John Man - Ninja: 1,000 years of the shadow warrior

J AMES B OND, THE S PY W HO B ROUGHT THE N INJAS W EST

Some call James Bond a Western ninja: a secret agent, loyal to a fault, adept with specialist weaponry, master of unarmed combat, the ultimate survivor. So its fitting that Bond (or rather his on-screen persona, Sean Connery) gave ninjas their first bigif inaccuratePR boost in Europe and the US, in You Only Live Twice (1967).

( You Only Live Twice film stills courtesy of www.007magazine.com 1967 Danjaq LLC and United Artists Corporation. All rights reserved.)

As these on-set shots show, the films ninjas were martial art extras. They were armed with swords and staffs (above), wore protective clothing (above), and in the climaxthe invasion of the villains mountain lairoperated as a team of commandos (below) ready to die rather than individuals dedicated to survival.

Gobi

Atlas of the Year 1000

Alpha Beta

The Gutenberg Revolution

Genghis Khan

Attila

Kublai Khan

The Terracotta Army

The Great Wall

The Leadership Secrets of Genghis Khan

Xanadu

Samurai

NINJA

1,000 YEARS OF THE
SHADOW WARRIOR

JOHN MAN

NINJA . Copyright 2012, 2013 by John Man. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Originally published in slightly different form in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Transworld Publishers.

FIRST U . S . EDITION

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Man, John, 1941

Ninja: 1,000 years of the shadow warrior / John Man.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-06-222202-2

1. NinjaHistory. 2. NinjutsuHistory. I. Title.

II. Title: Ninja, one thousand years of the shadow warrior.

UB271.J3M36 2013

355.5'48dc23 2012031912

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Epub Edition FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062202666

13 14 15 16 17 DIX / RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In the printed edition of this book, most Japanese namesexcept those that are common in English, eg, Toyko, Kyoto, shogunhave been Romanized according to the revised Hepburn system, with a macron above o and u to indicate long vowels. Unfortunately, because most e-book formats cannot accommodate macron symbols, these marks are absent from all electronic editions.

Once you get the details and layout of the castle or the camp, all you need to do is get back with the information as soon as possible.

Ninja instructional poem

THE RESTAURANT OWNER , IN HIS MID - SEVENTIES BUT AS FIT AS someone half his age, was talking about his ninja ancestors. A firm gaze behind huge glasses, a ready laugh, a torrent of words: Mr. Uedas ninja blood had kept him youthful and exuberant.

But how do you know all this? I asked, because ninjas were famous for leaving few written records.

Its in the family. My grandmother was a Momochi. A famous name, an eminent family, one of several hundred who shared these forested hills and steep-sided valleys. She used to talk to me about the past, when I was helping her on the farm and when we went away on holiday.

It was from her, with her childhood memories of her grandparentshis great-great-grandparentsthat he had learned about Igas ninja families, about the way they had worked together to build an early form of democracy, keeping themselves independent of power-hungry lords. Did people where I came from know about this? No, I said, it would be news to them, because most people thought ninjas were comic-book creatures.

Mr. Ueda had much more to tell, but I was short of time, and interrupted with a glance at my watch and an abrupt question. Was there anything else? I was hoping for another swift bullet point that I could follow up on at leisure, and was utterly unprepared for what came next.

I would like to show you what I inherited from my grandmother.

How could I refuse, without seeming impolite? He led the way past tables, pushed aside boxes, and revealed a narrow door into the roof space, for like most countryside buildings in this earthquake-prone country, the restaurant was a single-floor structure, with a loft for storage.

Be careful, he said, stepping over a mat on the floor. Thats to catch rats. Very sticky. If you step on that, you will not get off.

The stairs rose steep and shoulder-width into shadows. I followed, with a twinge of anxiety at the delay, wondering how on earth I could beat a gracious retreat.

Above and ahead, he stooped clear of the sloping roof along a little space too small to be called a corridor, and led the way into a gloomy attic packed with, of all things, what looked like tailors dummies. It took my eyes a few seconds to get used to the half-light before I realized what was before me: suits of ninja armor.

There were ten of them, slung over simple wooden crosspieces, lined up among piles of empty cardboard boxes. They were nothing like the theatrical creations favored by samurai, with segmented breastplates and garish face masks and exotic helmets. These were austere, dark, hooded, cloak-like doublets, the ghosts of shadow warriors. When I got up close, they turned out to be chain-mail doublets made of minute metal rings. From a meter away they looked more like cloth than metal, armored versions of the black peasant costumes that are nowadays considered traditional ninja garb.

Downstairs, Mr. Ueda had regaled me with family memories that may have been no more than folklore. These were the real things, direct links back centuries to a time when ninjas were ordinary farmers until called upon to defend not some lord but themselvesfighting for their families and villages against armies that had to be opposed with covert, nighttime operations because to engage with them in open, daylight conflict would be suicidal.

Nothing could have more powerfully brought home a fact I had hardly glimpsed until that moment: I was involved with a tradition that was very Japanese, yet completely different from the more obvious, better-documented traditions of the samurai. To learn about ninjas, I would be peering into shadows, and it would take a good deal of help and luck to discern underlying truths.

Before starting on this book, I thought I would be engaging mainly with myth: cartoon turtles, invisibility, flying, and other such nonsense. I was wrong. The ninjas, for centuries secret agents acting for their communities and their employers, had remarkable qualitiesamong them an extraordinary ability to inspire legendsbut there was nothing magical about them. If ninjas ever mastered the art of invisibility (the subtitle of at least one book about them), they did so by being masters of disguise and camouflage.