Ninja (17 page)

In the sixteenth century, while the rest of Japan fought itself to exhaustion, the two neighbors, Iga and K
o
ga, shared similar social systems, family connections, and ways of cooperation. With their councils and contracts, they were remarkable little semi-democracies (sort of: As in ancient Athens, only the top men counted; women and servants didn't). They were also capable of operating outside their own borders, designating ten men from Iga and twelve from K
o
ga to meet up on the frontier to sort out the problems between them.

That's the positive view of the two provinces: peace-loving communities inching toward democracy. But there is reason to think that this was an uncertain process, because both communities were also riven by petty feuds. Iga's three hundred to five hundred little estates and the fifty-three families of K
o
ga squabbled endlessly, and it was in these internal struggles that both sides developed the skills that would make them famous.

Everyone, for instance, built for defense. You can see the results today in the ninja houses that are tourist attractions in both Iga and K
o
ga. We have seen Iga's with its museum, but of the two, K
o
ga's claims to be the more authentic.

K
o
ga's ninja house, which according to its PR material claims to be the “only genuine historical building of its kind,” is a fine old place of dark wood, thatch, and undulating gray tiles, full of shadowy corners and steep stairways and secretive nooks and cabinets of curiosities, all evoking the vanished world of the ninjas.

For visitors, first comes a sort of a stage show, in which Hukui Minogu, a gnome-like old man with flyaway hair and astonishing energy, explains the devices used by house owners to trick their way out of danger, some similar to Iga's, some unique. “Here is a steel door, sealing off a
kura
, a storage area, which has an iron ceiling so no one can cut their way in from above, with clay walls to keep it cool and make sure it cannot burn. Lots of houses had
kura.
When Tokyo was firebombed in the war, it was the
kura
that survived. Try this door. It's really heavy. You would think it was locked, wouldn't you? So would an attacker. He would just give up. But the family know that they can move it, if they really try. Go on,
push.
You see? This window—it's got a secret catch, which you can open by sliding a piece of paper or a leaf into the frame. You slam the window, like this, and the catch falls into place. Look at this doorway. You can escape through it, and inside there's a ladder leading up, but also a false floor, so the owner can vanish. If someone follows, they see nothing but the ladder, so he will climb. See this pit? It's got water in it now, because people stopped using the wells and the water table has risen, but down there is a tunnel that leads to next door. The wire net? Oh, that's not to catch visitors. It's there because a cat fell in there once.”

But there's something odd about this house, with its array of tricks and devices. I would never have known without the guidance of Toshinobu Watanabe, the lean, fit professorial type who was chairman of the K
o
ga Ninjutsu Study Group. There is something about ninja blood and ninja studies that keeps their ageing followers in terrific health and full of youthful enthusiasm. Toshinobu pointed out that the house dates from the Edo period, the late seventeenth century, after the heyday of the ninja. The owner of the house, Mochizuki Izumonkami, had another reason for building these defenses. His family had been in the area for centuries, and had become experts as medical practitioners. The eldest son of an eldest son, and the leader of K
o
ga's fifty-three top families, Mochizuki had inherited the business, and built the house as a place to make medicines, founding what would become the Omi Medical Company. In fact, until fifty years ago, the house was not called a ninja house at all; it was “the medical company's house.” Hence some of its major features: the
kura
, the roofless kitchen, which allowed the smoke to rise into the loft, where plants were hung for curing. All his information was top secret. In modern terms, he was nervous about industrial espionage and for that reason adapted old ninja devices for his own purposes. And, though surely no single ninja house had so many tricks, each of them was indeed authentic.

The ninja house in Iga is similar, if you remember—a revolving door and pits here, retractable ladders and hidden weapons there. But this house was an amalgam, built in the early nineteenth century and then rebuilt on its present site, on a wooded hill near the center of town, in the 1990s, with several of the secret devices being added even later. So, to the quiet satisfaction of today's K
o
ga Ninjutsu Study Group, the Iga designers came to K
o
ka to get ideas for their ninja house.

Both in their different ways lack authenticity. It doesn't really matter. The display cases and the houses themselves distill the reality of pre-1581 ninja life, which was mostly that of farmers anywhere. The peasants who learned to fight back against bandits in Akira Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai
were ninjas in the making.

But the ninjas were more than farmers who fought. Each was linked into his local community, and each community to its neighbor, making a network of self-defense forces determined to preserve themselves against one another, and then against a world of ambitious lords and marauding armies. What use were ninja skills and secret home defenses if your house was burned and your family captured, scattered, or killed? You needed somewhere to gather as a group for protection, where food and weapons could be assembled in safety. What you needed was a fort, or two, or three.

We're not talking castles, like the restored ones that stand today all over Japan, with bases of dressed stone and intricate wooden towers and tiled roofs. The local forts of Iga and K
o
ga were mostly banks of earth around yards, with an entrance, but nothing in the way of towers or stockades. Toshinobu Watanabe was my guide to this little-known subject, which reveals some intriguing details about the nature of ninja society. There are some five hundred valleys in K
o
ka, he said as we arrived at a reservoir flanked by a clump of trees. “In those days each valley had a village or two. We think there were two to three hundred samurai families, no one knows for sure, but we do know that there were fifty-three strong families. All these top families had at least one fort, and so did many of the other families. This is a typical one, under the trees over there.”

He led the way into the forest, and up a slope kept clear of undergrowth to allow access to archaeologists and local schoolchildren. There, like the body of a giant under a blanket, were the contoured limbs of something the shape of which was impossible to make out. Mounds, ridges, dips, and flat areas made a complex of storage places and passageways and walls, all sprouting trees and disguised by a blanket of fallen leaves. Toshinobu tried to make sense of it for me.

