Ninja (22 page)

In K
o
ka's ninja museum, Hukui Minogu displays two throwing stars
(shuriken)
.

J
AMES
B
OND, THE
S
PY
W
HO
B
ROUGHT THE
N
INJAS
W
EST

Some call James Bond a Western ninja: a secret agent, loyal to a fault, adept with specialist weaponry, master of unarmed combat, the ultimate survivor. So it's fitting that Bond (or rather his on-screen persona, Sean Connery) gave ninjas their first big—if inaccurate—PR boost in Europe and the US, in
You Only Live Twice
(1967).

(
You Only Live Twice
film stills courtesy of www.007magazine.com © 1967 Danjaq LLC and United Artists Corporation. All rights reserved.)

As these on-set shots show, the film's “ninjas” were martial art extras. They were armed with swords and staffs
(above),
wore protective clothing
(above),
and in the climax—the invasion of the villain's mountain lair—operated as a team of commandos
(below)
ready to die rather than individuals dedicated to survival.

11

NOBUNAGA'S END, IEYASU'S RISE

If lightning is behind you, it is auspicious; if it is ahead of you, be careful.

Ninja instructional poem

NOBUNAGA
WAS
GOING
FROM
STRENGTH
TO
STRENGTH
.
IN
April 1582, with imperial backing, he mounted a great victory cavalcade in Kyoto: 130,000 men in full dress marching and riding past an imperial grandstand for hours, with Nobunaga taking care to “show off and enhance his status” in mid-parade—as the Jesuit priest Luís Fróis wrote—by getting off his horse and climbing into a crimson velvet sedan ornamented with gold, a gift from the Jesuits. “Never had there been an event where all were such excellent horsemen and were dressed so splendidly,” wrote a Japanese eyewitness. “The crowd of onlookers, whether high or low, would remember in what glorious times they had been born for the rest of their lives.” The emperor was delighted. A month later he decided to offer Nobunaga the position of shogun. But Nobunaga was focusing on yet another campaign in western Honsh
u
. The shogunate could wait.

At this moment, one of his generals, Akechi Mitsuhide, made the decision to turn on his master. No one knows why for certain, though there is a story about Nobunaga abusing Akechi over some meat and fish that, he said, had gone bad. Or perhaps Akechi was simply ambitious for power. Whether he was acting out of revenge or ambition, now was the moment, because Nobunaga had dealt with most of the opposition. On June 19, Nobunaga lodged in the Honn
o
-ji, a temple in Kyoto, on his way westward. Akechi, staying in a nearby castle, led his thirteen thousand troops to the Honn
o
-ji, ostensibly, he said, to be inspected by Nobunaga before joining him on campaign. Only his close accomplices knew the real purpose.

In the Honn
o
-ji, troops armed with arquebuses surrounded Nobunaga's quarters. The opening rounds told him all was lost. “Treason!” he shouted. “Who is the traitor?” His aide told him. Nobunaga grabbed a bow, then a spear, and fought his attackers, until, with the building burning around him and wounded in an arm by an arquebus ball, he retreated into a back room and committed suicide, making sure his body would be consumed by fire.

There followed eleven days of chaos—Nobunaga's heir, Nobutada, also dead by
seppuku
, his third son deserted by his troops, a cousin killed as a suspected traitor—until Nobunaga's senior ally, Hideyoshi, defeated Akechi, took his head, and presented it in the burned-out ruins of the Honn
o
-ji. He confirmed his status by staging a grand funeral for his lord, and then crushed opposition from within Nobunaga's family. By mid-1584, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Japan's future unifier, was master of central Japan, and in an uneasy truce with his main rival, Ieyasu, who would seize the nation for his own dynasty and secure its enduring unity.

But how come Ieyasu, Nobunaga's other staunch ally, had escaped? He had been in Sakai, just south of
O
saka and only some 45 kilometers from Kyoto, at the time of Nobunaga's murder. A messenger arrived with the dire news. Appalled, Ieyasu said his duty was to avenge his lord, but with such a small force that was impossible. The only other course was an honorable suicide in Kyoto. He was under way with several advisers when one of them suggested that Ieyasu would serve his dead master better by returning to his base in Mikawa (today's Aichi Prefecture), 150 kilometers to the east, and there raise a force with which to avenge the shogun's murder. But how to get home across Iga without being intercepted by Akechi's men or set upon by bandits or murdered by ninjas eager to avenge their defeat? A retainer named Hasegawa said he would get him through, because he had been a guide to Oda Nobunaga in the Iga Revolt. They set out (in the vivid if unsourced words of A. L. Sadler, Ieyasu's biographer), with one guard “brandishing his halberd ‘Dragon-fly Cutter' in the faces of the rustics with a view to eliciting reliable information about the route,” and another “distributing money with the same purpose.” After 40 kilometers, at the Kizu River, there was no ferry, but they commandeered two brushwood boats, which one of the guards sank after crossing the river by punching holes in them with his halberd. On then for 25 kilometers of “mountain roads and precipices . . . infested by mountain bandits” to Shigaraki, the small town famed for being briefly the capital back in the eighth century, and later for its pottery. This brought them to the borders of K
o
ga and Iga, where one of Iga's top men, Hattori Hanz
o
, heard of their predicament and came to help.

