Ninja (32 page)

Instant cutaway to several dozen iron-hard men in judo gear punching, wrestling, and hacking away at one another with staves. This top-secret operation is conducted in full public view, in brilliant sunshine, to a chorus of ferocious yells. Bond is a little slow, which gives Tanaka a chance to define ninjas, over a cacophony of grunts and screams.

BOND

Ninjas?

TANAKA

The art of concealment and surprise, Bond-san.

Perhaps Bond—or Dahl—is being ironic, for there is nothing ninja-like about these very unconcealed fighters. They are martial art experts and, as their assault on Blofeld's space center shows, commandos, expert in mass assaults, rappeling, and modern weaponry. Also, like samurai, they are quite prepared to die. They are the very opposite of shadow warriors. Real ninjas, operating in small numbers at night, don't make for huge, expensive, rip-roaring set pieces.

No matter. It was the film more than the book that popularized the term
ninja
in the West.

The film also gave Hatsumi a terrific leg up into the role he has played ever since as the latest, greatest exponent of his branch of
ninjutsu
, Togakure. In his hands,
ninjutsu
became a martial art with an impressive pedigree. He established Togakure as a
ryu
, a school, of which he is the thirty-fourth head. He is the founder of an international martial arts organization, the Bujinkan, and the author of many books. He says he inherited his title of
soke
, or head of his
ryu
, from Takamatsu, behind whom—writes Hatsumi—“eight centuries of history and tradition stretch all the way back to the founder of our system, Daisuke Nishina of Togakure Village” in Nagano Prefecture. Hatsumi backs these impressive claims by listing the thirty-three preceding Togakure heads and by referring to “ancient ninjutsu documents that I inherited from my teacher,” one of which supposedly lists the eighteen “levels of training” of ancient
ninjutsu.

All this and more is repeated as fact on many websites and in many books. And for all of it the only source is Hatsumi himself. No one else has confirmed the existence, let alone the contents, of the “ancient scrolls.” The result is that a few skeptics began to wonder about Hatsumi's authenticity. As one ninja expert told me, “Nobody ever said there was a ninja martial art until Takamatsu came along. He taught it to Hatsumi. I think he made it up.” Skepticism even has spread to Wikipedia, which flashes up warnings: “factual accuracy is disputed,” “needs additional citations,” “has multiple issues,” “needs attention from an expert.”

This controversy is a minefield. The
ninjutsu
community seethes with claim and counterclaim on the subject of authenticity. The reason for these high passions lies in the way skills and authority are passed down the generations, from master to pupil, in direct line of succession, rather as authority is passed in Islamic tradition, or the authenticity of a Shugend
o
mountain established by tracing its traditions back to the revered priest who “opened” it. Coming to Hatsumi as a pupil, an outsider like me would be impressed by his actual teaching: Does he teach the skills he claims to? But for martial artists, authenticity lies more in the lineage. Tracing it back a couple of generations is not good enough; eight hundred years carries conviction. But if it's a made-up tradition, there are those who will feel betrayed, as if, in the words of my rather-not-be-named expert, “they have been rolling around on the floor for the last twenty years for nothing.”

Though Bond did his bit to popularize ninjas in the West, in Japan, ninja lovers had no need of him. There, a boom was already under way in film, TV, books, and the graphic novels known as manga, with effects that show little sign of fading. This was fertile ground, because there had been a mini boom in ninja fiction earlier in the century, in the form of the fictional Sarutobi Sasuke, boy hero of children's literature between 1911 and 1925, resurrected in 1950s manga.

Another boost came in 1958, when the novelist Yamada F
u
taro published a tale with pseudo-historical roots:
K
o
ga Ninp
o
ch
o
(
The Kouga Ninja Scrolls
—
K
o
ga
becomes
Kouga
because in some transliterations all macrons are represented with a
u
). The context is the unification of Japan in the early seventeenth century, the geographical setting Iga and K
o
ga. That's pretty much it as far as history is concerned. K
o
ga and Iga, far from being allies, have been at each other's throats for four hundred years. But at present they are held apart by a truce arranged by Hattori Hanz
o
. Yamada's ninjas, cut off for centuries in their mountain fastness, have interbred and evolved into magical beings, monsters or beauties who can fly, shape-shift, and deploy outlandish fighting skills. One can spurt blood from every pore, another is a slug-like creature without limbs, a third has a body like jelly that can absorb sword blows and squeeze through the narrowest spaces.

