Ninja (26 page)

Over the next century, the ninja began to acquire his modern traits as a superman in black, able to perform magical feats. An illustration of an 1802 romance shows a black-clad figure crossing a moat by climbing along a rope held to a castle wall by a grapple.
⁵
A similar rope-climbing figure appears in a sketch done around 1814 by the great artist Hokusai. Several other black-robed ninjas appear regularly in nineteenth-century prints, though the range of subjects was limited by the censorship of the Tokugawa shogunate, which was sensitive about anything that suggested secret opposition. In one of a grisly series entitled “28 Scenes of Murder,” Tsukioka Yoshitoshi portrays a hero on the point of committing suicide, with the shadow of doom looming over him—a shadow that is a ninja in silhouette. It was done in 1866, and the ominous shadow might well symbolize the fate of the Tokugawa shogunate. The strongest image of a latter-day ninja appeared only after the end of the shogunate in 1868. It is a woodblock print created in 1883 by Toyonobu Utagawa, of an attempt on the life of Oda Nobunaga in 1573 by an assassin named Manabe Rokur
o
. The print shows him as the archetypical ninja, dressed in black, thrashing about with his sword with a servant woman on his back, while the shogun looks on coolly.

Of the many bizarre ninja transformations, the strangest is the one that changed the twelfth century's great hero Yoshitsune from a tragic failure into a glorious success. After an (apocryphal) incident in which he is smuggled through the Ataka Gate by his loyal servant, Benkei, Yoshitsune was defeated in battle and committed suicide. Or did he? Folklore does not like its great men to vanish. So it suggests an alternative fate in which the hero finds a destiny suitable to his greatness. In this legend he does not die but escapes northward, to the island of Hokkaid
o
, where the local aborigines, the Ainu, welcome him as a leader. Then what? Obviously he cannot die. So he travels on, ever northward, across the island of Sakhalin, to the mainland, then westward to Mongolia, where he reemerges as the world conqueror Genghis Khan.

This is utter rubbish, of course. Yoshitsune killed himself (or vanished) in the battle of the Koromo River in 1189, at the age of thirty. Genghis became the founder of his nation in 1206, which presumably acted as the legend's foundation stone, because the intervening seventeen years offer enough time for Yoshitsune's transformation. As it happens, the two were about the same age. But the storytellers were ignorant of the fact that at the time of Yoshitsune's death or disappearance, young Genghis—Temujin, as he was still called—was already busy uniting Mongolia's feuding tribes. Not that this could have been widely known in Japan, but it is clear enough in both Chinese and Mongol sources. Actually, the whole thing is batty. It ignores distances, problems of travel, language, and cultural differences. But legends grow by avoiding inconvenient facts. The real question is how and why the story arose.

It started at least in the early nineteenth century, because it was first recorded by the all-around German scholar and scientist Philipp von Siebold, who visited Hokkaid
o
in the 1820s. The legend gained a new lease on life soon after the revolution of 1868, which ended the shogunate and brought the Meiji government to power. During the revolution, rebels had set up a short-lived republic on the northern island of Hokkaid
o
. Crushing the rebels focused the attention of the new regime on the island. They remained there, mainly because they were afraid the Russians would seize it. In the ferment of nationalism, some Japanese needed to see a future building an empire on the mainland. All the better for the future if there was a precedent. Here it was—an empire had been built by Genghis that included all of China. Obviously, ran the argument, no Mongol could have done this, because the Mongolians, as everyone knew, were mere barbarians. Therefore Genghis, genius that he was, could not have been Mongolian. And since he conquered China, he could not have been Chinese. So, by iron logic, he must have been Japanese. This was the lunatic rationale of a Japanese author named Oyabe Zenichiro, whose book on the subject was published in 1924. It became a bestseller, and the idea acquired a certain respectability, with the result that it is constantly recycled as part of Yoshitsune's story, itself part of the process that was fast taking the ninjas away from reality into the realm of myth.

Yet a seed of reality remained, and was about to rebloom in the most unlikely circumstances.

14

THE NAKANO SPY SCHOOL

When you are on night patrol or have to stand guard in an emergency, you should keep quiet so that you can hear any sounds.

