--- description: Breaking news and analysis from time.com. Politics, world news, photos, video, tech reviews, health, science, and entertainment news. title: Ninja Myths Revealed: Japanese Fighters Didn't Wear Black image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [World](/section/world/) # You Don’t Know the Ninja: 8 New Revelations About the Shadow Warrior by [TIME Staff](/author/time-staff/) Feb 5, 2013 10:45 AM CUT by [TIME Staff](/author/time-staff/) Feb 5, 2013 10:45 AM CUT ## Ninja History 101  An 1853 print by Japanese artist Toyokuni Utagawa shows a ninja sneaking up behind a musician.
Ninja are everywhere in popular culture — they slice up mobsters in movies and fruit on your iPhone. We seem to think it makes sense to compare them to pirates and then think of them fondly as adolescent mutant turtles living in a New York City sewer with a kimono-clad rat.



But who were the ninja, really? That’s what John Man, a British travel writer and historian, set out to explore in his new book, Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior. He spoke to TIME about the fighters behind the legend.



LIST: Happy Ninja Day: Top 5 Ninja in Pop Culture itharoor ## 1\. The Smartest Ninja Didn’t Wear Black ## 2\. Iga and Koka, Where Ninja Were Born  This work by Japanese artist Utagawa Hiroshige depicts Mount Kaito in Iga province, an area associated with the ninja.

What is a ninja?

It’s now somebody who adopts a particular sort of martial art. But that’s not how they were originally. They were secret agents who undertook work, usually at night, and acted as spies and assassins of the medieval world of Japan.



What does the word ninja mean?

Ninja comes originally from the Chinese and is a vague Japanese pronunciation for “one who endures.” And because Japanese is what it is, there is also a Japanese word which means the same thing: shinobi. They are interchangeable. Because Chinese always was a slightly more higher-status way of talking, ninja tends to be higher status, and became acceptable to foreigners. Shinobi remains the Japanese way of talking about them.



And they originated from a particular part of Japan, right?

They did. I was surprised to discover there was a particular area that is associated with them. Traditionally, it is known as Iga and Koka — within a couple of hours' drive from Kyoto. It’s quite a charming and fairly remote area of rolling hills and forests and valleys and streams and rice paddies — not at all well developed, but very charming.



So what made this such fertile ground for ninja-ism?

It’s very central in Japan and arose at a time when all of Japan was riven by feuds and governed by warlords. This particular area had been pretty free of warlords and was determined to remain so. And what happened was that the villages there formed themselves like self-defense communes, and it was in that context that the ninja skills developed. itharoor ## 3\. Yes, Some Ninja Were Samurai  This 1820 print by Shuntai Katsukawa depicts a samurai.
In your book, you emphasize the contrast between ninja and samurai.

Ninja are usually regarded as the anti-samurai. The samurai were extremely overt and colorful personalities. Their whole being depended on public display — death-defying and often death-seeking bravado. The ninja were the opposite: in order to be a spy, you have to survive and be secretive. Secretiveness was something the samurai pretended to despise, but in fact the ninja were vital to military activity. And quite often the samurai during the day doubled as ninja during the night.



So could ninja be samurai at the same time?

You could, theoretically. There would have been some sort of distinction, because samurai were often extremely high class, but ninja not necessarily so. But there was an overlap in the middle. itharoor ## 4\. Ninja Trained by Sitting Under Waterfalls  This print by Katsushika Hokusai depicts a ninja in training.
Were ninja similar to other secretive, cult-like orders of the day, perhaps like the hashishin, or assassins of the Crusades?

I don’t think so, because the assassins had a strong, powerful jihadist sense, very deeply rooted in the religion, whereas the ninja were not religiously driven. The overlap came in that the ninja wanted what was called "right-mindedness." They had to have the correct attitude in order to undertake what they did in defense of their villages, their masters and themselves. What they did was train in a local belief system, which was Shinto and called shugendo, which is really mountain asceticism, which demanded that you undertake training in the mountains and along the streams to hone your body and mind until you are absolutely fit enough to carry out ninja activities.



Did this involve sword craft and flying daggers?

There was never any sort of formal martial training. It would have been from childhood, within the family, learning self-defense. The only formal training I’ve heard of was with the shugendo ascetics who were not ninja. And not all ninja underwent shugendo training.



So is this more of a spiritual process than a martial one?

It was both. Certainly it was spiritual. It was martial in so far as it trained you. There were no martial arts involved, but clearly if you can survive sitting under waterfalls or walking many miles in forests in extreme adversity, it helps you in your training to be a fighting spy. itharoor ## 5\. There Were Ninja Families ...  Japanese Iga-ryu ninja pose in Hong Kong in 2007\.
Were there ninja bloodlines and generations of ninja families?

Yes, you were born into it, and you were probably a landowner or working those fields, fixed to a particular estate. Loyalty would have tied you to an area and your family. It was very feudal.



Is being a ninja more a tactic than a defining identity?

