Ninja by Stephen Turnbull

Author:Stephen Turnbull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Asia / General
ISBN: 9781473850439
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2017-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The Enduring Ninja

During the early twentieth century an alternative view of ninjutsu began to emerge alongside the undercover techniques of the military manuals and the magic of the Tachikawa Bunko novels. In complete contrast to the popular understanding of ninjutsu as having something to do with secrecy it took its inspiration from the primary dictionary definition of the character nin as endurance and produced an interpretation of ninjutsu related to personal development, much like the emphasis on character building that was being stressed by the founders of martial arts like judo and aikido. The trend also seems to have been related to a desire to subject the topic of ninjutsu to fashionable Western-style enlightened scientific enquiry. Many contemporary scholars of psychology and philosophy were impressed by the scientific approach of the West and attempted to follow the trend within their own disciplines. Ninjutsu was therefore placed under the microscope, although the works that emerged from this new approach were far from being scientific. Instead they brought about an entirely new way of writing about ninjutsu and its practitioners to add to the Tokugawa Period materials and laid further important foundations for the benchmark ninja of the post-war years.

Two names in particular dominate the ninjutsu literature of the early twentieth century. They are Itō Gingetsu 伊藤銀月 (1871–1944) and Fujita Seikō 藤田西湖 (1899–1966), and their important contributions to the ninja myth have much in common. Each begins his key work with regretful comments about how ninjutsu has been misunderstood and misinterpreted as techniques of secrecy. This is a major fault that the new book will put right, but never is this quite achieved. Instead, as will be demonstrated below, both authors would add their own set of errors and misconceptions to the existing corpus of misunderstanding that so annoyed them. That material would enter unchallenged into the received wisdom about ninjutsu and would be repeated endlessly in books about ninja published from the 1960s onwards.

Lying behind Itō and Fujita’s ideas is this obsessive concern about the true meaning of the character nin. As noted earlier, its primary dictionary definition is endurance, creating compounds that mean patience, perseverance and fortitude, such as the verb tae shinobu 耐え 忍ぶ (to endure). It is only the secondary meaning of nin as secrecy that produces the expression shinobi komu 忍び込む (to secretly enter), and unfortunately (as far as Itō and Fujita are concerned) it is this one that is commonly associated with shinobi and ninjutsu. The tension between the two interpretations lies at the heart of the dilemma facing these influential authors, although neither of them ever seems to make his mind up about which meaning was appropriate for a true understanding of ninjutsu. The situation is not helped by their fanciful extrapolations from the Tokugawa manuals and some imaginative additions to them, which were drawn from the plots of the kabuki theatre and, in one outrageous instance, even a twentieth-century novel. Some of these inventions are so blatant than one is tempted to see

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