July 17, 2025 • 52 mins
In this four-part 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. (originally published 7/25/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today we are bringing you an
episode from the Vault, an older episode of the show.
This is part one of the series that Rob and
I did on The Ninja. We started this in July
of last year, so this episode originally published July twenty fifth,
(00:26):
twenty twenty four. We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
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
(01:22):
to visit I believe, a couple of historic sites that
have ties to the historic ninja, and so I thought, well,
now's the time. Let's this is the ideal time to
jump into the subject of the ninja, with the acknowledgment
that it gets a little complicated in places. It's not
(01:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But I also hear what you're saying about coming of
age in an era where there was just ninja f
in like US pop culture.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I think this would be a great
place to start and maybe compare notes on sort of
our 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
(02:25):
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
and 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,
(02:50):
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 war black and the
bad guy wore white, which even at the time was
like stuck stuck out as stuck out, as being a
(03:11):
little unbelievable because even as a kid, you know that
a 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.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
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 GIA Joe Man would be.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Dismembered, swapping heads and stuff. Yeah, yeah, well I think
I had some of the same main obviously teenage mean
ninja turtles. I fortunately, I think when I first came
to them, did not have to deal with the internal
term oil of thinking I was too old for them.
That does that sounds rough.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
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,
(04:25):
ninja turtles are awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
What could be all bad if Victor Wong, isn't it right? Yeah,
looking back on ninja movies that I watched, I also
think a major early influence was that I must have
seen this in 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
(05:43):
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
(06:06):
shouldn't have seen it at early age.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I think that's like a hyper violent movie, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Actually, as far as cartoonified movie Ninjas go, I recently
before I knew you were gonna 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.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Right, this is like the third one in that the
Cannon Films Ninja series.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
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
(07:11):
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 sequel to Enter the Ninja, so
it's got that kind of sleazy nineteen eighties La van
(07:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
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 we should have a
film at some point that has a ghost ninja.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
OF's ghost ninja possession.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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 how strong the ninja vibes are
in that one. But then eventually you get things like
(08:27):
Mortal Kombat, which has you know, some version of Ninja's
in them, often of course with all sorts of crazy
colors 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 a ninja
as a user of magic, then as we'll get into,
then I guess Mortal Kombat isn't too unbelievable. And then
(08:50):
during junior high, probably like early junior high, I 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 in Japanese culture that are 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,
(09:13):
because as it turns out, the novel Showgun has a
very important influence on the idea and the popularity of
the ninja outside Japan.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Well, regarding the idea of the ninja outside of Japan
and the word ninja as it enters sort of the
English lexicon, 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
(09:43):
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
(10:05):
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 shinobi no mono. But
there's an alternate pronunciation of the same idiographs nin ninsha
(10:27):
or ninja, which became the dominant way of expressing the
idea out loud in English in English contexts, at least,
I guess beginning in the somewhere in the mid twentieth
century or the nineteen seventies or so, but I don't know.
It's just surprisingly late to me. I've read in a
few sources that consciousness of the idea of the shinobi
(10:49):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
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 this is important, this is bringing cultures together, anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Oh, but in some ways it kind of is. I mean, 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.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
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 altype referenced on the show before for
some of his other writings about Japanese culture in Japanese
Popular Culture, and in this book they point out as
(12:07):
well that You Only Live 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
(12:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So how did ninjas end up in James Bond.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
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 Wonk 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
(13:08):
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 kind of thing that will propel a new
(13:32):
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, you know, all
the way back to things like a seventeen seventy eight
kabuki play that involves ninja. And they actually have a
(13:53):
lovely flow chart that includes everything from Ninja scroll to
kill Bill. I'll come back to or of what they
have to say about ninja, popular culture and ninja fiction
here in a.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
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
(14:25):
ninja is a stealthy assassin, dressed head to toe in
cloth coverings, usually black cloths 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 black cloth.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, that's just the iconic idea of a ninja. You
can't say the word ninja without picturing that on some level.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
What does the ninja do?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
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 the assassination.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
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
(15:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
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,
(16:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
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 ninja's. In fact, I think there is
(16:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Right, and have great, great eyes. We really want to
have really expressive eyes in your cinematic ninja's, you know,
because that's all you're going to see of the actor
at least, and when they're in Ninja.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Mold 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 and techniques. There's one that
is from a novel by Yamata Futaro, who you mentioned
a minute ago is writing these influential ninja stories and
(17:38):
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 as weapons, so like
weaponized hair.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
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 minis 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.
