Question Home

Position:Home>Arts & Humanities> Are there any documented murders committed by ninjas in Japanese history?


Question:

Are there any documented murders committed by ninjas in Japanese history?

Or are they more the stuff of legends.. please link me to sources if you can.


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The real kernel of the problem when dealing with ninjas is what, exactly, IS a ninja?

If you're looking for some guy dressed in black with mystical powers and a special style of martial arts, look no further. Such a creature only exists in myth and hype.

Some, on the other hand, view ninjas as a counterculture reaction to the way of the samurai. Countercultures have a way of springing up in just about any society with strong moral ideas, and these movements tend to adopt exact opposite ways of doing things. So instead of samurai ideals of glorious combat, honor, and service, the ninja counterculture movement would embrace stealth, indifference to social rank, and a mercenary lifestyle.

Like most countercultures, that means the first people to behave like ninjas were the youthful, the rebellious, and the outright criminal. These are people who form a counterculture because they feel unrepresented, and history has a way of rolling over them without taking much individual notice. Most countercultures disappear with hardly a mark. Some few end up integrating, coexisting, or replacing the dominant culture.

In the case of ninja, we might say that they established a kind of long term hold in part by being useful both as a tool and a scapegoat. And here's where the waters get really muddy. Few prestigious lords would want his allies to think he dealt with ninjas of this nature, but most would want his ENEMIES to think he did. This gave the dominant culture a reason to even play up the fearsomeness of the ninja while still oppressing them.

And in this way even in ancient Japan and China we often get incidents of misinformation, scapegoating, and the like. SOME of the assassins, spies, and infiltrators were members of this counterculture. But some were undoubtedly just poor fools left holding the bag. There were indisputably hundreds and hundreds of murders at the time. Figuring out who was REALLY a ninja is a bit like figuring out who was really a witch in Salem Massachusetts based on historical documents of the time.

I put a link to what seems to be a pretty good history of the idea below (link 1) as well as several contrasting views (link 2). It's a start, anyway.