Ninja instructional poem

THE
NINJAS
LIVE
ON
IN
MANY
DISTORTIONS
OF
A
DISTANT
REALITY
, but they also live on in one man, Onoda Hiroo, who survived in the Philippines for thirty years after the end of the Second World War. It is a famous story. Onoda, ninety as I write and still going strong, was as loyal to his country as any samurai to his lord, but kept himself alive with techniques and an attitude that owed more to the ninjas than the samurai. His attitude in particular: Where the samurai accepted, or sought, or ensured a “glorious” death, Onoda was a dedicated survivor.

We'll get to Onoda himself in chapter 16. First, we should look at the roots of his ethos, which he shared with a small band trained in covert operations. They were a remarkable group. All alumni of or instructors in a “spy school” devoted to intelligence gathering and guerrilla warfare, these few, twenty-five hundred in all, might have been examples of expansionist, imperialist, militaristic Japan at its most extreme. In fact, they were just the opposite; though unshakably patriotic, they possessed extraordinary streaks of creativity, liberalism, idealism, and flexibility. One man in particular possessed all these qualities. It is rare for anyone to retain moral integrity in opposition to the beliefs and actions of his nation. Fujiwara Iwaichi was such a man. He would not have put it in these terms, but he was a “shadow warrior,” in the tradition of those few ninjas who tried to balance loyalty, action, and morality.

He and Onoda owed their careers to the Nakano Spy School,
¹
the roots of which go back to Japan's emergence on to the world stage in the late nineteenth century. The emperor had been restored to full power in 1868. The samurai vanished. Japan's new modern armed forces went from strength to strength, defeating China (1895) and Russia (1905), joining the Allies in World War I, then in the 1930s building an empire in Manchuria, with ambitions for a greater one in Siberia, Mongolia, and China. But brute military strength was not enough. Inner Asia was a complicated place, with China torn by warlords, nationalists, and Communists, Soviet armies strengthening their grip on Siberia, and Mongolians eager both for independence and for Soviet support. The Japanese army saw it needed to help conquest along with subversion and covert operations. Spies posing as Buddhist missionaries or businessmen built intelligence networks that produced maps and information on opposing armies.

As Japan's military machine grew in strength in the 1930s, the army saw that something rather more professional was needed in terms of covert warfare. In 1937, focusing principally on the threat from the Soviet Union, the army began to develop the tools and techniques of “shadow warfare”: secret inks, cameras hidden in cigarette lighters, explosives disguised as canned food and coal, couriers reporting on what they saw while traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway, an intelligence unit of anti-Soviet Russians, a counterintelligence agency. Finally, in summer 1938, it was decided to formalize training in a spy school, which the following year acquired a headquarters in Tokyo's Nakano district.

The Nakano Spy School, a compound of nondescript buildings with a forest of telegraph poles, had once been a military telegraph unit, and—according to a deliberately deceptive sign—was no more than an “Army Communications Research Institute.” It was run at first by the brilliant and unconventional Akigusa Shun. Fluent in Russian, with round glasses and a gentle manner, Akigusa drank no alcohol, preferred coffee to tea, and took his students to the Imperial Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, to improve their Western manners. He selected his students with care, preferring reservists and disdaining army officers drilled in absolute obedience and rote learning. From six hundred candidates, he chose just eighteen, all notable for their intellectuality, internationalism, and fitness. They were an elite, and acted the part, sporting fashionable haircuts and wearing smart suits.

From the first, they were taught a new type of covert warfare that would help establish the Japanese empire, or as they termed it, the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. The twentieth century, as World War I had shown, was an age of total war. But, they learned, full-frontal assaults were of less importance than intelligence, with which one could undermine the enemy by fomenting religious strife or class conflict. A single spy, said one teacher, could be more valuable than a division of soldiers. Shadow warfare, ninja-style, was the thing—but adapted to the modern world. They studied psychology, aviation, marine navigation, pharmacology. They were taught how to handle explosives and time bombs. They read up on German strategy, American politics, and the campaigns of Lawrence of Arabia. They learned how to photograph documents surreptitiously, to disguise themselves, even (with known criminals as teachers) to crack safes. In an introduction to biological warfare, they were shown how to use special pens designed to release bacteria into water supplies. Everything, of course, was top secret. No one was to expect public honor. All should accept that they might die for their country without recognition. Nothing could have been more different from the samurai ethos, nothing more in line with that of modernized ninja-ism: dedication, patriotism, flexibility, thoroughgoing professionalism in shadow warfare.

