Ninja (25 page)

“There's nowhere to sit or lie down,” I complained.

“You can sit or lie
anywhere
,” said Noriko.

But I couldn't. It seemed odd to lie on the floor, and it hurt to kneel or sit cross-legged. Compared with the kimono-clad lady of the house, who could drop to her knees and rise again with ease and elegance, I was a graceless lump, unworthy of the hotel's charm.

Besides that, though, the hotel had one overwhelming advantage. The owner, Tsuji Kunio, was a member of the local historical society, and among his many books he had a multivolume copy of the most famous of ninja books, often called its bible, the
Bansensh
u
kai.
The Japanese like four-part titles and phrases, such as the nineteenth-century political slogan
Son n
o
j
o
i
(Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians).
Ban Sen Sh
u
Kai
—though usually transcribed as one word—is one of them. It means “Ten thousand rivers merge (into) the sea,” which I take to be a metaphor meaning that “countless elements make a single philosophy” (i.e.,
ninjutsu
). So it was here, with the
Bansensh
u
kai
spread out on the table, that half a dozen local amateur historians met to tell me about the ninja response to redundancy. I was in awe; here, apparently, was a copy of the most impressive of ninja records. I was about to touch the very roots of my subject.

Why, though, would some ninja authors choose to reveal their secrets at all?

It was the elderly Toshinobu Watanabe, he who had taken me around to various ninja sites in K
o
ka, who explained. For the first twenty or thirty years after the Iga Revolt, the ninjas found gainful employment with the shogun as guards, and twice as spies and soldiers in the last great actions, in the siege of
O
saka and the Shimabara Rebellion. Then all was quiet. They were in the uncomfortable position of not being needed anymore—worse, actually, because they had fallen in status, and were ordinary farmers, much put upon by the tax man. Like the samurai, they were at best gradually turning from active to passive, from soldiers to bureaucrats, dependent (if they could claim samurai status) on stipends of rice to feed their families. Soon, perhaps, they would be out of a job altogether. They would age, and die, and because they had been so secretive, no one would remember them or their great deeds. They had to show what they were made of, the skills they had, and the importance of passing them on from generation to generation. Nor was it just the practitioners of
ninjutsu
: all specialists—in archery, sword fighting, firearms in all their different schools—felt the need to record details of their ways.

“In fact the
ninjutsu
experts came to this view quite late,” said Toshinobu. “Around 1670, specialists from Iga and K
o
ga got together and said, ‘My goodness, we had better do something about this, or we will disappear.' So that's how the
Bansensh
u
kai
came to be written, along with several other works on
ninjutsu.
”

To focus on the
Bansensh
u
kai
: This is a ten-book record of ninja ways, in some twenty to twenty-six chapters or “volumes,” depending on the edition. It was compiled by an ex-samurai called Fujibayashi Yasutake and completed in 1676. “He wrote it as a combination of the K
o
ga and Iga
ninjutsu
,” said Toshinobu, “because his house was on the border between the two.” It is, in effect, an encyclopedia of
ninjutsu
, a manual of covert operations that includes fighting techniques, weaponry, strategy, spying, astronomy (because the stars pointed the way at night), psychology, explosives, basic chemistry, and guidance for survival in warfare (see box for details).

Since working as a ninja involved having a “correct mind,” there is also much esoteric lore, some of it in Chinese (or rather
kanbun
—Chinese adapted for Japanese), with many quotes from Chinese sources, because so much of the theory—strategy, tactics, divination, the calendar—came from China, and because using Chinese conferred authority on the text. For example, the sections “Determining Direction and Location from the Stars” and “Divination” include much in Chinese about Chinese divination that was standard knowledge among Japanese generals—“They are not to be trusted,” says the
Bansensh
u
kai
, “but the knowledge of them is useful when conducting warfare against a general who believes in them.” Practical matters—burglary, infiltration, espionage, tools, explosives—are mostly in Japanese.

It's a puzzle. It looks like the proud product of the ninjas' heyday, when they were living secure, happy, and active lives. But if that were so, the secrets would never have been written down. The very existence of the
Bansensh
u
kai
suggests insecurity, unhappiness, and inactivity—an attempt to make sure that later generations would know their birthright, and be able to apply it if necessary.

In its original form, it was no literary masterpiece, as the edition in front of me proved. It was a photocopy of a hand copy of an original, which has been lost. Noriko had been wondering about the calligraphy. It seemed to her to be pretty substandard. She guessed this because her father is an eminent historian, Katsuhisa Moriya,
³
and as a child she was used to seeing good-quality calligraphy and printing of all ages around the house. Later, Professor Katsuhisa expressed his own opinion, in no uncertain terms. On the basis of this copy, the original must have been the work of an educated commoner, which was not saying much. “A samurai with an education in
kanbun
would never write rubbish like this!”

True, but a little harsh, because Fujibayashi was indeed a low-level samurai, who would not be expected to be a master of Kanbun. As Antony Cummins pointed out to me, “The fact that he could write
kanbun
at all is totally amazing.”

At some point, a century after it was written, when the former ninjas needed even more help, the
Bansensh
u
kai
was recopied in finer calligraphy to become a plea to the shogun for recognition, in effect an extended job application. The subtext of this later, improved edition was: Appreciate our skills! Employ us! Make sure our masters are able to pass on our secrets from generation to generation!

“That's the one that is in the National Archives today,”
⁴
said Toshinobu.

“Did it have an effect?”

“Not at all! Nothing changed!”

So much for the ninjas' hopes for employment. And what of my hopes of touching the roots of ninja culture? How accurate are the copies? How well did the long-gone original represent the realities of ninja life, given that it was written a century after the true ninja lifestyle came to an end? Extremely well, according to the K
o
ka historians and to the
Bansensh
u
kai
's translator, Antony Cummins. “An outstanding manual,” he told me. “One hundred percent correct. No doubts here.” And the proof? The
Bansensh
u
kai
and the
Shoninki
both record “the same set of skills and reflect each other.” That's what shows this to be “one of the all-time survival and guerrilla warfare manuals.” Which in turn implies that those who dismiss the
Bansensh
u
kai
as shoddy and unreliable are expressing deep-seated prejudices against ninjas, deriving from samurai traditions about the supreme value of calligraphy and scholarship and display and death-defying bravado.

By the time the
Bansensh
u
kai
was written, the ninjas were on their way into the realms of make-believe. Even the
Bansensh
u
kai
, with all its supposed authenticity, has its share of doubtful information. It prints a “ninja code” made up of mock-Chinese signs that makes no sense; it suggests that ninjas could transmit information by training a horse to walk in certain ways; it insists that a good ninja can live “off snow and hail,” it gives a recipe for pills to counteract thirst (pickled plums, crystallized sugar, and wheat).