(18:21):
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 Colovell's Showgun is like an
adaptation of history, I guess you would say it is
(18:42):
a work of fiction based on history, written by an
outsider who was interested in these things. But there is,
of course this pivotal sequence in the novel and in
adaptations that involved the ninja, and it has been argued
that Clavel introduce the concept of ninja into the West.
I've also read it argue that, like for a while,
(19:06):
this was a very successful novel, A lot of people
read it like a lot of what many Westerners knew
about about Japanese history and 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
(19:26):
to this different culture and different time period. But again,
the novels based on history, it's not one hundred percent 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 that they seem like they seem to have done
what they could to sort of ground it more properly.
(19:48):
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 moral on back colors, but they are
more recognizable as pop culture ninjas. Quick note on the
word ninja plural and singular is ninja, But I am
(20:14):
inevitably going to keep saying ninja's from time to time.
So my apologies.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
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
this the editor and the authors here point out that
ninjas in the novel Showgun Quote reflect the romanticization of
(20:50):
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
(21:14):
more of the myth in the legend here in this
usage of the ninja than anything.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
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
(21:58):
all occurred Withinese popular culture, well in advance of anything
James Bond got up to.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah, one thing I think we should establish early and
this is 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
(22:26):
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
(22:50):
referred to.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
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 men, 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.
(23:14):
And it's fun to get into that and try and
peace apart like what was real, what was probably real?
What isn't an embellishment and what does that embellishment mean?
In the book by Yoda and All, they point out that,
like basically the term ninja or even shnobi, we're dealing
with a colloquial term that can be translated to things like,
(23:36):
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 suska, which
means like a practitioner of ninjutsu, the art of stealth.
(23:57):
There's one called on Mitsu, 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 that they would have translated to the shortcutters,
(24:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That's very cool.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
There's another one that I believe is Okami, that I've
seen translated as the silent watchers, And I think that's
also important here because while, yeah, while the 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,
(25:03):
things that we might typically describe more as like straight
up spy and espionage business.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
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 ninja
(25:29):
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 Zoo,
or Turnbull calls him sun z I guess they're different
ways of pronouncing the name, but I think I'm gonna
(25:51):
say sun Zoo because that's more familiar to me. So
this is a classic Chinese text, usually dated to the
fifth century BCE. Apparently, any 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
(26:14):
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 sow division within
within societies or within within armies. And Sunsu actually sort
(26:36):
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 incan 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
(26:58):
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
(27:18):
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 enemy
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.
(27:42):
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. YEA. Then there's one called Chikhan, which means
(28:04):
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
(28:24):
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
(28:47):
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 nin
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
(29:10):
already this idea of this like James Bond spy kind
of figure, or this ninja, this person who is a
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
(29:34):
or do whatever is needed.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, And of course, in all of this, sun Zoo
is codifying 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. They are
apparently examples from the Old Testament that also involve, you know,
(29:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
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.
(30:41):
I would say the most common profession this character has
is spy. Isn't that kind of interesting?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
It is interesting? Yeah, I mean on one level, I
think it's a realization of the intense level of danger
that individuals like this would put themselves in. Like even
if there 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
(31:11):
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 ninjas who you know,
use modern gadgets and or are robots or cyborgs. There's
(31:34):
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
(31:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
But an important point that Yoda and altamic about 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
(32:42):
gunpowder for example. So it's it's kind of just a
virtue of us spinning modern tails about an older pop
cultural idea than anything like. So, yeah, if the Ninja
had access to James Bond spy gadgets, they use those
James Bond spy gadgets like they are like any espionage
(33:04):
operative out there. They'll make use of the best tools
available to pull off the deed.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
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.
(33:40):
This is something 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 commers. The samurai are depicted as loyal
(34:02):
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
(34:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
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 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.
