say, back into his body, killing him in the process. And then there's the technique where they seduce a man so hard that he's mentally turned into an infant. Hmmm, great trick if you can put it off.
Yeah.
Now, I'm not sure that Frank Herbert was directly inspired by any of this, and if I had to guess, I would say he was probably not. But I have read that he did study Japanese and Chinese culture, among you know, so many other things, so it's not impossible that he got some inspiration from all of this, and certainly like some of these the detailed classifications of spycraft. We do see these reflected in the Dune series. You know, it's just thinking earlier about the Hearkenans hiding somebody away in the walls in Araken as as an assassination attempt on the royal household. You know, there's somebody who was like locked up for days or whatnot. You know, so who knows, maybe he was inspired by it, maybe not. Now for other magical arts attributed to the ninja, well we've already mentioned the fictional phantom toad summoning of Juriah, but there are some other interesting ones as well, and Yoda and all mentions these, and again not all of these are definitely classified as ninja or shnoby, but a lot of them are kind of shinnobi adjacent. And then again you have to think about the fact that as ninja myths in the popular culture kind of coalesce, they're going to draw in multiple things. So one figure worth looking at is sixteenth century sage Kashin Kogi. Not a ninja, more of a wizard attributed with various acts of illusion and shape shifting, so he would do things like allegedly throw leaves into the water and make them turn into fish. Various other entertaining illusions that are maybe not that far removed from the idea of somebody doing little illusionary tricks on the sidewalk or in a subway station.
Oh that's interesting.
Yeah, but yeah, he was according to legend, he was something of a trickster for sure. For instance, there's this story that he painted a detailed illustration of the torments of Hell that when you looked at it, it seemed animated to the naked eye, So you know, do with that way you will. Maybe it was just like really detailed. Maybe there was some sort of effect involved, or it was magic. You know, he's a magical painter, and it looks like it moves like, you know, Harry Potter style or something, and everybody was really impressed by it, and in fact, the powerful daimyo some called him the demon Daimyo Nabunaga, insisted on buying it, and the negotiations apparently included at least one assassination attempt on the artist, and you know, but Cogie stuck to his guns and finally agreed to sell it for just a crazy sum, just I don't know how much, but a lot, at which point the art suddenly lost its animated magic, and Nabonica is like, what happened? Why is it not moving anymore? Why is it not you knows as amazing as was previously, And He's like, well, it used to be priceless, but then we agreed on a price, and so the quality of the piece adjusted to that sounds like a great way to get beheaded. But I don't know. You know, that's the thing about being a trickster, daring, trickster wizard. You can pull these things off.
I guess artists in the audience remember this negotiating.
Technique again, Yeah, yeah, try and pull that one off. So Koji again not a ninja, but a figure that crosses over with some of the attributed magics of the ninja, and as a pop culture figure, he does pop up in a lot of ninja media, such as nineteen eighty two's Ninja Wars aka Death of a Ninja starring hero Yuki Sonata, a major actor who would go on to of course have a starring role in the recent Showgun series on FX, but also he played Scorpion in the Ninja in one of those in that recent Mortal Kombat film, so definitely a figure that has immersed in the Ninja lore, and I think he's popped up in a film or two for Weird House Cinema, great actor. I have not seen Ninja Wars, though, so I can't really vouch for it. All right, Shall we get into some more alleged ninja technology of note?
Yes, absolutely so.
As we previously discussed, the modern trope of the ninja typically involves their use of a traditional martial art that prioritizes medieval weaponry. Right, so these ninjas will use a schuriken to bypass a security panel. They will kill a robot with a sword, right, you know exactly what I'm getting at here? Oh?
Yes, Yeah.
In reality, though, as we've been stressing, the Shanobi would have used whatever tools were necessary and available to them, including what was essentially cutting edge technology, like the latest in explosives, the latest in chemistry, the latest in firearms. And so we do have some examples of this sort of thing. Again, with the huge caveat that, we have a lot of crossing of history and legend here. But fifteenth century Shnobi commander mochiuki Izumo Nokami is said to have utilized smoke bombs, pyrotechnics, code signals, and some form of weather prediction. And I'm not sure to what extent we're talking about weather prediction that based on like acceptable models and methods or something that was maybe a little more supernatural in form, but you know, both are likely to some degree.
Yeah, remember some of these Ninjasu manuals did involve like divination and astrology.