Murasame, as the fort was called, had been a natural mound, rising above a valley, where a stream had run, now all drowned by the reservoir. Then, up the slope, the mound had been reshaped, with courtyards a few meters across being excavated and the soil being thrown up to make walls—“only earth walls, no roof, not even any wooden defenses on top of the walls. This was a place for the
bushi
—the warriors—to gather in case of attack. The women and children would have run away to hide.” Here was an entrance, with a steep, curving approach; here a narrow passageway, like a large ditch—“we think this was where warriors could hide”—and here what might have been a storage area for weapons and food.

Then, as we walked northward along the outer wall, the one that rose out of the reservoir, the ground dropped to what could have been a moat, except that we were well above the valley floor. “No, this was a division between this fort and the next.” Two forts, right next door to each other? Yes, “and they were both used at the same time.” The second, Jizen, had probably been a secondary defense, so defenders could retreat from one to the other. This one was smaller, sixty meters across, with its own maze of entrance, courtyards, and enigmatic dips and bumps.

Later, from a high point over a motorway, the whole valley lay open. Toshinobu pointed to a clump of trees a kilometer away, then another. In fact, within this one small area there were no fewer than seven “castle mounds,” none of them more than a few hundred meters from its neighbor. The same pattern holds true for the whole of K
o
ga. Archaeologists have recorded 180 forts; and many more must have vanished, washed away, or been reclaimed by farmers.

“These places were not for long-term occupation,” said Toshinobu. “One or two had wells, some had a little pond for water, but on the whole, they seem to have been built to be used for only a few days.”

I wondered what this told us about K
o
ga's society. How many people were involved? How many ninjas per village? It matters, because on this basis it should be possible to calculate the numbers the province could muster to repel the great invasions that were to come in 1579–81. “It's very difficult to know. Before the unification of Japan in 1600, there was no clear ranking system separating samurai, farmers, craftsmen, and businessmen. A farmer was a part-time soldier, and in the evening he would become a craftsman, and sometimes he would travel to sell his produce.”

But wait. Surely you could do a time-and-motion study, based on the size of the forts, and the weight of the soil? What would it have taken to make forts like this? Not all that much. An archaeological plan records some 750 meters of walls. Say the average height was 3 meters, the average width 2 meters. That makes about 6,750 tons of earth. A man can shift 4.5 tons a day,
¹
working flat out. So these two forts could have been made in a month by 50 men, in two weeks with 100. I imagined farming communities of 500 or so cooperating to make and maintain two or three forts each, where the men, and perhaps their families, could take refuge in the event of an attack; which would come from no formidable army, but from small-scale forces of some warlord looking for easy pickings. I started to do sums: 300 villages, 500 people each, total population 150,000, of which, say, 100
bushi
per village: 30,000 warriors . . .

Well, perhaps. Toshinobu was skeptical. “What we do not know, and there is no way of knowing, is the proportion of
bushi
per village. All the men could have been part-time fighters, or they could have had a lot of servants. We are just now starting this sort of research.”

Farmers with growing skills as ninjas needed more than fighting talents. As important was the acquisition of information by traveling widely without being noticed. To do this the ninjas would join “the wandering world,” those who could travel without automatically raising the suspicion of officials. But to do so, the ninja had to fit in seamlessly as puppeteer, juggler, musician, storyteller, peddler—or, most commonly, as a pilgrim
yamabushi.
Nobody had a better reason to travel or was more sure of a good reception, because as a pilgrim, he was always on the move from temple to temple.

Just outside the Forty-Eight Waterfalls is a temple, the only one to be rebuilt of the eight that were burned when the ninjas were destroyed. It was in remarkably good shape: tilted eaves, intricately carved roof joists, and beamed walls standing on a wooden platform, with several small buildings and a little shrine from which En no Gy
o
ja the founder of Shugend
o
and thus the temple's founding father, glared out of the shadows, the whites of his eyes and teeth startling against remarkably black skin. A square arch with its upturned crosspiece married this Buddhist temple to its predecessor, Shintoism. The priest appeared, clothed not in an elegant loose robe but in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and shorts. He was in a hurry, couldn't speak for more than a minute or two, but then spoke for twenty, the gist of which was that all the eight temples were part of a Pilgrims' Way of eighty-eight temples, centers not only for pilgrims but for travelers, monks, entertainers, vagabonds, all the chaotic elements that made up medieval life, everyone bringing news and rumors from foreign parts, all therefore part of the wild elements that Oda Nobunaga was keen to control. That was why he hated the Tendai sect. That was why he burned all the temples. Which, as I was to discover later, was a somewhat simplified version of the truth. What better way for a ninja to discover what was happening in the wide world than by pretending to be or actually becoming a traveling
yamabushi
?

Or perhaps even a painter or a poet? Such men were free to travel where they wanted. They even say that one of Iga's most famous sons, the poet Bash
o
, was a ninja. Matsuo Bash
o
, as every Japanese child knows, was a master of the haiku, with its three-line, approximately 5-7-5-syllable structure, its subtle references to a season, and its enigmatic nature. (As Bash
o
put it: “Is there any good in saying everything?”) He was born in what is now Iga Ueno, where there is a museum devoted to him, but he was always wandering, making his way mysteriously without any obvious means of support. “Who was paying him to travel around on his on his own in the guise of a simple peasant?” Noriko wondered. “How come he had so many connections? How come he could stay in nice places? He would stare and stare, then always wrote about something really obscure. People were suspicious. They said he must be hiding something. Perhaps he was paid by some lord to report everything he saw. That was why he was so well off without ever earning any money. That's why they say he must have been a ninja.”