(35:01):
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
(35:24):
sort of again political, military, or social problem that they
couldn't otherwise approach, and it was not something that you
would have talked about in polite society. Like the shanobi
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
(35:47):
to retain plausible deniability over whatever was about to happen.
In general, we may get into some you know, some
examples to the contrary, but in general, like this was
this was the dirty tricks department.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
But yes, to come back to your point, despite the
later profusion of valorizing tales, you know, often at the
time 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.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
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 add a quick note. I mentioned men
and women, and on the subject of a female ninja,
they did apparently exist, though the reality was likely nowhere
(36:37):
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
(37:01):
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
a particular note, as transient Mico holy women. So these
would have been the modern version is they tend to
(37:23):
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 for any female ninjas,
female spies that would have been utilized. It would have
been an ideal cover. And these were sometimes referred to
(37:45):
as the kno 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
(38:06):
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 but 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, uh, doing the taboo thing in order
(38:29):
to achieve your military political goals. And so in that case,
you know, all cards are on the table there.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Rob So you found something about like the earliest references
to ninjas in their all black costume.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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 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
(39:06):
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,
(39:29):
Katsushi Kuhokusai, 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 Kandagatwa. This artist
lives seventeen sixty through eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
And so what do we see in his woodblock featuring
a ninja.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
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.
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
(40:11):
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 has been pointed
out that, you know, it would be ridiculous to say,
(40:32):
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 akuroko, which is someone that is dressed all in black,
(40:56):
essentially a stage hand that is 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
(41:18):
and don't distract from the central performance.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, when I've done theater, you know people working backstage
were dressed in all black, and I guess the idea
is you're just less likely to be seen that way.
But yeah, Turnbull 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
(41:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Yeah, so what we're looking here, it's 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
(42:19):
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 we're not meant to know about.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
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 would 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,
(43:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
So yeah, in general, when we think about what would
a ninja look like, what would a Shanoby 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 anyway, so I
(43:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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 an exciting thing possible. So you want the
spy hero to be like to stand out, to be
notable and exciting in every way. And then reality, if
(44:08):
you were doing spy work, you would want to be
the least exciting, least notable looking person on earth. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
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
(44:36):
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 Shanobi. And then these various groups
(45:01):
that are described as Shanobi 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 Shnobi operatives were
generally common born dirty tricks specialists who were you know,
(45:25):
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 and and the ninja are going
(45:45):
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 died under the radar, and Yoda and
Auld actually signed an individual by the name of Musque Hatsumi,
(46:08):
the last living descendant of the Tokokushi 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
(46:29):
picture about assassins. But in that movie, which again is
very much work of fiction that's not to be taken
a reality, it's in a 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
(46:50):
almost like a ghost there. 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 maybe 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
(47:11):
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, you know,
coming back to the idea of shanobi as an adjective
(47:32):
as well. And it was only later, during the comparable
peace 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.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
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
(48:17):
maybe some of the science of their tools and tricks.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
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 interwoven
idea of the ninja comes to fruition and so forth.
(48:43):
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 ury. 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
(49:04):
like a very fun manga look to everything. Uh. But
but these are very informative, very well cited texts.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
I highly recommend them. They're a lot of fun. That
the Yokai book I read with my son, We really
got into that one. H 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.
(49:35):
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?
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
We we we want to know. We're very interested in this.
In the global legend of the Ninja.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
Did anybody out there ever beat Ninja Gaiden? Oh?
Speaker 3 (49:52):
Man, I don't think. I don't think I played that one.
But that is another huge Ninja video game franchise.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
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 mean and Ninja Turtle game
for like Anys that it was only later that people realize, oh,
you couldn't actually make some pivotal jump that always nobody
could actually beat it.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
I don't know. We've talked about this before. Yeah, I
remember that, but I don't know about Ninja Guide, and
I just remember it being hard.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
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 be able to beat this and move
on from it. This is not a lifelong struggle I'm
signing up for.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Like, yeah, I want to feel like a competent ninja
in this video game, not an incompetent I didn't sign
up for a bunch of ninja fails.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah, well there were a lot of those in that anyway. Okay,
so I guess we're wrapping up for today, but we'll
see you next time. A 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.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
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.
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today we are bringing you an
episode from the Vault, an older episode of the show.