Yeah, and so ninja throughout the centuries were said to use nouroshi no jutsu smoke bombs, though Yoda and All stress that these were likely quote carefully placed in ignited smoke pots, given the limited pyrotechnic abilities of the time, and that also they would use things that we would think of as just simple firecrackers to serve as distractions, you know, set off a little pop over here, just enough distraction to do whatever it is you need to do, be that something more pop culture ninja ish, as sneak from one point to another or you know, switch out a piece of paper in an office, that sort of thing. But yeah, the smoke bombs, of course, are a huge part of the ninja myth, and they spill over into Batman as well. Like Batman's always throwing smoke bombs and disappearing right, and the reality is maybe less as instantly dramatic as that. It might have been more something that involved like placing something, lighting it and waiting for the smoke to build up. Right. Now, getting into the use of weaponry, we have the example of sixteenth century assassin of Sujatini Zunjuvo, and he is noted for his use of the Japanese matchlock rifle. So this is an individual that was definitely an assassin, definitely an attempted assassin, definitely a marksman. Was he a Shinobi, I don't know. I'm not as sure on that. I think you could say that he definitely engaged in a major Shnobi activity, though this was apparently a Kdo clan marksman task with the assassination of Oda Nobunaga himself, a local warlord was said to have hired him for the task and provided with key intel about Nabonaga's scheduled brands that through a particular pass in Omi. This would have been on May nineteenth, fifteen seventy, so you know, basic you know, sort of sniper operations here. He set up a position days in advance, using like the patience of the shnobe, if nothing else until okay, here it comes the retinue. Here comes Tobunuga in armor on his on his steed, accompanied by all of his men, and our would be assassin. Here Zenjubo knows that he really only has one shot. You know, this is this is a matchlock rifle. You know, he's not rapid fire. He's going to get one shot off and then it's going to be so loud and it's going to produce a discharge of smoke and he's not like, you know, miles away or anything. So he knows that the instant he fires this shot, they're going to mark his position, and so he needs to he needs to make sure that that shot lands home or he's going to have to like try and get off a second one if he can. So he fires the shot, knocks Innabunika from his horse, but as it turns out, does not kill him because the collar armor that he's wearing absorbs the shot. So Zenjubo flees. He hides that he is eventually caught and subjected to slow execution. I believe the story is that they buried him up to his neck in the sand and like sawed his head off.
Wow.
Now it was worth noting that snipers then and now sometimes utilized breathing techniques to steady one's aim in. Various breathing techniques and things that you could also think of as like self hypnosis have also been attributed to the shnobi in general to aid in stealth or patience. Now, at this point, let's come back to the idea of a ninja sword, something that is just inseparable from the modern myth of the ninja. In fact, we already in passing I think, talked about teenage mutant ninja turtles with katana. You know, like, if you're gonna make turtles into ninjas, you give one of them swords. Just what you do. And we actually heard from at least one listener who wrote in and was like, oh yeah, there's actually the whole thing about the ninja having a specific sword, the shoby katana. But as this listener pointed out, and as is discussed in the text we were working from, this sword's exact form is at least a matter of some controversy. There are a lot of strong arguments that this sword never existed at all. This is one of those examples where we don't see mention of it in the historic ninja guide books and instruction manuals. There's a very strong argument that these were created entirely in the twentieth century, though again, this is certainly something where then you can go around and buy one at a mall in like Wisconsin. So you can argue that while the shinobi katana exists, now you see it in movies and you can buy one at the mall. But let's get into the idea of it, at least the myth of it. The idea is that this would be a short straight blade with a pointed scabbard, So the scabbard has a point at the end and also a simple square guard you know, at the between the hilt and the blade, and the aspects of its design were said to be very practical for the ninja. So the pointed scabbard allowed it to be driven into the ground so it could be he could serve as a footstool to aid in climbing. I think there's some other stories about the scabbard being used as like a breathing tube if an engine needed to go into water. I'm not sure why that is would be more effective than having a breathing tube on you or using a reed or something.
Yeah, trying to imagine now. I think the idea with the scabbard is that you wouldn't you could stab it into the ground within its scabbard and then stand on the hilt of the sword to like hop over a wall and then like pull it up by a rope. That's the idea, because I guess if you were to stab the blade of the sword into the ground that the ideas that would dull it. But I'd also seen something about just generally using the scabbard of this sword as a kind of like a feeler, like an untinnee in the dark.
