Title: Ninja: Unmasking the Myth
Author: Stephen Turnbull
Publisher: Frontline Books
Publication Date: 02/26/2018
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 230, 6.1″ x 9.8″
Cover Price: £25.00
Content
Author Dr. Stephen Turnbull took his first degree at Cambridge and has two MAs (in Theology and Military History) from Leeds University. In 1996, he received a PhD from Leeds for his thesis on Japan’s “Hidden Christians,” or Kakure Kirishitan (Japanese: 隠れキリシタン, lit. ‘”hidden Christian”‘). He is a prolific author on many aspects of Japanese history and martial arts.
In my last review, I examined a book that explored Bushido as an “invented tradition,” drawing on the work done by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their 1983 book The Invention of Tradition. In Ninja: Unmasking the Myth, I learned that the ninja and ninjutsu are another set of invented traditions, built up from a mix of factual and fictional events taking place in Japan over the course of several hundred years.
Dr. Turnbull is an academic writer who has delivered other books on this topic before. He describes this earlier work, “Ninja: The True Story of Japan’s Secret Warrior Cult in 1991, [as] a serious if flawed attempt to discover the reality behind the ninja by using original Japanese sources.” His problem was the following: “I unfortunately allowed myself to become over-dependent on works such as Yamaguchi’s imaginative Ninja no Seikatsu, in which almost any secret operation in Japanese history is credited to a ninja.”
This is a recurring theme in the book: ninja fans look back through history and apply their image of the ninja to events and people, rather than accepting them for what they really were. This new book is Dr. Turnbull’s most comprehensive attempt to expose the ninja and ninjutsu myths, hopefully without offending any of their devoted fans.
Pros
If you are a scholar, or researcher, or you just appreciate reading martial arts history based on sound evidence and sourced research as I do as the founder of Martial History Team, then you will love almost all of Dr. Turnbull’s book. Each chapter is thoroughly sourced, referencing Japanese resources. Dr. Benesch cites both sides of the debate, letting the ninja have a fair hearing. He shows how “The building blocks for the ninja myth can easily be traced back to the civil wars of the Sengoku Period, although some enthusiasts will go back even further in time and find links in the mists of imperial antiquity, seizing upon certain historical figures and projecting the idea backwards to credit them with being ninja.”
Dr. Turnbull uses a three step process to make his argument. First, he “tease[s] out the essential features of the archetypal ninja as he is presently understood to provide a baseline for comparison with what may have existed in the past.” Second, he “look[s] at accounts of undercover warfare that were recorded by unbiased eyewitnesses when wars were still taking place.” Third, he “examine[s] the wide range of written material produced after Japan’s wars had ceased.” The careful review of all of this material shows that the ninja was less of a “person” (or a “noun”) and more of an action. In other words, “ninja” was a way of describing a soldier’s actions (i.e., as an “adjective” or an “adverb”). Thus, a soldier who moved with stealth wasn’t really a “ninja,” but his actions were consistent with what later ninja fans believed ninja to have accomplished.
Cons
If you are not interested in factual books, you may not like Dr. Turnbull’s work as much as I did. The text is easier to read than Dr. Benesch’s book, and incorporates Dr. Turnbull’s experiences visiting ninja theme parks and restaurants in Japan. I did feel like the text got bogged down a bit in the sections on Iga and Kōka history. However, those arguments were key to showing that their current commercial fascination with all things ninja has weak historical grounding. Their association was built more upon their status as court intelligence operatives, not their skill with shuriken (a weapon that, while real, was not really a ninja tool).
Conclusion
I give this book 5 out of 5 ninja stars.
The book deserves the stars, even if the mythical ninja do not! Readers will learn so much from this book. For example, Dr. Turnbull notes that “ninja” consists of two kanji (Chinese-derived ideographs) 忍 and 者. “Sha (or ja) 者 simply refers to a practitioner of something, as in the word geisha 芸者… The word ninjutsu 忍術 uses a second character 術 meaning techniques, but the first character nin 忍 in both words can have two very different meanings… It is usually taken to mean secrecy, invisibility or concealment, but its primary definition involves the idea of endurance… Taking one’s clues solely from the addition of furigana to Japanese texts, a fully confirmed on reading of 忍者 as ninja does not appear in any written source until 1955 when it emerges in the novel Sarutobi Sasuke by Shibata Renzaburō, where 忍者 is glossed to be read in that precise way on its first appearance.” These are just hints to the fascinating tale of the ninja waiting for you in Dr. Turnbull’s book.
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