Here's a sense of the fairy-tale quality of the stories, taken from the beginning of the first and most successful book. Two ninjas, one from K
o
ga and one from Iga, are fighting five warriors each, before turning on each other. Shougen, the K
o
ga ninja, is a hideous creature with bumpy forehead, hollow cheeks, long gray limbs bloated at their ends, a humpback, and red dots for eyes. He climbs a wall, backward, with one hand and two feet, the other hand still wielding his sword. He spits a glob of thick, sticky mucus, which blinds his five opponents. Meanwhile, the Iga ninja, Yashamaru, is a beautiful youth, with cheeks the color of cherry blossoms and shining black eyes.

He drew out a black ropelike object. This “rope” had immense power. It was incredibly thin, yet had the strength of steel wire. Even a direct chop from a sword could not cut it. During the day, it shone with dazzling brilliance. But once the sun went down, it became completely invisible. . . .

The rope had been forged through a special technique: Black strands of women's hair had been tied together and sealed with animal oil. A mere touch of the rope upon human flesh had the same effect as a blow from an iron whip. As the rope coiled around the thighs and bodies of the defeated soldiers, their skin burst open as if sharp swords were slicing them. Several dozen feet long, the rope moved like a living creature—spinning, twisting, striking, encircling, and amputating the limbs of its enemies.

The book's plot centers on the question of who will succeed Japan's unifier, Ieyasu, now seventy-three. Which of two grandsons should he choose? A monk provides the answer. Ieyasu should decree an end to the truce. Let ten ninja warriors from each side fight one another, until one side is exterminated. The clan of the survivors will decide on the succession, with the added advantage that the top ninjas will have exterminated one another. Two scrolls—the scrolls of the book's title—record the names of the warriors. Meanwhile, in K
o
ga and Iga, two young people have fallen in love. They are Gennosuke from K
o
ga—a graceful, intelligent boy with long eyelashes—and Oboro of Iga, whose beauty shines through her veil. This is the story of two houses, both alike in dignity, and of star-crossed lovers. Can romance heal a four-hundred-year rift? Or are they doomed? Doomed, as it happens: All twenty die, the lovers being the last to go.

The story, with its magical elements, burrowed into Japanese culture. Yamada wrote another twenty-three ninja novels over the next decade, many of them being turned into films. A five-volume manga adaptation of the first book is available in English. In 2005, almost fifty years after it was first published, the story became a feature film,
Shinobi: Heart Under Blade
(the subtitle recalling the hidden meaning of the kanji sign), all gorgeous landscapes, beautiful people—though with five warriors per side rather than ten to make things simpler—and much magical fighting.

Other ninja novels, manga, films, TV series, and video games are too numerous to mention, with two exceptions.

No account of modern ninja literature can omit
Naruto
, the multivolume manga series by Masashi Kishimoto. This is pure fantasy, with no pretense of any historical roots, and phenomenally successful, easily the best-selling manga of all time, with almost 60 volumes—113 million copies—sold in Japan. The anime versions (220 episodes in Japanese, 209 in English) and video games and novels and card games and on and on and on have all had equivalent success.

Second, with even less connection with reality, is the brilliant, bizarre phenomenon of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The idea sprang as a parody of several different comics from two young artists, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. In the late 1980s, their rough, self-published seed grew overnight into a cultural and commercial beanstalk, with comics, TV series, films, toys, games, songs, and a parody of its own (
Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters
).