You go back in history and the whole thing becomes extremely vague. Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military theoretician, talks about the art and necessity of deception if you want to win in war. And it’s from that belief that the ninja crept into Japanese life. There’s evidence in old fables of underhand, secretive assassin types. itharoor ## 6\. ... and Quite Possibly Ninja Armies  A group of ninja in the movie You Only Live Twice.
Ninja seem to have sprung up in proto-democratic communities. Is there something fundamentally subversive about ninja?

I wouldn’t say subversive. If you can imagine self-defense communities that needed places to retreat to in case of attack — there are still several dozen, perhaps hundreds of places where they used to gather. These are earth mounds, similar to the Celtic forts in southwestern England. These are not well researched, and the archaeology still has to be done. They are pretty unique to Iga and Koka. They never had the sort of castles that are typical to much of Japan nowadays, which are tourist attractions and much restored. These places have not been restored and are often covered with trees. So there’s a lot of work to be done about the ninja and how they operated.



Were these forts defended by armies of ninja?

Nobody knows. The manuals that were written do not talk about cooperative activities at all. They were always treated as individuals. They must have operated as groups, but there’s no records of them doing so. itharoor ## 7\. James Bond Forever Warped Ninja History  Tetsuro Tamba as Tiger Tanaka, chief of the Japanese secret service, in You Only Live Twice.
How did the ninja legend spread around the world?

It took on a life of its own very much in the 19th century in Japan and then spread to the West, but really after the Second World War. I blame James Bond, really. The Bond movie You Only Live Twice really popularized the idea of ninja among people who are not interested in martial arts. It’s quite strange, really: the idea of the ninja spread, but in the film they’re not represented as ninja at all, more as commandos. Nevertheless, that’s what made the term popular in the West. Of course, there is a whole martial-arts community that’s separate from that tradition and has a life of its own.



By the 19th century there were prints of dark-robed men stealing over castle walls.

Yes, there were some prints that were in operation. The myths that had been assiduously cultivated really spread only after \[the ninja heyday\], as it became ever more removed from reality. When I started this book, I thought I was going to be involved in all sorts of nonsense which is currently believed about ninja. But I was absolutely delighted to realize there was a historical core to them. And that’s really what the book is about. And even though ninjitsu is considered a martial art, there is very little to do that in the way of authenticity.



Could you talk more about the nonsense?

You look up ninja websites and ninja books and there are titles about the art of invisibility or how to disappear, which has been invented largely since 1945 in order to create and sustain a ninja community, many of whom dispute among themselves what is meant by true ninja-ism and what is authentic. There are masters still in existence who claim to have scrolls that go back to the Middle Ages granting them all sorts of authenticity down the generations, but nobody has seen these scrolls or proved anything about them. itharoor ## 8\. The Incredible True Story of the Last Ninja  Hiroo Onoda, a former intelligence officer in Japan's imperial army, hid in the Philippine jungle for 30 years.
What do you think our most major misconception about the ninja is?

I had thought they would be assassins or would-be killers, but I was surprised that they had a spiritual dimension and that shugendo was an important part of the training. Even now, the experts in ninjitsu tell you that right-mindedness was a prime element of their training.



Did ninja have special weapons?

In the many weapons that are displayed in the ninja museums, first there was an awful lot of adapted farm equipment, and secondly none of it’s authentic. It was all made long after the ninja became redundant.



What about the tales of ninja as magicians?

There was a folk tradition of magical belief that if you write certain things, certain statements on bits of paper and put them in the right place in a room, then magical things would happen. But these are in the manuals which come after the event.



You write about a Japanese WW II-era spy, Hiroo Onoda, who hid in the Philippines for 30 years. Why is he, in your view, the last of the ninja?

It was wondering about him and how he survived there which told me there was a tradition in Japan, which is exactly the opposite of the sort of xenophobic militarism that we associate with Japan in the Second World War. There was a spy school that taught an extraordinary degree of liberalism and generosity and non-xenophobia. The idea being that the Japanese would bring freedom to the peoples of Asia — of course, it turned out to be exactly the opposite after Pearl Harbor. But this different tradition was preserved by the Nakano Spy School and by Hiroo Onoda himself, who is still alive. Other people would dispute this, but I’d say he’s the last of the ninja. itharoor ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7151408/you-dont-know-ninjas-8-new-revelations-about-the-shadow-warrior/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7151408/you-dont-know-ninjas-8-new-revelations-about-the-shadow-warrior/"},"headline":"You Don’t Know the Ninja: 8 New Revelations About the Shadow Warrior","datePublished":"2013-02-05T10:45:43.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T13:17:05.499Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/archive/7151408/you-dont-know-ninjas-8-new-revelations-about-the-shadow-warrior/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"World","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/world/","name":"World"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7151408/you-dont-know-ninjas-8-new-revelations-about-the-shadow-warrior/","name":"You Don’t Know the Ninja: 8 New Revelations About the Shadow Warrior"}}]}] ```