HAI!
It is pretty hard to take ninja seriously in Japanese film. They turn up in bad films with no respect for historicity; in good films as gremlins at the edge of the action. There seems to be a genre set inside outlaw communities with their own reverse morality, in which assassins are compelled by honour to butcher in defiance of heart and ethics.
Besides their value as a storytelling tradition, I know nothing about their potential historicity.
The last Carnival of Bad History has chipped away at the legend of the ninja, locating the stories inside the grand tradition of faked, pseudomystical and superhuman histories of martial arts.
I was charmed to discover how much of the tradition comes from theatre.
“Ninja shows, ninja houses (sort of like American “haunted houses” at carnivals), and ninja novels and stories were popular by the middle of the Tokugawa period. The “ninja” performers may have created the genre completely out of whole cloth, or they may have built on genuine lore derived from old spymasters. Either way, however, it’s clear that much of the lore underlying both modern ninja movies and modern ninja schools has both a long history AND little basis in reality outside the theatre. [emphasis added; quoted with permission]“
It seems that the llegendary ninja costume is actually taken from the bunraku puppeteers black=invisible dude pyjamas, which are very elegant.
Check the article for the origin of the quote above – it is too complicated to add yet another layer of attribution.
I imagine that the western parallel for ninja is really the gunslinger in the old West – a grain of truth, but elevated into a ritual, given a code and wrapped up in perverse notions of honour.
March 1st, 2006 at 11:31 pm
“I imagine that the western parallel for ninja is really the gunslinger in the old West – a grain of truth, but elevated into a ritual, given a code and wrapped up in perverse notions of honour.”
Or the knight-in-armour – same general idea, but a few centuries earlier. We have Malory to thank for that; and his admirers in the Romantic and Victorian era.
March 1st, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Interesting Tim – worth thinking about. I reckon there is a fair correspondence in mythology between the samurai and the European knights, but there is no counterpart for the liminal ambiguities of ninja, except maybe the feudal fool.
My impression is that the gunfighting tradition of the west has been hugely over-emphasised, but both the knights and the samurai were genuinely violent. Just more brutishly than they depicted themselves.
Or as the poets chose to see them.
March 1st, 2006 at 11:58 pm
A la Kurosawa’s Red beard and 7 samurai, crossovers between the tradional and the harlequin.
March 2nd, 2006 at 8:46 am
but there is no counterpart for the liminal ambiguities of ninja, except maybe the feudal fool.
The bushranger?
March 2nd, 2006 at 9:24 am
Are not we confusing samurai and ninja? What of the portrayal of ninja as secretive assassins. The gunslinger relates to the samurai not the ninja. Ninja are always anonymous and automatons. They die without complaint, any sound or identity.
Perhaps they are more like the Indian thuggee or the Ottoman janissary.
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:26 am
They were the original speacial forces.
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:39 am
That’s getting close. The bushranger thing is to do with the exiled outsider, I reckon, but it draws on the older Robin Hood myth, which has the virtue of embracing that concept of an oppositional morality.
But the ninja code is completely outside the society, sits in a place where the self-defined morality has no redeeming merit at all.
The special forces thing contains the notion of deniability, which is great.
March 2nd, 2006 at 4:35 pm
The special forces thing contains the notion of deniability, which is great.
John Winston Ninja ??
March 3rd, 2006 at 10:01 am
The Japanese equivalent of the gunslinger is not the ninja, it is the ronin, the itinerant, masterless warrior. This archetype is exemplified in Yojimbo by Kurosawa, which was remade, ironically, by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars (“Per un Pugno di Dollari”).
There is no real Western equivalent for the ninja (i.e. a secret society of professional assassin/spies), apart from, perhaps, the hashishin (i.e. “assassin”) Ismaili fanatics of Medieval Islam.
I understand your frustration on historicity, David, as there really are no historical records of their practices. It is believed, with some evidence, that the Tokugawa shoguns of the Edo period (1600-1867) monopolised the use of ninjas, but there is little documentation on how they operated or were organised. Their organisations were rendered obsolete by the Meiji restoration, the abolition of feudal armies and centralisation of state power in the late 19th century.
What is certain is that anything you see on screen, in Japan or the West is hopelessly over-romanticised rubbish. Don’t even get me started on the various charlatans purporting to teach “ninjutsu” (the body of technique/knowledge ascribed to the ninja) nowadays.
March 3rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm
Gotta see this too:
It is pretty Scary
Antarctic Ice Melting at Surprisingly Rapid Rate
March 5th, 2006 at 9:58 pm
I would argue that the equivalent to ninja in the Western tradition is the CIA… what we did before that, I don’t know, offhand.
Fyodor’s comment about Tokugawa “monopolization” of ninja doesn’t hold any more water than the rest of the “tradition” I’m afraid: it only works, as a trope, if you already believe in the existence of ninja as a class — instead of, as Karl Friday said, a function — but the evidence really doesn’t support it.
March 9th, 2006 at 7:20 am
[...] Via Barista and an interesting link on the theatrical origins of the ninja, I came to this great piece by Craig Colbeck on Karate and Modernity, a lot closer to my own interests than black-clad stage assassins. Although the jargon is a bit heavy going in places, there’s a pretty clear argument to show that the Okinawa karate tradition developed in the late C19 and was derived from China. [...]