Yeah, the idea that you would kind of like partially unsheathe your sword, hold it out in front of you, and if you like tapped into something, you're like, oh, there's a person there, and then you can pull your sword out and like slash them or something. I think it's been referred to as like a person detector or a people detector. And of course there's the other obvious idea that if you're doing some sneaking around and potentially using that weapon in a confined space, it pays for your sword to be short as opposed to being some sort of like a longer sword, So this would be in keeping with operations that require disguise and so forth easier to hide, easier to carry, and all that. So again, very strong argument to be made that these were just invented in the twentieth century as part of outright ninja fiction and myth making. But something that Yoda and All point out is that, Okay, if these swords did exist, which depending on where you land on this could be a huge if they would have been very simple, they wouldn't have been ornate because they would not have been forged by a master swordsmith, one of these individuals responsible for the just the elegant superiority of the noble samurai sword. But or rather, these would have been made by blacksmiths in the country, probably who were willing to take a risk making an illegal sword. M because remember, your average shenobi here is not, if not an actual criminal, is at least a common born person, and it was illegal for commoners to own a weapon of any kind. So these would have been dirty weapons made for dirty practitioners of the sketchy arts. Yeah, and I think we also might want to consider it questions of necessity, Right, would is Shenoby operative need a sword, because even a small sword is fairly sizable, and especially if you consider, well, what are you going to use it for? Are you gonna are you gonna engage in a sword fight? Probably not. And if you do need some sort of a sharp object as a weapon or a tool, well, there are other choices you could make, such as a common field knife, some other kind of like sharpened tool that on one hand, maybe doesn't constitute a full weapon, and so for you're not like you're not going to be found out immediately just because you have it on your person, but the kind of thing that could be used as a weapon if things got dire, and in the cases where they did use swords, yeah, we're probably talking about the equivalent of some sort of like a black market sword. Now, these again are all like pretty standard pop culture ninja weapons, though I think it's even more fun to get into some of the perhaps weirder technologies that ninja are held to have utilized.
Right, I think it's time to talk about misugumo. Misugumo is a device described in the sixth volume of the seventeenth century ninjitsu manual Mansen Chu Kai, which I mentioned earlier, and the sixth volume is sort of a It describes various pieces of ninjitsu equipment and gadget It's kind of a ce branch compendium. Now, when it comes to the misugumo, there is a way in which it has commonly been interpreted in twentieth century sources, and then there is a revisionist understanding of it, which I think seems much more likely what the original source is intended. I'm going to start off by talking about the more likely confused interpretation. So misugumo literally means water spider, and it's clear from the context in which this device is described that it's some kind of floatation device. So in some popular ninja literature of the twentyth century, it has been interpreted as a kind of footwear that allows the ninja to walk on top of the water, often said to be used for crossing the watery moat surrounding a castle. So imagine a kind of wooden sandal that is a little rectangular sandal in the middle bound with twine in the center of a large flat disk made out of wooden quarter circle pieces. So you imagine a round disc with a hollow center made out of wood cut into four different pieces, and they're bound together with twine. And then in the middle you've got this little flat sandal soul to stand on. You can look up illustrations of this if you want. But this idea, in the first interpretation, is that the ninja would stand on these and then use them to walk across the surface of the water, because hey, wood floats right now, Would this actually work? Would such a device allow you to walk on water? I think we can start by thinking about its namesake, which is the water spider. There are insects and spiders that are able to walk across the surface of the water without sinking in. There are a number of different species that can do this, So how do they do it well? There are generally two physical forces that they can take advantage of. One is standard buoyancy. This works by displacing water with a lower density object, and this is how boats float. Boats float by having a hollow hull, thus displacing more weight in water than their own weight, so they get to sit on top of the water without sinking down. The other physical factor is surface tension. Insects and spiders are small enough that different forces play a major role in the way they move through the world, and the surface tension of water is one of those forces. Water is a polar molecule, so it likes to stick to itself, and when there's a mass of water, it forms a kind of skin on its surface, with the water molecules clinging very tightly to each other and to some extent resisting being split apart. So it takes some force actually to break through this surface layer of water. Now, given the mass of a human body, Earth's gravity pulling us downward into a pool of water quite easily overcomes the surface tension of water, and we plunge right in. But as you become smaller and smaller and your mass becomes smaller, gravity becomes less relevant and the surface tension of water becomes more relevant. So some insects and spiders are specially evolved to take advantage of the power of surface tension at their body size by having hydrophobic or water repelling surfaces and hairs on their bodies and especially on their feet, And these surfaces they from one thing. They spread out their weight over a larger surface area by having like specially shaped feed and these hairs that allow them to kind of spread out their footprint, so they distribute their weight over a larger surface of the water. But they also at the molecular level, tend to be made of hydrophobic substances that do not want to get wet. They chemically resist getting wet, and so they do not want to penetrate the surface level of the water. And so with the combination of these hydrophobic surfaces and distributing their weight over the larger space, the arthropod is able to walk or skate over the surface of the water by taking advantage of that surface tension. This is great for insects, but again it works because they are extremely small and have very small mass. Once you start getting bigger and having more mass to your body, you're just too big to take advantage of the surface tension of water in this way.
