Clouds cover the moon as a man climbs up Azuchi Castle on his grappling hook.
It’s 1580, and the intruder is here to kill a warlord.
Dressed in black, he sneaks through the castle halls,
throwing stars and smoke bombs fromon his belt.
He avoids guards where he can and silently kills them where he can’t.
Sliding open a door, he lunges – but guards are waiting.
When the warlord demands to know who sent him, the assassin bites off his own tongue.
Oda Nobunaga, the first Great Unifier of Japan, survives… for now.
This scene has become part of the legend of the ninja, or shinobi.
The truth is… if anything like this had actually happened, the killer would have been a doctor.
He'd have had no smoke bombs or throwing stars and
he wouldn't have murdered guards but would have passed them with a smile.
The ninja mythology is so strong, so cool, that it pulls in stories that are totally unrelated.
So who were the real ninja, and where have they gone?
A Shattered Empire
Japan is ruled by a military government: the Shogunate.
Officially serving the Emperor, they have been the real power for centuries.
But their authority has crumbled.
Daimyo, feudal lords, and their armies of bushi,
Japan’s warrior class, are waging war for territory and power.
Close to the capital Kyoto, which all rising powers hope to control, lie Iga and Kōka.
More than one warlord thinks they’re easy to conquer – a mistake:
their mountains act as a natural defense and their clans work together.
But their real strength is the samurai they lend to neighbours and allies,
shifting allegiances and spying on threats to keep the fighting far away.
These skills of spying, ambush, and stealth are called “shinobi tactics”,
and Iga samurai gain a reputation for them.
But in recent years a new power has risen,
an inspiring leader and ruthless conqueror who can unify Japan – Oda Nobunaga.
After he deposes the shogun in Kyoto, Oda is the most powerful man in Japan.
To consolidate his control, Oda invades Kōka with overwhelming force,
and the district becomes his personal fief.
Now alone, Iga’s days are numbered.
In 1579, Oda’s son tries to impress his dad by invading Iga.
This plan backfires when local samurai infiltrate his camps.
Disguised as merchants and priests, they learn the paths the armies are taking.
Then, the men of Iga ambush and destroy them.
Oda is furious: “You were guilty of a fiasco on the Iga border. Take this as a lesson.”
He will not make the same mistakes as his son.
When the warlord himself invades Iga in 1581, he sends more than 40,000 samurai
who destroy every village and temple they encounter, killing thousands.
Iga’s samurai are soon bottled up in their castles.
The defenders use all kinds of shinobi tricks – lighting torches for fake reinforcements,
setting fire to enemy camps, killing scouts, and leading night raids.
Three musketeers lie in wait for Oda Nobunaga himself and kill his guards,
but the warlord is undeterred.
After long sieges, Iga submits to the Oda clan.
This victory lasts only a year.
Then, Oda Nobunaga is murdered – not by a ninja, but in an ambush by disloyal subordinates.
The warlord refuses to die by any hand but his own.
He commits seppuku – disembowelling himself with his own sword.
Oda's story may be over, but the story of the ninja is just beginning.
Without his authority, former allies become rivals – and the
men of Iga will help decide who wins that fight.
History on a Knife Edge
The fearsome Oda Nobunaga is dead! Finally, old grudges are paid back
in blood, and Oda supporters like Tokugawa Ieyasu are hunted down.
Tokugawa was one of his closest allies – now he’s
in enemy territory with only a few dozen men – his bodyguards of Iga and Kōka samurai,
led by the legendary Hattori Hanzo, who has served Tokugawa for decades.
Their loyalty has only grown since Tokugawa gave shelter to those fleeing the Oda invasion.
Now they can return the favour.
Tokugawa needs to pass through Iga – a dangerous place full of bandits
and samurai hunters – but Hattori’s warriors know the mountains well.
Their strategy is relying on old ties and bribes just as much as
on bows and blades – or so the legend says.
After a harrowing trek, Tokugawa reaches safety.
By saving his life, Hattori’s warriors have changed the course of history:
they allow him to become Shogun two decades later and shift the country
from 200 years of ongoing warfare into a peace that will last decades.
Togugawa brings his bodyguards to the new capital, Edo – while his ascension as the
last of the Three Great Unifiers of Japan would seem to ends the need for shinobi fighters.
But not everyone is pleased with the new shogunate,
so loyal men with shinobi skills will still be essential to keep the newly–won peace.
All you have to do is pick your next destination – and we’re headed back to Japan!
Sniffing Out Conspiracy
In 1651, the Tokugawa Shogunate has ruled for three generations,
prizing stability above all else.
To prevent the spread of dangerous new ideas, Japan has become strictly isolationist,
banning Christian missionaries and restricting foreign merchants.
Violators are imprisoned and deported.
To avoid the bloody pitched battles of the past, official policy requires all lords to spend every
other year in Edo, based on the principle – keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
The job of watching the lords falls to the guards
patrolling the grounds of Edo Castle, like this guy.
He’s not just a common soldier – he’s a kind of castle detective.
It’s the family trade – his grandfather served under Hattori Hanzo, and followed him to Edo.
Besides guarding the Shogun, his most important
job is gathering intelligence by blending in as a servant or priest.
He knows that people whisper about the detectives’ supernatural skills,
and call them shinobi-no-mono, “person of stealth".