And spirituality, Japanese-style. A shrine at the front gate was dedicated to Kusunoki Masashige, the great fourteenth-century general who fought for the emperor Go-Daigo in the early years of the sixty-year civil war between the Northern and Southern Courts, the one who oversaw the defense of several “hilltop” castles in Yoshino, who escaped from one castle by pretending to have committed suicide, who defended another with an army of mock figures, and who obeyed his imperial master by going into battle (Minatogawa, 1336), even though he knew it meant his death, and who, dying by committing
seppuku
, became the paragon of loyalty.

On this basis, the first students were supposed to take on board two root concepts: integrity and spirit,
makoto
and
seishin.
“Success in clandestine activity comes from integrity” was a key motto, while “spirit” meant a fervent patriotism. These attitudes might have evolved into modern versions of the gung-ho, arrogant, nineteenth-century samurai cry of
Son n
o
j
o
i!
(Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians!). One of Akigusa's subordinates, Major Ito Samata, almost put this idea into action by planning to raid the British consulate in Kobe, to search for evidence of bribes offered to Japanese politicians and financiers. In the event, this plan, made in classic ninja tradition, was discovered, Ito court-martialed, and his boss, Akigusa, reassigned to Berlin. After that, Nakano avoided such “cowboy” schemes, preferring well-thought-out projects. Covert ninja-style operations were all very well, but they would need a clear military and political purpose.

That same year, 1939, world events and a setback on the mainland rewrote Japan's plans for imperial conquest and gave the Nakano School its true agenda. In inner Asia, Japan's advance came to a sudden halt when its army was crushed by a joint Russian-Mongol force. In Europe, Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with Russia and invaded Poland, inspiring Britain and France to declare war. War in Europe offered a chance for Japan to end European imperialism in Asia by driving out the British, French, and Dutch—and then, in June 1941, with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, a new opportunity to seize the Soviet Far East, even all Siberia. What a vision for an ambitious young power, to become the force to free Asian peoples from Western rule, to reverse centuries of humiliation! By “Western,” Japanese meant both European and American, since it had been the United States, more than any other nation, that had forced Japan to open itself to the world in the mid-nineteenth century and turned the Pacific into its own backyard. Surely no Asians, from Siberian hunters to native Hawaiians, from British-ruled Indians to Filipinos, could possibly object to a war of “liberation” by fellow Asians?

In pursuit of these goals, the ethos of Japan's new ninjas was very different from that commonly associated with the Japanese military. As Stephen Mercado puts it in his history of the school: In an army that “inculcated unquestioning execution of orders and a fiery patriotism, the Nakano School began encouraging its shadow warriors to think creatively. They were to know the enemy, not simply fight him. Such knowledge would be the strength underlying whatever technical skills in martial arts, safe-cracking, or the like in their covert quiver. From such knowledge, too, would flow empathy. A competent intelligence officer must, whatever his personal beliefs, be able to grasp the basis of his opponent's beliefs and actions.” In brief, Nakano trainees were to develop a combination of private initiative and group “spirit.”

Purists in today's “ninja community” argue that the Nakano graduates were not true ninjas. Quite right, in the sense that the historical circumstances in which ninjas and
ninjutsu
evolved had vanished. No one could be loyal to a lord anymore, because lords no longer existed. And in purist terms, a
ninjutsu
specialist could only learn his expertise from a master, which had to be passed on man to man, not learned in a group. But several aspects of ninjaism justify the use of the term here. The man who claims to be the inheritor of the ninja tradition, Masaaki Hatsumi, lists eighteen fundamental areas of expertise, eleven of which were echoed in Nakano's training: spiritual refinement, unarmed combat, swordsmanship, fire and explosives, disguise and impersonation, stealth and entering methods, strategy, espionage, escape and concealment, meteorology and geography. Seven others were not exactly mainstream in modern warfare: stick-and-staff fighting, throwing blades, spear fighting, halberd fighting, chain-and-sickle weapons, water training, and horsemanship. But there was enough in common between traditional ninja training and Nakano's to call these men modern ninjas. The two shared loyalty, secrecy, a sense of duty, a sense of integrity. As Onoda puts it: