Ninja (15 page)

First, Nobunaga saw that the musketeers needed protection against the cavalry. So, on the afternoon before the battle, he had them build a palisade of stakes some four hundred meters long, in sections too high for horses to jump. Hills at one end and a river at the other would prevent cavalry from outflanking the guns. He gave orders that the troops should fire only when they could be sure of a hit, which meant at less than fifty meters. By now it was dark, and the musketeers settled for the evening behind their stockade.

During the night, it rained. Katsuyori, camped in woods in front of the castle and a few hundred meters from the stockade, assumed that the enemy's muskets would be too wet to use. Also his cavalry would cover the ground from woods to stockade in a minute or two, which meant—in theory—that the horses would be upon the matchlock men before most had a chance to reload. So, soon after a midsummer dawn, while troops to left and right engaged in hand-to-hand combat, he did exactly as expected, sending his cavalry into the attack, a magnificent display of bravery and impetuosity. Out of the trees they came, across a shallow stream, up the bank, and on, laboriously, over rough, wet ground.

Seconds later, within fifty meters of Nobunaga's line, the first rank of his muskets spoke, and the first of Katsuyori's horses and riders fell. At that speed, the survivors would cover those fifty meters in just five seconds. But now the second rank fired, then the third, reducing the charge to a mêlée of fallen men and horses. Those who survived were impaled by the vast, five-meters spears of the foot soldiers defending the ends of the stockades. Other charges followed, and more slaughter. Seeing what was happening, many in the castle came out to join in the fighting. The musketeers advanced from their stockade, the battleground became a chaos of men fighting hand to hand, and by midafternoon Katsuyori's troops saw they were beaten. They broke and fled, many—some three thousand, according to the most widely accepted estimates—to their deaths. Not, however, Katsuyori himself, who lived to fight another day.

This is the strange tale of how Uesugi Kenshin died. All ninjaphiles know it, so let's retell it, and then see if there could be any truth in it.

First, a little background. Uesugi was one of the greatest of sixteenth-century daimy
o
s. He owed his name to a former lord who, in defeat, came to him begging for refuge. He agreed, on the understanding that the lord would adopt him, give him his own name, Uesugi, and make him heir as provincial ruler with immediate effect. The following year, in 1552, he also took the Buddhist name Kenshin. With his new name, he fought many battles in a series of confusing campaigns, attacking some rivals, allying with others, then turning on his allies and allying himself with former enemies. His main enemy, Takeda Shingen, felled by a sniper's bullet in 1573, was succeeded by his less brilliant son, Katsuyori, the one defeated by the fast-rising Oda Nobunaga at Nagashino in 1575. It was Nobunaga, therefore, who emerged as Uesugi's greatest threat, and Nobunaga who in 1578 engineered Uesugi's nasty death—so it is said, because it was he who benefited from it.

The story appears in its most developed form in
Asian Fighting Arts
by Donn Draeger
³
and Robert Smith. It opens with an attack on Kenshin by four of Oda's ninjas, headed by a certain Ukifune Kenpachi. They are spotted by Kenshin's ninja guards but hide in a ceiling, kill the guards with darts from blowguns, then head for Kenshin's quarters. But the guards' commander has faked death; he intercepts the assassins and kills them.

Then comes the sequel, which involves the brother of Ukifune Kenpachi, a ninja dwarf named Ukifune Jinnai, a sort of Japanese version of Gimli in
Lord of the Rings.
Here is the Draeger and Smith version of the story:

The clever Oda, taking no chances, had dispatched a dwarf ninja, Ukifune Jinnai, weeks in advance to study and make special preparations to assassinate his rival Kenshin. Ukifune, who stood no more than three feet tall, concealed himself in the lower recesses of the Kenshin private lavatory on the day of the entry of the other Oda ninja. He clung perilously and at great personal discomfort for hours to the unsanitary understructure by a technique perfected by him known as
tsuchigumo.
⁴
Ukifune was accustomed to cramped living: it is said that in training camp he resided in a huge earthenware jar to prepare himself for such a situation. As Kenshin squatted in observance of his daily habit, Ukifune stabbed him with a spear that entered Kenshin's anus and continued through his body until it protruded from his mouth. The screams of agony brought Kenshin's ninja to the scene. But when Danj
o
[Kenshin's ninja chief] and the others arrived, Kenshin was dead, and his assassin was nowhere to be seen. Ukifune had dived under the reservoir of fecal matter where he remained motionless, breathing through a tube, until Danj
o
and his ninja left with the lifeless body of their master. Then he quietly slipped out of the lavatory and the castle to report the deed to Oda.
⁵

This tale has been repeated in many books and is all over ninja sites on the Internet, as if it were established historical truth. It's no such thing. The source on which Draeger and Smith relied was published four years previously, in 1965; that source's source was an undated manuscript.

Other sources (well reviewed by Turnbull) suggest that Kenshin had not been well for some time. A sickness several years earlier had left him with one leg shorter than the other, after which he walked with a stick. He also drank heavily: “This chaste and vegetarian Galahad of Japan liked wine as he disliked women,” in the words of Tokugawa Ieyasu's biographer, A. L. Sadler.
⁶
In the months before his death, an aide noted that he seemed to be getting worse by the day. A diarist recorded that he was very thin, with a pain in his chest “like an iron ball”; and that he often threw up after eating and had to drink cold water. The symptoms suggest cancer of the stomach. In the days before his death, according to Kenshin's heir, “an unforeseen bowel complaint took hold, and he could not recover.” The account continues: “On the ninth day of the third month, he had a stomachache in his toilet. This unfortunately persisted until the thirteenth day when he died.” Another source says his death at the age of forty-nine was due to “a great worm.” The most likely cause of death was a stroke brought on by straining to defecate, or in the words of Sadler, who had an eye for a colorful story, “he was struck down in his lavatory with an attack of apoplexy,” with absolutely nothing to back talk of a ninja assassin. In a poem found after his death, Kenshin seemed to think his life was nearing its end:

Forty-nine years;

One night's dream.

A lifetime of glory;

A cup of sake.

(Or in less condensed terms: “My forty-nine years have passed like a single night's dream. The glories of my life are no more than a cup of sake.”) No mention of an assassin in any of this.

What seems likely is that folklore filled the gap left by the death of a great man, myth replacing fact—an old Japanese equivalent of the conspiracy theories that became attached to the murder of John F. Kennedy and the death of Princess Diana. On the question of how the elements of the myth came together, there is no definitive answer, but there are a couple of pointers. First, ninjas did indeed hide in toilets, simply because toilets were among the outhouses that provided cover at night, though not
down
them. Second, Kenshin did suffer an “attack” in his toilet. The linking of these two facts to make a fiction seems to have occurred at least by the eighteenth century, because the story, minus the dwarf, is mentioned in an undated book (
Kashiwazaki Monogatari
), which was probably written in the eighteenth century because it is referred to in an early-nineteenth-century record of the Tokugawa shogunate (
Tokugawa Jikki
).
⁷
Some time after that, folklore added the dwarf, presumably to “explain” how a ninja managed to hide
down
, rather than in, a toilet. But it leaves some practical problems: How does a dwarf cling to the underside of planks “for a long time”? How could he be certain that Uesugi would come to the toilet within an hour, or however long he could remain suspended? If he dived under the shit, breathing through his scabbard, he did so to hide from curious eyes—but surely, inevitably, his scabbard would be exposed? How do Uesugi's retainers not realize where the assassin is, given that (a) he was not to be seen; and (b) there are no shitty footprints? Finally, how does a shit-covered dwarf sneak through a castle unnoticed?

Anyway, this was the version that Draeger (now dead) and Smith repeated, with embellishments, in their 1969 book, from where it escaped into the electronic ether.

