Warriors of Medieval Japan

An extract from ‘Part 3 – Ninja’

Recruitment and training

Ninja recruitment

From the mid-15th century onwards, certain samurai families began to develop particular skills in intelligence gathering, undercover warfare and assassination. These were the ninja families. Like so many other martial-arts traditions in Japan, their skills and traditions were passed on from father to son, or more usually from sensei to chosen pupil, who may not always have been a relative. In a real sense, therefore, ninja were born, not made, and the expression ‘recruitment’ refers only to the negotiations made between daimyo and the ninja leader for the use of his men’s services.

However, when Tokugawa Ieyasu took the men of Iga and Koga under his personal wing in 1581, the source of supply dried up, and we begin to see other daimyo training and using their own home-grown ninja. Strangely enough, this was not officially forbidden, and in 1649, in the shogunate’s laws for military service, we read that only those daimyo with incomes of 10,000 koku and above were allowed to have shinobi in their armies.

The school of ninjutsu called the Nakagawa-ryu, which served the daimyo Tsugaru in Mutsu Province in the mid-17th century, provides a good example of the recruitment and training process. The founder of the school was a samurai called Nakagawa Shoshunjin, an expert in ninjutsu. The most fascinating account of his life is the Okufuji Monogatari, which says that ‘he could change into a rat or a spider, and transform himself into birds and animals’ – an early illustration of the magical powers traditionally attributed to ninja. In reality Shoshunjin had the command of a group of ten young samurai whom he trained to practise ninjutsu, and forbade anyone else from coming near the place where they exercised, which was at the southern corner of the castle and called Ishibayashi. Shoshunjin called the group the Hayamichi no mono (‘the short-cut people’) and its numbers soon increased to 20. Since the duties of the group members were to act as spies or secret agents, they were put into operation entirely on the word of the daimyo, and their training was kept strictly secret.

Ninja selection

There is a splendid story about Nakagawa Shoshunjin’s first visit to the Tsugaru mansion to be interviewed by Tsugaru Gemban, a karo (senior retainer) of the Tsugaru. Tsugaru Gemban challenged Shoshunjin to prove his ninja abilities by stealing the pillow from under his head while he lay sleeping. That night Gemban lay down on his futon, and as time passed he heard the pitter-patter of a passing shower beginning to fall outside the house. He carefully avoided letting his head move from the pillow, until he suddenly felt rain falling on to his face. He raised his eyes, and quickly noticed that the ceiling was leaking. In spite of himself his head moved off the pillow at an angle. When he lowered his head once again the pillow was missing, and as he turned his head in surprise he saw Shoshunjin standing beside him, grinning broadly, and with the pillow in his hands!

Unfortunately, the story is probably not authentic, as similar versions are told of ninja employed by other daimyo. For example, Mori Motonari’s general Sugiwara Harima no kami used a ninja, who, according to legend, was asked to steal a sword from his master’s bedside, and a certain Kato Dansai was asked to steal a naginata from beside the bed of Naoe Yamashiro no kami of the Uesugi family. Nevertheless, it illustrates the respect that the daimyo had for ninja skills, and the need to hire someone who could be trusted.

Ninja training

We may certainly envisage the ninja of Iga and Koga being trained for their future roles as soon as they could walk. The ninja leaders of the province were minor landowners and, in common with all daimyo of any size, great emphasis was laid on family connections and hereditary loyalty. Any boy born into a conventional samurai family would grow up expecting to be a warrior, and many hours of his childhood would be spent learning the martial arts. Skills with the famous samurai sword, the spear, bow and, later in ninja history, guns would be most important. A young samurai would also be expected to ride well and to swim.

For a young ninja, of course, the curriculum would be more extensive. He would also have to learn about such matters as explosives and the blending of poisons, and become an expert in fieldcraft and survival. This would include such ‘ninja lore’ as how to purify water and how to cook rice in camp by wrapping it in a wet cloth and burying it underneath a campfire.

He would have to be superbly physically fit to enable him to scale the walls of castles and become an expert in martial arts, including unarmed grappling techniques. We may therefore envisage the fledgling ninja being trained from an early age in all these skills. He would also have to know how to draw a map and would have a great advantage if he could read and write. If he was to adopt the disguises of other professions, he would need an in-depth knowledge of them to be convincing.

Belief and belonging

At a psychological level the young ninja would need to develop a detachment from death and the fear of dying that was even more complete than that customarily expected of ordinary samurai, who were presented with the ideal of serving their masters with unflinching zeal to the very end. ‘The way of the samurai,’ wrote a famous warrior, ‘is found in death,’ and how much more it was in the way of the ninja. There was also the chilling samurai tradition of ritual suicide, whereby, in situations of certain defeat, any disgrace could be wiped away by the act of hara kiri that released one’s spirit.

The ninja’s concept of his own fate was therefore a more intense version of the samurai worldview. The major difference in attitude that would be inculcated in the ninja, as distinct from the samurai, was the complete acceptance of the knife in the dark as a legitimate activity. This was contrary to so much of the samurai tradition that relied on stories of noble warriors who fought in an ideal and often idealized way. The accepted samurai code involved first of all being very visible, so that both friends and enemies recognized who it was that won the supreme distinction of being the first to go into battle or the first to scale a castle wall during an assault. How different it was for a ninja! Dressed in black and with no flag to identify him, his role in a siege would be to enter the castle days before the assault and lie low until emerging to cause mayhem by setting fire to towers, killing guards or even assassinating the commander. His job done, the ninja would withdraw into anonymity and let the first samurai in the assault party receive all the glory. It was an attitude totally different from the rest of samurai warfare, and carried the additional opprobrium that the noble samurai, who depended upon the ninja’s activities for his own achievements, officially despised the ninja for behaving in such an underhand way.