This is part one of the series that Rob and
I did on The Ninja. We started this in July
of last year, so this episode originally published July twenty fifth,
(00:26):
twenty twenty four. We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
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
(01:22):
to visit I believe, a couple of historic sites that
have ties to the historic ninja, and so I thought, well,
now's the time. Let's this is the ideal time to
jump into the subject of the ninja, with the acknowledgment
that it gets a little complicated in places. It's not
(01:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
But I also hear what you're saying about coming of
age in an era where there was just ninja f
in like US pop culture.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
Yeah. Absolutely, And I think this would be a great
place to start and maybe compare notes on sort of
our 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
(02:25):
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
and 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,
(02:50):
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 war black and the
bad guy wore white, which even at the time was
like stuck stuck out as stuck out, as being a
(03:11):
little unbelievable because even as a kid, you know that
a 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.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
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 GIA Joe Man would be.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Dismembered, swapping heads and stuff. Yeah, yeah, well I think
I had some of the same main obviously teenage mean
ninja turtles. I fortunately, I think when I first came
to them, did not have to deal with the internal
term oil of thinking I was too old for them.
That does that sounds rough.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
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,
(04:25):
ninja turtles are awesome.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
What could be all bad if Victor Wong, isn't it right? Yeah,
looking back on ninja movies that I watched, I also
think a major early influence was that I must have
seen this in 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
(05:43):
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
(06:06):
shouldn't have seen it at early age.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I think that's like a hyper violent movie, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Actually, as far as cartoonified movie Ninjas go, I recently
before I knew you were gonna 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.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Right, this is like the third one in that the
Cannon Films Ninja series.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
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
(07:11):
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 sequel to Enter the Ninja, so
it's got that kind of sleazy nineteen eighties La van
(07:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
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 we should have a
film at some point that has a ghost ninja.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
OF's ghost ninja possession.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
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 how strong the ninja vibes are
in that one. But then eventually you get things like
(08:27):
Mortal Kombat, which has you know, some version of Ninja's
in them, often of course with all sorts of crazy
colors 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 a ninja
as a user of magic, then as we'll get into,
then I guess Mortal Kombat isn't too unbelievable. And then
(08:50):
during junior high, probably like early junior high, I 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 in Japanese culture that are 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,
(09:13):
because as it turns out, the novel Showgun has a
very important influence on the idea and the popularity of
the ninja outside Japan.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Well, regarding the idea of the ninja outside of Japan
and the word ninja as it enters sort of the
English lexicon, 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
(09:43):
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
(10:05):
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 shinobi no mono. But
there's an alternate pronunciation of the same idiographs nin ninsha
(10:27):
or ninja, which became the dominant way of expressing the
idea out loud in English in English contexts, at least,
I guess beginning in the somewhere in the mid twentieth
century or the nineteen seventies or so, but I don't know.
It's just surprisingly late to me. I've read in a
few sources that consciousness of the idea of the shinobi
(10:49):
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 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.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
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 this is important, this is bringing cultures together, anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Oh, but in some ways it kind of is. I mean, 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.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
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 altype referenced on the show before for
some of his other writings about Japanese culture in Japanese
Popular Culture, and in this book they point out as
(12:07):
well that You Only Live 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
(12:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
So how did ninjas end up in James Bond.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
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 Wonk 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
(13:08):
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 kind of thing that will propel a new
(13:32):
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, you know, all
the way back to things like a seventeen seventy eight
kabuki play that involves ninja. And they actually have a
(13:53):
lovely flow chart that includes everything from Ninja scroll to
kill Bill. I'll come back to or of what they
have to say about ninja, popular culture and ninja fiction
here in a.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
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
(14:25):
ninja is a stealthy assassin, dressed head to toe in
cloth coverings, usually black cloths 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 black cloth.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, that's just the iconic idea of a ninja. You
can't say the word ninja without picturing that on some level.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
What does the ninja do?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
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 the assassination.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
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
(15:49):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:00):
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,
(16:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
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 ninja's. In fact, I think there is
(16:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
Right, and have great, great eyes. We really want to
have really expressive eyes in your cinematic ninja's, you know,
because that's all you're going to see of the actor
at least, and when they're in Ninja.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Mold 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 and techniques. There's one that
is from a novel by Yamata Futaro, who you mentioned
a minute ago is writing these influential ninja stories and
(17:38):
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 as weapons, so like
weaponized hair.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
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 minis 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.
