Saturday, May 15, 2010

How did the Ninjas disappear from the Japanese culture or society?

And do real heirs of the Ninjutsu traditions currently exist?|||Vodka Martini... Shaken, not stirred.|||Egg shell smoke bombs. Poof, they run off.|||The Japanese government has banned it%26#039;s public practice at different times in the past few centuries.





It%26#039;s use and practice still exist, but are not seen by the general public.











http://www.hiken.com/History/tabid/356/D...|||thats what they want you to think. but did they really disappear is the question. they are a very cunning creature.





bushido (the samurai) along with ninja were impart desolated by the laws set forth by the Emperor Meiji around 1870 or so, he laws were more geared toward the samurai but did effect the ninja over time.|||This is really a historical or anthropological question, but from my understanding both samurai and ninja began to disappear after the Meiji revolution (restoration). After the revolution one government ruled Japan (an emperor-appointed oligarchy, go figure) and that gov. created a national military to counter the remaining shoguns and daimyo (territorial lords) who employed samurai and ninja. This army later became a military power that the world would officially meet in WWI. Both Ninja and Samurai, before this period, were essentially employees of rich powerful lords who were always fighting for more land and power over other lords. The Samurai are the well-known warrior class that were %26quot;employed%26quot; in servitude to their lords for the cause of waging war on other lords and protection. Some lords had many samurai, while others had few; a samurai without a lord-employer was a ronin. Well, many ronin and samurai had a lot of free time: War isn%26#039;t waged everyday, and many shogun/daimyo had a separate force just to protect their homes. An honorable samurai spent this time training and maybe meeting a good woman and getting married, but a dishonorable samurai would make trouble. This came in the form of duels with rival samurai or even non-samurai warriors, village raids, rape, muggings, theft, etc. Basically the samurai would throw their weight around in the territory their masters owned, so the peasant villages were helpless victims and had to invent a new method of combat to defend themselves. This is how Ninjutsu was born: a village or two would %26quot;fund%26quot; a small group of men (from the village-%26gt; NO outsiders) to be full time warriors for the village and stop the samurai from raiding. These village warriors quickly figured out that head-to-head combat was pointless because the samurai were already masters, so they developed a system that employed other means of combat: wilderness survival, booby traps, hidden weapons and non-traditional weapons, camouflage, night-combat, fighting moves that focused on quick kills, guerrilla tactics, etc. When the samurai were dropping like flies- with the surviving ones telling stories about how they never saw their enemy but then watched their comrades die all around them- the Ninja became legendary and even magical in reputation. The villages would steal the samurai armor and weapons and sell them on the %26quot;black market%26quot; (one set of samurai armor, not including weapons, costs as much as two years of peasant labor) and give a lot of the money back to the ninja. Repeat this process all over Japan for several decades and you have an elite system of assassins with varied %26quot;clans%26quot; (the ninjas from different territories), a lot of training, and some high quality deadly weapons. The Daimyo/Shogun very quickly figured this out and employed these %26quot;assassins%26quot; for their own uses. So, when the revolution occurred and this %26quot;lord system%26quot; was broken up the first groups that had to be eliminated were the samurai and the ninja: the samurai went out in glorious battle against firearmed soldiers (see movie %26quot;last samurai%26quot;). I suspect that many of the ninja clans simply disbanded, while others were destroyed similar to the samurai, while still others were absorbed into the military. There are Ninja masters today who teach wilderness survival, booby trapping, tracking, and deadly combat, etc. but if they are actual lineage-descendants would be up to them to prove (I would think that they are though, because Japanese culture is obsessed with lineage, and most citizens own notebooks with their entire family tree recorded inside that is updated and passed down).|||Ninjutsu still exists today, but Ninja do not. The Samurai eventually took control over Japan and the Ninja slowly died off. The winners (Samurai) wrote the history books on the matter.|||Check out the Bujinkan and Masaaki Hatsumi. He%26#039;s written a few books. Ninjutsu still exists as intelligence gathering, undercover work, bodyguarding and military operations, but the ninjas as they once were have no need to exist as Japan is no longer a feudal system, weapons are very different now and training takes place publicly.





Hatsumi changed the name %26quot;ninjutsu%26quot; to %26quot;Budo Taijutsu%26quot; - very simply, war way body skills - and brought nine different schools together under the name %26quot;Bujinkan%26quot;. Ninjutsu is very closely allied with esoteric Buddhist schools and several high rankers are priests, Stephen Hayes, the man who brought it to the U.S. being one of them as well as Hatsumi%26#039;s teacher (died 1972) Toshitsugu Takamatsu.





The main social change was the imperial restoration in 1868 that ended shogunate military rule and a few years later extended the right to bear arms to include the peasant classes instead of just the samurai.

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