Other campaigns followed Nagashino, driven by Nobunaga's need to crush rival warlords and cut the great temple of Ishiyama Hongan-ji from its network of provincial monasteries. That done, he could close in on the temple itself. It took ten years, on and off. In 1580, Hongan-ji surrendered, being burned by its defenders to stop it from falling into Nobunaga's hands undamaged. In today's
O
saka, hardly a trace remains of the temple that once ruled here. This success ensured that the state triumphed over religious institutions, becoming an expression of Nobunaga's own conviction; as Luís Fróis had said, he “despises the gods, the Buddhas and all other kinds of idolatry and pagan superstition.” From now on, religion would operate only with the consent of the state, rather as Russian Orthodoxy survived under communism in the Soviet Union, or Buddhism survived in Mongolia over the same period.

There remained one enemy who had to be crushed before all Japan became one: the Takeda leader who had survived Nagashino, Takeda Katsuyori. And that campaign also involved ending the independence of Iga and K
o
ga and their ninja villages.

9

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

Always draw what you have learned while scouting, and then report it to the strategist directly in person.

Ninja instructional poem

BY
THE
TIME
THE
SURVIVING
WRITTEN
EVIDENCE
WAS
RECORDED
, the ninjas of Iga and K
o
ga had been in operation for decades, perhaps a century or more. Doing what exactly, we may ask, in the absence of contemporary documents? The answer is, a great deal, because although many were no doubt landowning samurai administering their estates, others were ordinary, hardworking farmers. Besides doing their military training and field work, they built up medical expertise, prepared their houses for possible attack, fought far afield as ninja mercenaries, and went off on the equivalent of commando courses.

Training demanded a combination of physical and mental preparation, aims that the ninjas shared with the adepts of Shugend
o
, working out in the forested mountains. So, to research ninja commando training, it was to a mountain and a Shugend
o
adept that I turned.

I had seen K
o
z
o
Yamada the day before, when he was taking part in the dragon-god fire ceremony. Then he looked the image of the traditional adept, in white cloak, shoulder harness, and little monk's hat. Now he was the image of a modern one, though prepared more for hiking than commando training: conical sun hat, dark glasses, white sweat scarf, multi-pocketed waistcoat, backpack, heavy-duty gloves, a long machete-like knife on his belt, thick trousers, extremely serious walking boots. At seventy-six, he looked twenty years younger, while his light voice was that of a teenager.
Shugenja
, as the Shugend
o
students were called,
yamabushi
, and ninjas—the groups all overlap—claim that Shugend
o
practices have magical effects. In K
o
z
o
's case, it seemed to be true.

The knife was for what exactly?

“This is a
nata.
I use it to cut branches, and sometimes to fight bears.” He saw that I believed him, and set me straight. “We have deer, and boars, which can be dangerous. Lots of snakes, particularly at this time of year. No bears.”

With host Yoshihisa driving me and Noriko, K
o
z
o
guided us up a winding track deep into autumnal forest, where he was going to lead the way along a “training path,” a re-creation of the sort of course used by ninjas. As if on cue, a small snake writhed away through the fallen leaves. He picked it up and held it out to me. “It's harmless. The only one you have to look out for is the
mamushi.
If you get bitten, you have to get an injection, or you may die.” Snakes, in the words of Indiana Jones; why did it have to be snakes? I looked at my running shoes, compared them with his calf-length boots, and wondered how long it would take to get me injected. Luckily, until doing later research, I didn't know that every year some two thousand to three thousand people get bitten by
mamushi
, a sort of pit viper, of whom ten die. Nor did I know that the
mamushi
is the same species I had taken care to avoid a couple of years before on the little island of Amami
O
shima, where they call it a
habu.
So, in happy ignorance, I fell in behind K
o
z
o
, and—Jesus! There was another one, a meter long, and this one had a frog in its mouth. “Harmless,” K
o
z
o
said again, but it did leave me wondering about the significance of snakes in Shugend
o
-ninja training regimes.