(18:21):
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 Colovell's Showgun is like an
adaptation of history, I guess you would say it is
(18:42):
a work of fiction based on history, written by an
outsider who was interested in these things. But there is,
of course this pivotal sequence in the novel and in
adaptations that involved the ninja, and it has been argued
that Clavel introduce the concept of ninja into the West.
I've also read it argue that, like for a while,
(19:06):
this was a very successful novel, A lot of people
read it like a lot of what many Westerners knew
about about Japanese history and 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
(19:26):
to this different culture and different time period. But again,
the novels based on history, it's not one hundred percent 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 that they seem like they seem to have done
what they could to sort of ground it more properly.
(19:48):
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 moral on back colors, but they are
more recognizable as pop culture ninjas. Quick note on the
word ninja plural and singular is ninja, But I am
(20:14):
inevitably going to keep saying ninja's from time to time.
So my apologies.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
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
this the editor and the authors here point out that
ninjas in the novel Showgun Quote reflect the romanticization of
(20:50):
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
(21:14):
more of the myth in the legend here in this
usage of the ninja than anything.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
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
(21:58):
all occurred Withinese popular culture, well in advance of anything
James Bond got up to.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Yeah, one thing I think we should establish early and
this is 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
(22:26):
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
(22:50):
referred to.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
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 men, 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.
(23:14):
And it's fun to get into that and try and
peace apart like what was real, what was probably real?
What isn't an embellishment and what does that embellishment mean?
In the book by Yoda and All, they point out that,
like basically the term ninja or even shnobi, we're dealing
with a colloquial term that can be translated to things like,
(23:36):
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 suska, which
means like a practitioner of ninjutsu, the art of stealth.
(23:57):
There's one called on Mitsu, 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 that they would have translated to the shortcutters,
(24:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That's very cool.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
There's another one that I believe is Okami, that I've
seen translated as the silent watchers, And I think that's
also important here because while, yeah, while the 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,
(25:03):
things that we might typically describe more as like straight
up spy and espionage business.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
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 ninja
(25:29):
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 Zoo,
or Turnbull calls him sun z I guess they're different
ways of pronouncing the name, but I think I'm gonna
(25:51):
say sun Zoo because that's more familiar to me. So
this is a classic Chinese text, usually dated to the
fifth century BCE. Apparently, any 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
(26:14):
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 sow division within
within societies or within within armies. And Sunsu actually sort
(26:36):
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 incan 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
(26:58):
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
(27:18):
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 enemy
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.
(27:42):
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. YEA. Then there's one called Chikhan, which means
(28:04):
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
(28:24):
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
(28:47):
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 nin
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
(29:10):
already this idea of this like James Bond spy kind
of figure, or this ninja, this person who is a
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
(29:34):
or do whatever is needed.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Yeah, And of course, in all of this, sun Zoo
is codifying 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. They are
apparently examples from the Old Testament that also involve, you know,
(29:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
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.
(30:41):
I would say the most common profession this character has
is spy. Isn't that kind of interesting?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
It is interesting? Yeah, I mean on one level, I
think it's a realization of the intense level of danger
that individuals like this would put themselves in. Like even
if there 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
(31:11):
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 ninjas who you know,
use modern gadgets and or are robots or cyborgs. There's
(31:34):
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
(31:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:21):
But an important point that Yoda and altamic about 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
(32:42):
gunpowder for example. So it's it's kind of just a
virtue of us spinning modern tails about an older pop
cultural idea than anything like. So, yeah, if the Ninja
had access to James Bond spy gadgets, they use those
James Bond spy gadgets like they are like any espionage
(33:04):
operative out there. They'll make use of the best tools
available to pull off the deed.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
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.
(33:40):
This is something 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 commers. The samurai are depicted as loyal
(34:02):
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
(34:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
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 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.
(35:01):
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
(35:24):
sort of again political, military, or social problem that they
couldn't otherwise approach, and it was not something that you
would have talked about in polite society. Like the shanobi
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
(35:47):
to retain plausible deniability over whatever was about to happen.
In general, we may get into some you know, some
examples to the contrary, but in general, like this was
this was the dirty tricks department.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
But yes, to come back to your point, despite the
later profusion of valorizing tales, you know, often at the
time 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.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
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 add a quick note. I mentioned men
and women, and on the subject of a female ninja,
they did apparently exist, though the reality was likely nowhere
(36:37):
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
(37:01):
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
a particular note, as transient Mico holy women. So these
would have been the modern version is they tend to
(37:23):
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 for any female ninjas,
female spies that would have been utilized. It would have
been an ideal cover. And these were sometimes referred to
(37:45):
as the kno 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
(38:06):
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 but 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, uh, doing the taboo thing in order
(38:29):
to achieve your military political goals. And so in that case,
you know, all cards are on the table there.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Rob So you found something about like the earliest references
to ninjas in their all black costume.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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 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
(39:06):
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,
(39:29):
Katsushi Kuhokusai, 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 Kandagatwa. This artist
lives seventeen sixty through eighteen forty nine.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
And so what do we see in his woodblock featuring
a ninja.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
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.
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
(40:11):
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 has been pointed
out that, you know, it would be ridiculous to say,
(40:32):
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 akuroko, which is someone that is dressed all in black,
(40:56):
essentially a stage hand that is 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
(41:18):
and don't distract from the central performance.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, when I've done theater, you know people working backstage
were dressed in all black, and I guess the idea
is you're just less likely to be seen that way.
But yeah, Turnbull 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
(41:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Yeah, so what we're looking here, it's 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
(42:19):
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 we're not meant to know about.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
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 would 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,
(43:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
So yeah, in general, when we think about what would
a ninja look like, what would a Shanoby 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 anyway, so I
(43:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
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 an exciting thing possible. So you want the
spy hero to be like to stand out, to be
notable and exciting in every way. And then reality, if
(44:08):
you were doing spy work, you would want to be
the least exciting, least notable looking person on earth. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
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
(44:36):
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 Shanobi. And then these various groups
(45:01):
that are described as Shanobi 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 Shnobi operatives were
generally common born dirty tricks specialists who were you know,
(45:25):
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 and and the ninja are going
(45:45):
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 died under the radar, and Yoda and
Auld actually signed an individual by the name of Musque Hatsumi,
(46:08):
the last living descendant of the Tokokushi 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
(46:29):
picture about assassins. But in that movie, which again is
very much work of fiction that's not to be taken
a reality, it's in a 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
(46:50):
almost like a ghost there. 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 maybe 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
(47:11):
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, you know,
coming back to the idea of shanobi as an adjective
(47:32):
as well. And it was only later, during the comparable
peace 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.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
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
(48:17):
maybe some of the science of their tools and tricks.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
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 interwoven
idea of the ninja comes to fruition and so forth.
(48:43):
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 ury. 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
(49:04):
like a very fun manga look to everything. Uh. But
but these are very informative, very well cited texts.
Speaker 1 (49:12):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (49:12):
I highly recommend them. They're a lot of fun. That
the Yokai book I read with my son, We really
got into that one. H 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.
(49:35):
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?
Speaker 2 (49:42):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
We we we want to know. We're very interested in this.
In the global legend of the Ninja.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
Did anybody out there ever beat Ninja Gaiden? Oh?
Speaker 3 (49:52):
Man, I don't think. I don't think I played that one.
But that is another huge Ninja video game franchise.
Speaker 1 (49:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
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 mean and Ninja Turtle game
for like Anys that it was only later that people realize, oh,
you couldn't actually make some pivotal jump that always nobody
could actually beat it.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
I don't know. We've talked about this before. Yeah, I
remember that, but I don't know about Ninja Guide, and
I just remember it being hard.
Speaker 3 (50:31):
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 be able to beat this and move
on from it. This is not a lifelong struggle I'm
signing up for.
Speaker 1 (50:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (50:56):
Like, yeah, I want to feel like a competent ninja
in this video game, not an incompetent I didn't sign
up for a bunch of ninja fails.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah, well there were a lot of those in that anyway. Okay,
so I guess we're wrapping up for today, but we'll
see you next time. A 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.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
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.
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