And a backstory:

Once upon a time in Japan, a handsome young ninja master named Yoshi, who had a pet rat called Splinter that copied his every ninja move, loved a beautiful girl named Tang Shin. He had an evil rival called Saki. Rather than risk a fight between the two rivals, Shin persuaded Yoshi to flee with her to America, plus rat. They settle in New York. But one day Shin and Yoshi are murdered by Saki, leaving the rat, now a ninja master, to fend for himself in the sewers. There Splinter finds four baby turtles in a puddle of radioactive slime. They are mutants. They grow, and speak. He names them after Italian artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo.

What is this all about? Teenagers certainly, especially New York teenagers, who are, as parents know, mutants, if not aliens, with a language of their own. But there are many other possibilities, principally assimilation versus non-assimilation.
³
The turtles are immigrants who modify their traditions to fit in with the American way. Rat and turtles bond, just as the poor and dispossessed on the Statue of Liberty are supposed to do. They love pizza, which they slice with ninja weapons. They have nicknames. They are streetwise, slang-talking, powerful individuals, yet bonded by their code into a Democratic Brotherhood. They like girls, in the form of their mother figure, April O'Neil (God forbid the turtles should fancy one another). They oppose the evil Shredder (Saki), who is a criminal non-assimilator in black kimono and preys on vulnerable child dropouts. In brief, they are archetypes, with echoes of the Four Musketeers, Robin Hood, and Peter Pan, but with something very reassuring to middle America and a little disturbing for the rest of us: They are separate, they cannot truly assimilate, they cannot reproduce, they cannot threaten the old white, dominant culture.

What it's not about is ninjas, except in terms of weapons and their dress, which keeps them together, yet apart from mainstream society.

Fantasy, it seems, is crucial for the survival of ninjas in today's world. It certainly was for the man who all this while had been surviving in the jungles of the Philippines, but for him it was fantasy of a totally different sort.

16

THE LAST OF THE NINJAS

If guiding and planning the way whilst moving position, the essential information you must bring are the mountains, the rivers, and the distance from the enemy.

Ninja instructional poem

ONODA
'
S
STORY
OF
SURVIVAL
IS
EXTRAORDINARY
ENOUGH
. Anyone able to live alone for thirty years, close to civilization but apart from it, deserves admiration. But in what follows perhaps the most extraordinary thing, not so much admirable as simply astonishing, is his motivation, his mind-set, his determination to cling to his mission, a commitment based on his unshakable belief that World War II was not over.

That belief derived from his training not just as a shadow warrior but as the product of a society in which loyalty had been the very stuff of life for centuries—loyalty to one's lord and to the semidivine emperor, loyalty so powerful that it suggests evolutionary or IT metaphors: “inbred,” “hardwired,” “part of the DNA.” “Programmed” is a better analogy. Onoda's loyalty was to his division commander. Once he was programmed with his mission, only his commander could deactivate him with new orders. For thirty years, no new orders arrived. Therefore everything that happened had to be interpreted in the light of the old ones. For those thirty years, Onoda's mind ran a program that treated all evidence contrary to his worldview as a virus to be rejected. Those who suffer from such programming are often too far removed from reality to be considered sane. But Onoda was perfectly sane, and his programming was not
totally
rigid. He recognized reality when he was finally able to see it clearly. Given the right “input,” his old worldview collapsed, freeing him to adopt a new one, pretty much in line with one that we call normality.

But where, we have to ask, did his loyalty come from? Whence this extraordinarily rigid belief that orders from a superior must be obeyed, absolutely? Of course, most armies train their fighting men to obey instantly, without question. But Onoda's training as a shadow warrior had specifically told him that orders could be questioned, that he had to remain flexible in his responses.

He was a living paradox. Programmed to be creative and show initiative, he deployed his creativity and initiative in proving to himself that the world was not as it seemed but as he wished it to be. For comparable examples of faith carried to extremes, you usually have to look to closed systems: churches, dictatorships, cults, lunatic asylums. But Onoda was and is unique: tough and dedicated, of course, but also as humane and moral as a fighting man can be. Today, at ninety, he works for his own children's charity.