Hattori, second in a line of famous samurai, had made his name as a warrior in his mid-teens and helped Oda Nobunaga to victory in the hard-fought battle of Anegawa in 1570, acquiring the nickname “Devil Hanz
o
.” Then, as a resident of Iga, he had found himself fighting against his onetime lord in the Iga Revolt. He was one of those who, after Iga's defeat, had fled over the Forty-Eight Waterfalls, taken refuge in Ieyasu's territory, and been well treated, an act of generosity that turned out well for everyone. Possibly by this time Devil Hanz
o
was back at his home just west of Iga, which, given his fame, I thought would be a prime tourist site. So I took a taxi with Noriko and went in search of it.

There was nothing prime about it. A few kilometers outside Iga, a winding lane and a narrow alleyway led past a huddle of houses to a flight of cement stairs. At the top, steps roughly cut into the slippery earth gave onto a glade about fifty meters across. A sign said that here were the remains of Hattori's castle, Chigachi. But there were no remains. Other castle mounds are contoured with walls and ditches and entrances. This was entirely flat. Perhaps it had been a house, not a castle. A scattering of bushes made it a pretty spot for a picnic, except that no one had been there for months and spiders had taken possession. Noriko did not like the webs, but she was no arachnophobe. “This spider,” she said, peering at a yellow-legged beauty, “is
jorigama
, a prostitute spider, so-called because she eats the male as well as the flies.” Several engraved stelae, standing about like tombstones, commemorated the significance of the place:
THIS
IS
THE
BIRTHPLACE
OF
HATTORI
HANZ
O
, claimed one,
BUT
HE
LEFT
HERE
WHEN
HE
WAS
18
TO
WORK
FOR
TOKUGAWA
IEYASU
. Another prayed for peace for the souls of those who died in the Iga Revolt.

It was strange. Trees had been cleared, the memorials set up, yet who ever came here to disturb the spiders? The taxi was waiting, but the question was worth a few minutes more. Back down below, we braved a barking dog and exchanged bows with its owner, and of course cards. Tsukii Katsuya, a lean, sharp-featured fifty-something with laughing eyes, was a potter, and a master of his craft, specializing in the local ware. Inside, beside his kiln, he showed me a rectangular vase to explain the subtleties of Iga-style pottery: the deliberately coarse texture, the way the black merged into charcoal and then a soft yellow, a technique that he called “rained on.” I remembered something I had been told a few days before: The great English potter Bernard Leach came to Iga once. He loved the ware for its colors, its roughness, its simplicity. Apparently there were examples in his studio in St. Ives. I had never been. I promised myself I would go, if and when I was better prepared. There was a chance here to be inducted into the mysteries of great art—perhaps, who knew, to acquire a . . .

No. This was foolishness. I didn't have the time to go off on such tangents. I explained my interest in Hattori Hanz
o
. Were there many visitors here, Japanese, locals perhaps, keen to reconnect with their history? “Maybe one or two a week. Of whom,” he added, “twenty percent are foreign.” How did he know? Did he talk to them all? And what did this statistic mean? But the taxi was waiting, and we were out of time.

If Hattori was at Chigachi as Ieyasu approached Iga, he would have been only some fourteen kilometers from Ieyasu's party, a day's ride north over the hilltop where Iga and K
o
ga families used to meet to sort out their problems. Now, under Hattori's direction, two hundred to three hundred men from Tsuge, a village on Iga's northern border, and another hundred from K
o
ga came to Ieyasu's aid.

Which route to take? This was going to be tricky. There was, of course, a well-established road, of sorts, leading eastward—the T
o
kaid
o
. But it was crowded with people from far and wide, some of whom would surely be on the lookout for Nobunaga's successor, while others would be quick to oppose Hattori and take revenge on an ally of Nobunaga who had been with him during the conquest of Iga.

The answer, probably, was to head for the hills, back the way Hattori had (perhaps) just come. The route is still there today. Shigaraki, with its arrays of ceramic figures crowding the front of shops, drops away behind you. The road winds up through forested hills. Back then, of course, it would have been nothing but a one-horse track, leveling out at the top with a view through the trees down to the flatlands of Iga. Today, it is no more than a pretty little road leading past an upmarket country club, but it has a claim to historical significance because it was on this crest, Otoge, that the leading families of both sides, twelve from Iga and ten from K
o
ga, used to meet. Besides, of the half dozen roads between the two, this is the smallest and most tortuous. Local officials are in no doubt, as a newish wooden post proclaims: “
TOKUGAWA
IEYASU
CAME
THIS
WAY
TO
IGA
.”