10 AMAZING Facts About NINJAS
10.
Kunoichi
Since women weren’t allowed to serve as samurai, if a woman in feudal Japan wanted
to provide military service to her clan, serving as a ninja was a much better bet.
This was particularly true as women were much more likely to be invited into castles and
fortresses than unfamiliar men.
To make it even more uncomfortable for potential assassination targets, it was their usual
practice to wait a bit before the hit.
They tended to receive all the same training that their male counterparts did and actually
had a slightly wider array of weapons.
Female ninjas often used blades concealed inside fans or a particularly unnerving weapon
called the “cat’s claw.”
It was a small poison-tipped blade (less than three inches long) attached to a leather ring
worn on a finger.
9.
Actually Chinese
Although there is inevitably murkiness to the activities and origins of ninjitsu, it
appears that it does not come from the country so many of us associate with it.
All the core principles that we associate with them were written in China almost a millennium
before there is any evidence that ninjas were being used in Japan.
Sun Tzu includes information on the five types of spies in his seminal classic The Art of
War in the fifth century BC.
As it happens, his thoughts on the matter were much harsher than Japanese ninja doctrine,
recommending that anyone who just knew all the active ninja agents for a clan should
be put to death, whether or not there was evidence that the person intended to provide
the information to the enemy.
The most important event as far as spreading the practice to Japan was the collapse of
the Tang Dynasty in the tenth century, which caused many military experts and scholars
to flee China for the relatively peaceful island nation.
8.
Magician Ninja
Many ninjas would disguise themselves as street performers as part of their covert operations.
The legend of 16th century shinobi Kato Danzo has him seemingly going about it the opposite
way.
He began as a street magician performing an act where he would appear to swallow an ox.
One time someone called him on how he did it, and Danzo responded by one upping the
previous trick, doing one where he made flowers seem to bloom instantly from scattered seeds.
This was enough to get him an audience with the Kenshin clan, although you’d think such
a public figure would not a very good spy or assassin.
He was given a test to steal a very well-protected and treasured sword.
He got through an array of guards and swiped his objective but made the mistake of taking
a maid with him, which led to him not getting the job.
He then made his final mistake by then trying to get a job with the rival province of Zia.
There, he was suspected of being a double agent.
After Danzo attempted a burglary to make up for it, he was put to death.
7.
Dressed & Armed for Concealment
Despite how often you see it in fiction, ninjas didn’t have special black ninja uniforms
that concealed their faces or anything of the kind.
Part of the whole point of being a secret agent is to be as subtle, or frankly boring,
as possible to avoid attention, so a highly stylized costume is the last thing you want.
They much more reasonably dressed like farmers.
Also, rather than employing flashy, suspicious swords, they tended to use sickles because
that was something a farmer was likely to have.
6.
Ninja Were Not Dishonorable Compared to Samurai
There’s a notion that because samurai were supposed to be so honorable with their Bushido
Code and all that, ninjas were basically the ones that had to do the dirty fighting so
the esteemed samurai could keep their hands clean.
Combat doctrine for the two groups was the same.
It was more that ninjas needed to maintain a low profile while samurai were the public
face of war.
While, naturally, that meant there were slightly fewer chances for advancement when it came
to reaching the very highest class of society, since they had to keep at least some of their
operations secret, it did not mean that ninja were considered secondary, inherently disgraceful
soldiers.
5.
Security Systems
With trained assassins being a fact of life in times of war, the powerful people that
were bound to be targets weren’t just going to hire extra guards and leave it at that.
Traps were installed that went far beyond mere trip wires.
Holes were installed in walls to allow guards to monitor areas faster.
Secret weapon compartments were hidden for emergency defense.
Even inside floors were rigged to be extra susceptible to squeaking from the softest
footfall.
The very design of castles was made more complicated and difficult to traverse in hopes of confusing
or at least slowing down potential assassins.
4.
Scaffolding, Ferris Wheels, and Gliders
The times that ninjas got to use more elaborate equipment was during sieges on castles and
fortresses.
You’d imagine that if a ninja needed to scale a wall on a castle at night, he or she
would probably rely on a rope and grappling hook.
Some opted for much more elaborate setups because they had to bring up groups of ninjas
at once.
During one siege, ninjas at night silently assembled improvised scaffolding.
Other times a device called a yagurawas brought out which basically functioned like a crude
ferris wheel that bring up ninjas so quickly that it was described as a “stream.”
When they got up on the wall, many used effectively a crude cloth parachute to drop down, a device
which they called a “human eagle.”
Building on these advancements in gliding, ninjas operating at night would use kite-like
devices called yami doko to drop grenades over walls.
3.
Ninja Purge
In the late 1500s two Japanese lords, Hideyoshi Toyotomi and Oda Nobunaga, began to try and
kill off all ninjas in Japan.
It was part of a campaign to fully unify the country, as ninjas were likely a voice of
dissent as they weren’t as loyal to any specific regime as the samurai were.
It wasn’t just the ninjas; Buddhists, Christians, and European immigrants were also targeted.
The culmination of this was a mass slaughter in the town of Iga in 1581, but the conflict
went on for decades, including incidents like Ishikawa Goemon being boiled alive for a failed
attempt on Toyotomi and two attempts to shoot Nobunaga, which involved three ninjas missing
him but killing seven people standing near him.
Although they hardly killed off all the ninjas, they definitely were severely weakened as
a military force and never really recovered.
2.
First Recorded Japanese Ninja was a Thirteen Year-Old
The first person that Japanese records name as being a ninja wasn’t a government or
military agent in any way.
He certainly wasn’t motivated by philosophy or anything of the kind.
He was a child named Hino Kumawaka, and he was motivated to assassinate his target for
utterly personal reasons.
In 1330 his father had been exiled to the horrible island of Sado and sentenced to death.
Kumawaka pleaded with the local governor to see his father, but was told he could not.
As soon as his father was killed, Hino vowed to kill the governor and his son and then
commit suicide.
He couldn’t get near the target with how well the governor lit his room, so Kumawaka
was said to have let moths into the room to douse the governor’s light.
When it came time to commit suicide after he’d fled the scene of the murder, he decided
it was better “to live a useful life than die a useless death.”
He sneaked away while still being hotly pursued and got in contact with a monk, fully confessing
his crime.
The monk helped smuggle him away from fifty pursuers and from there he joined a ninja
group in service to the emperor.
1.
Castle Sack
The finest hour for ninjas in medieval Japan took place in 1562.
Tokugawa Ieyasu had needed to capture Castle Kaminojo, where members of his family were
being held hostage.
After besieging the castle for two and a half months, the commanding officer changed his
approach and ordered a team of eighty ninjas to sneak in using hooked spears and capture
the castle under cover of night.
For extra effectiveness, they were dressed in enemy uniforms to cause confusion and give
the impression the troops inside were betraying each other.
They distinguished themselves by shouting passwords at each other during the sacking.
During the attack, they further created confusion by setting fires around the castle.
In the end, the garrison of two hundred soldiers was completely destroyed and the hostages
were recovered.