So you're saying Ninja might have been just really small.
If ninja were the size of insects. So yeah, you can quite well imagine coming up with technology for running over the surface of water. And that brings us back to the Misigumo device. So I was not able to find any rigorous testing of this device of recreations of this device published in a scientific or historical journal. But I've come across a few informal tests staged in things like documentaries and TV programs, And having reviewed this evidence and read what I could about it, my assessment is this device would probably not work as described, at least in the way it's interpreted here as footwear, unless the shoes were absurdly large, much larger than the specifications in the Ninjasu manual indicate, in which case I questioned the extent to which you could be said to walk on water as opposed to just floating upright on two small boats. And in that case, why is this method of crossing the water preferable to just piloting a small rat after canoe.
Right, because a small rafter canoe works, wonders like, there's a reason we still use canoes and kayaks and so forth. They're great. Why would you wear a couple of like huge floaty clown shoes instead, especially if you're trying to be stealthy?
That's right now, you might argue, well, you know, a rafter canoe is big, and you have to it would be hard to like carry it to the But in order for these shoes to work. They would also need to be big and hard to carry.
Yeah. I mean, I'm reminded of every time as a child or even as an adult, where I've attempted to stand on something floating and say a swimming pool, and you know, how long can you stay up unless it is like a large surfboard or a larger float, But even a fair sized float can prove difficult. You're not going to stay up there very long.
Yeah, that's another thing I want to get to in just a minute. Balance. Now, there is another consideration, which is the question of what exactly are you crossing? If it's actually water, these these you know, water walking shoes seem very implausible. But if it's some thicker substance like a muddy marsh, perhaps increasing the surface area over which your weight is distributed with these wooden disks actually would give you an advantage walking over a mud flat or a marsh, or some kind of thick, thicker substrate like that. It might help to have shoes like this because they would function more like snow shoes, you know, they just spread your weight out.
This remind you know, remember we did some episodes on mud a while back, right, and I remember looking into like military experiments with mud and often with vehicles. But I believe there were also some accounts of boots, like trying to figure out like what kind of boots would enable soldiers to move through or across the mud easier. And I know there were at least some experiments involving like sort of wider shoes almost kind of like snowshoes for mud.
