Ninja and Ninjutsu (1): Who Were the Shinobi?
Updated: 4 hours ago
The series at a glance
In 2020 I published a series here on the ninja and Ninjutsu. Since then new research has been published, mainly from the International Ninja Research Center at Mie University in Japan, and some of what I wrote then needs correcting. This is the updated version, in five parts. In the first part I ask a simple question: who were the people we call ninja today, and what did they really do?
"Ninja" is a modern word
The word ninja hardly appears in the historical sources. They were called shinobi (忍び), or shinobi no mono, "those who act in secret". Different regions also used other names, such as rappa, suppa and kusa. According to Prof. Yamada Yuji of Mie University, the name "ninja" (忍者) became common in literature only at the end of the 1950s.
I wrote about the character 忍 itself, which also means patience and endurance, in the article The Essence of Ninjutsu According to the Bujinkan (in Hebrew).
What the shinobi did
The earliest record is from the 14th century. The Taiheiki, a chronicle of the wars of that period, describes a shinobi in the service of the Ashikaga setting fire to the Iwashimizu Hachiman shrine near Kyoto. According to Yamada, the shinobi were active from the Nanbokucho period (1336–1392) to the end of the Edo period (1868), and their main role was intelligence. In the period of internal wars (Sengoku), local lords hired them to gather information behind enemy lines, infiltrate camps, set fires, raid at night and lay ambushes. But the most important mission of all was to come back with the information. So they avoided combat whenever they could.
The shinobi were not a single class. Among them were low-ranking samurai, farmers with some samurai privileges and ordinary farmers. In the peaceful Edo period their role changed: they guarded gates, secured areas and escorted lords. According to Yamada, their last major military action was in the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638).
Iga and Koga
Two regions are linked to the shinobi more than any others: Iga, in today's Mie Prefecture, and Koga (Koka), in Shiga Prefecture. Yamada explains their status by several factors: mountainous terrain, proximity to Kyoto, a tradition of Shugendo (mountain asceticism) and marriage ties between the two regions. Both were governed by independent local leagues (ikki), which hired out their fighters to neighboring provinces. Yamada estimates that the first shinobi there were farmers defending their independence.
That independence ended in the Tensho Iga War. In 1579 Oda Nobukatsu, son of Oda Nobunaga, invaded Iga and was defeated. According to the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum, the defenders knew about the attack in advance and made use of the terrain. In 1581 Nobunaga himself invaded with nearly 50,000 fighters against a few thousand defenders, and within about a month he destroyed the resistance. Many of the details are known from later chronicles, among them the Iranki, so the numbers are estimates.
Not all researchers accept the special status of Iga and Koga. The historian Stephen Turnbull argues that covert warfare existed all over Japan, and that before 1581 only one reliable account of such warfare in Iga and Koga can be identified. In his view, the two regions claimed a special expertise, and this created an "invented tradition" whose influence is felt to this day.
Where the image came from
In the Edo period most people never met a shinobi. They knew the ninja from the theater, from books and from woodblock prints, and there he appeared mainly in two roles: a thief who sneaks in and steals a precious object, or a sorcerer who uses his powers to overthrow a ruler. That is also where the black outfit with the shuriken was born. According to Yamada, there is no reliable record of shinobi using shuriken, and they never wore clothes that identified them as shinobi. Someone whose job is to disappear does not wear a uniform. Sean Askew, a Bujinkan teacher who studied Japanese and history at Sophia University in Tokyo and researches the history of the Bujinkan traditions, points on the other hand to documents that, in his words, describe dark clothing for night raids. In other words, even if there was dark clothing for a particular mission, there was no "ninja uniform".
In the Edo period the literary ninja was usually a villain. In the Taisho period (1912–1926), the Tachikawa Bunko book series presented Sarutobi Sasuke as a positive hero, and in the 1960s a "ninja boom" broke out in Japan. I wrote about this boom, in which Hatsumi was also involved, in the article Ninpo and Ninjutsu: What Is the Difference? (in Hebrew). From there it is a short way to the Hollywood films of the 1980s and to computer games.
What remains
The historical shinobi was less magical than the movie ninja, and more interesting. He was a professional of information, adaptation and survival, not a super-warrior. In the next part I will try to answer a harder question: where did Ninjutsu come from, and what is the difference between what is known and what is told?
Sources
Itakura Kimie, interview with Prof. Yamada Yuji: Que sait-on réellement des ninjas?, Nippon.com, 2023.
Stephen Turnbull: The Ninja: An Invented Tradition?, Journal of Global Initiatives 9(1).
The Tensho Iga War: Iga-ryu Ninja Museum, Tensho Iga-no-ran.
Tokyo Weekender, on Yamada's research: The Real History of Ninjas.
International Ninja Research Center, Mie University: International Ninja Research Center.
Sean Askew, Facebook post on shinobi clothing, December 4, 2020.
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