The detectives see themselves as maintaining peace and order,
but to their enemies they are the feared secret police of the Tokugawa surveillance state.
When the third Shogun dies, he leaves a vulnerable empire to his ten-year old son.
Rumours soon reach the palace that something is on the horizon,
and a masterless samurai called Marubashi Chūya is particularly suspicious.
He runs a swordfighting school – a perfect place for young samurai to conspire.
A detective slips into Marubashi’s home disguised as a servant, and – according to one version of
what happened – finds Marubashi ill, talking to people in a fever dream.
The unnoticed detective listens with horror as Murabashi describes a terrifying plot – to set
Edo ablaze with gunpowder, killing thousands in a deadly distraction.
As the authorities fight the flames, Murabashi will storm Edo Castle,
murder the Shogun’s regents, and force the boy to undo his father’s unpopular policies.
The detective slips out of the house, and returns with soldiers.
The conspiracy is undone.
As a result, whole families are crucified, tortured to death for all to see.
The detective does not relish these brutal punishments, but sees them as necessary –
only a firm hand can keep Japan from slipping back into chaos.
Returning to his room in Edo Castle, he opens a well-read book – a history of Oda Nobunaga.
The detective enjoys the section on Iga’s plucky defiance – it’s more exciting
than the day-to-day surveillance that makes up his shinobi work.
It’s in this peaceful period that the legend of the shinobi begins to really form.
Iga scholars craft the legend of Tokugawa’s escape
through their homeland, and boast of the skills of their samurai:
“They have a supernatural power as spies,
so no matter how secure a fortress is, they can enter it secretly.”
The kabuki theatres bring these stories to life – characters who can turn invisible,
or transform into toads, rats and slugs.
Actors use gunpowder, throwing knives and acrobatics.
One trope becomes commonplace: characters dress in black to signal invisibility,
just like the stagehands in all-black outfits who aren’t meant to be seen.
The building blocks of the modern ninja myth are coming together.
While the legend of the Iga shinobi takes shape, the connection of the castle detectives
to Iga grows weaker as generations of new shoguns bring their own men to protect them.
But once the outside world comes knocking and Japan has to react,
shinobi skills will come in handy once more.
The World Comes to Japan
In 1854, two centuries after Marubashi nearly burned Edo to the ground,
the capital is under threat once again – but this time not from within.
Nine huge US gunboats are anchored in the port of Yokohama, cannons pointed at nearby Edo.
Japan has been off limits to foreigners for centuries.
But Commodore Perry of the US Navy demands open trade and diplomatic relations… or else.
For years, the British, Russian, and French empires have been pressing for entry.
The Americans are just the most recent, and the most open with their threats.
Japan’s neighbour, China, presents a terrifying example of how badly this contact can go.
Detective Sawamura Yasusuke watches the strangers
in their odd clothes as he tries to assess the danger.
He’s not here to assassinate Perry – he’s not like the shinobi he’s read about or seen on stage.
He’s posing as a simple official in the Japanese delegation.
The Americans have no idea that Japan has developed the most sophisticated intelligence
gathering system in the world, or that they’ve let a professional spy onto their flagship.
But Sawamura’s talents, honed in the feudal society of Tokugawa Japan,
are of only limited use in this new modern world.
A single spy can’t change the fates of empires,
and you don’t need shinobi training to see that the Shogun is outmatched.
Japan’s doors slowly creak open to the world.
The ancient military dictatorship was already cracking under economic and political pressure,
and many are outraged that the Shogun has allowed Japan’s humiliation.
The detectives were espionage experts in isolationist Japan,
but their usefulness is running out.
With a weakened shogunate and angry feudal lords,
Japan is closer to civil war than it has been for 300 years.
The new Emperor Meiji seizes the opportunity to sweep away
the Shogunate and its institutions – like the castle detectives, replacing them with
professional secret police, more suited to the modern Japan he seeks to create.
Three centuries after the province was razed, the shinobi legacy of Iga finally dies.
Enter the Ninja
This may have been the end of the shinobi of history, but it is the birth of the Ninja of myth.
The Edo Period saw an explosion of art and literature and in the
20th century these stories gained new life.
In 1936, martial artist Fujita Seiko claims secret knowledge of ‘ninjutsu’ from Kōka,
able to withstand poisons and torture, impersonate animals, and move silently.
His work reads like a parody, but some people take it seriously.
After World War 2, Japan needed to rebuild, and that included its national confidence.
Storytellers looked back into a mythologised past, and they found ‘Shinobi’.
Kabuki tales and woodblock prints evolved into movies and manga.
These stories weren’t about the surveillance of the Tokugawa secret police,
but shadow warriors who sneak into castles and assassinate villains.
Shinobi had begun as a tactic and became an identity.
It feels traditional, but what we know and love about ninja is less than a century old.
The straight ninja sword first appears in a 1956 tourism advert, the throwing star is
from a 1957 movie, and the ancient martial art of ninjutsu is a post-war creation.
Even the word ‘ninja’ came out of the 20th century.
Shinobi warfare wasn’t unique to the samurai of Iga and Kōka,
but their skills entered the storybooks as their descendants entered the castle.
As detectives they adapted to uncover conspiracies and clamp down on dissent,
but they couldn’t change with the times forever.
When the Shogunate itself was swept away, the shinobi went too – but they survive
as shadows and stories long after the world that created them has disappeared.