Right, So if you're thinking about mud or some other kind of substrate different than just plain water, different footwear options could have advantages. But coming back to the water walking like literal water walking interpretation, that seems unlikely to me. One example of these informal tests that recreated a model of this device and tried it out was actually MythBusters that they did an episode where they tried it and it did not work at all. They sank right into the water or quickly lost upright balance and toppled over. And they even made like much more buoyant shoes, like more buoyant, larger shoes that were different than the original design in these Ninjasu manuals, and still had trouble staying upright. The issue is that an adult human is just way too heavy for reasonably sized shoe worn floatation devices to keep them afloat, So they're not going to work unless you make the shoes gigantic, but in doing so, you would probably lose the ability to quote walk in them with any kind of grace, So you're just trying to like stand up into little canoes. And this brings us back to the how generally floatation devices on the human scale and larger work by displacing more weight of water than the total amount of weight that is being kept afloat. So you can float a thousand ton boat on top of the water if the volume of the boat displaces more than a thousand tons of water. Right, So, you can have a boat made out of steel that has a hollow hull, and even though steel is very dense and would sink in water, it's displacing more water than the total weight of the boat and all its cargo. So when you think about it this way, it's relatively easy to create a personal floatation device that will keep you from sinking entirely under the water, because once your body is mostly submerged in the water, it's already displacing a lot of water. The average density of the human body is very close to the density of water. I've seen estimates that on average, a human adult with lungs full of air is slightly less dense than water and will float, and a human after exhaling with the lungs empty, is slightly more dense than water on average, or roughly neutrally buoyant, and will more likely sink. And this is going to vary somewhat due to tissue composition, clothing. Literally how much gas you have in your digestive system that plays a role in your natural buoyancy. But as animals, we're naturally right around on the line between sinking and floating. So if you just add a little bit of extra low mass volume, like a life vest, it pushes your volume to weight ratio over the line and makes you a little more buoyant enough that your head easily stays above the water with most of your body maybe neck down or shoulders down, displacing a lot of water below the water line. But walking on top of the water is a very different front physical goal than just keeping your head and its breathing holes above the water line. To walk on top of the water, you would need shoes that by themselves just the shoe part displace your entire body's weight in water, which again means that the shoes need to be both light or like boat shaped in a way with like a hollow hull and compared to normal shoes huge. So it is not impossible to have sort of shoes that will allow you to float on the top of the water. You can look up videos of people creating things like this, but again it's just like people standing on two small boats. They're like big things, they're not like shoes. The other issue is balance. You brought this up rob Because of the low friction at the interface between your water walking shoes and the water as compared to shoes and the ground, it is difficult to stay upright and propel yourself forward on a floatation device. In video, it was like the MythBusters test. When people try to do this, they quickly either sink or just tumble over.
Yeah, you end up falling one way, and say, like the boogie board you're trying to balance on, ends up like soaring off the other way.
Yeah. So the misogumo as shoes interpretation for walking on actual water seems totally not plausible. However, a lot of this gets cleared up with a reinterpretation of what this device was intended to be used for. So the original text that describes this device does not describe how it's used. It only sort of gives a give specifications of the device itself, and shows an illustration of a single one in isolation, notably not a pair of them. Also, the original illustration does not indicate any kind of sandal strap or other way of attaching the paddle in the middle of the disk to one's foot, So some modern scholars have come to think that this device was not actually intended to be used in pairs as footwear, but instead was a seat used for flotation in the water. So a ninja could, according to this interpretation, sit in this sort of ring and use it like an inner tube and then float across a water remote but they absolutely would get wet if they did this. They would be sitting in the water, but the upper part of their body would be sitting above the water, like sitting in an inner tube.
So you might want to like take your pants off, pants in your pack until you get across, climb up half naked, and then put your pants back on.
Right, And of course all of the caveats and uncertainties about hystericity remain. We don't know if this was ever like really used, or if it was exactly what it was used for. I've seen speculation that seems again just total speculation, that you could, like, oh, you could transport gunpowder across the water without getting it wet by using one of these. You know, you could hold it up in the air and float across the water. I guess you could do that, But then again, you could also probably just use like a small raft or boat. So I don't think it's fully understood what the alleged benefit of this device as described would be. But it does seem to me that the floating seat interpretation is more likely what the author intended than the footwear and interpretation.
I mean, we mentioned that it's important for a shnobi operative to potentially become part of the community, open up a business. What if that business was essentially tubing, providing inflatable circular devices for tourists to float from point A to point B down a river, you know, at leisure, perhaps while enjoying a beverage. It might give you the cover you need.
Okay, well, maybe we have to call it for part three here, But we've got more alleged ninja techniques and anecdotes to talk about in the next episode.
That's right, we'll be back and we'll cover we'll cover some big ones. If you're wondering, well, why did they talk about X, Y or Z, we'll hold on for the next episode. But still in the meantime, go ahead right into us, because everything is fair at game here. If you have thoughts about ninja lore, ninja history, various shnobi activities, either in the history books or on the big screen. Yeah, it's all fair game right in. We'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder. Stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes and Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Friday's Weird House Cinema. That time when we set aside most serious concerns just talk about a weird movie and hey, we'll remind you. If you're on the social media, check us out, follow us, and some of the various places you can find us. A big one of course is Instagram. That's SDBYM podcast. That's our user name there, that's our handle there. If you're on the gram then go over there and follow us. Why not, It's one way to keep up with the episodes we're putting out. Then we also have some amusing videos going up as well, reels I guess reels. They call them reels 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.
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