Ninja (4 page)

I asked Tullio about the training. In summary, this is what he said: In Japan, mind and body are not separate. In the West, we often say it doesn't matter how you are outside, it is the inside that matters, the mind. But in Japan, that is not true. How you are outside matches how you are inside. If you are tall, strong, beautiful and rich, that is how you are inside. If you are weak, bent, diseased, that is how you are inside. You want to achieve some inner benefits? Well, you can do it by improving your body.

The idea is that whatever you do, it should take physical effort. When you walk from sacred spot to sacred spot, it's sort of like a pilgrimage, but harder. You can walk twenty or twenty-five kilometers a day over mountains, over rocks. There are often no paths. You may have a rope to climb down to worship a sacred spring or rock. It's a matter not of imposing pain for its own sake, but of doing something hard, and the harder it is, the greater the reward. So if it is done in winter, all the better. You know, Tullio told me, there is energy within us that we do not use. If you sit under a waterfall and it is minus ten degrees, what you feel is a surge of heat. That's the way your body reacts, if you don't die.

There is a whole universe of lore—religious, philosophical, literary—that you can do in advanced Shugend
o
, and an encyclopedia of magical gestures to be mastered and then performed hidden by clothing. Take the reading of the texts, he explained, which is mainly in kanji. But there is also a secret reading, with special Shugend
o
pronunciation, which is meant to be more powerful. Then you have Sanskrit mantras. In the Heart Sutra, for instance—he started a rhythmic, low-voiced chant,
Ya-te-ya-te-para-ya-te-parasan
—the sutra says, in effect, “Now I will teach you the greatest spell of all, the spell that conquers all passion, the spell that says, ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, there is no ear, no nose, no eye . . . '” Ultimately, this high-level esoteric practice is all about being reborn at ever higher levels until you become a Buddha and achieve enlightenment and enter nirvana.

How would this help a ninja with spying and fighting and survival? One thing is certain: If you, as a warrior, undertook even part of the training, you would emerge tougher in mind and body. Tullio knows because he has been through it. “You become completely estranged from everyday life. You are so exhausted you do not think anymore. You do not remember where you are from. This is the point at which you can rebuild yourself in a different way.” Tullio chose a computer analogy: “The experience
resets
you. I was told by a friend who had joined the Special Air Service, the British equivalent of the SEALs, that an SAS training course has the same effect. You emerge rebooted, refocused, ready for battle.”

Why would you, as a would-be
yamabushi
or shadow warrior, come to one mountain as opposed to another? Because it had a tradition of being sacred that was guaranteed by an oral history (or in rare cases a text) that led from master to master, right back to the time the mountain was “opened” by the very first religious adept to come there, the one who marked out the sacred spots. The more ancient the opening and the more eminent the opener, the better. The most eminent of all was and remains Shugend
o
's semi-mythical eighth-century founder, En no Ozunu, better known to historians of religion as En no Gy
o
ja, En the Ascetic.

En is a vital figure in Shugend
o
, because he was everywhere, or so countless traditions claim. “He's a sort of a wild card,” as Tullio put it. “If you issue certificates to qualified
yamabushi
, you have to legitimize your practice. You do this with an impressive foundation narrative, and there is no one more impressive as a founder than En no Gy
o
ja. That's why he is ‘everywhere.' Well, obviously he cannot possibly have been to all these places, although he is imagined as running and jumping from one to another. That doesn't matter. What matters is the impressiveness of the claim.”

So who opened the Forty-Eight Waterfalls? Why, En no Gy
o
ja, of course.

So the future ninjas joined the
shugenja
(as those who practice Shugend
o
are called) and other would-be curers and warriors and priests. They came here to train on the mountain ways—in effect, marking out commando routes and running and climbing them at speed and subjecting themselves to endurance tests, but also aiming to acquire purity of mind, with the hope of achieving magical skills, medical powers, and longevity.

Shugend
o
is alive and well, practiced by many groups all over Japan, as my guide, Noriko, was happy to tell me, because as mentor and fixer for films and TV channels she had explored many training areas, entered more temples and shrines than I knew existed, and met uncounted priests, martial artists, and ninja experts.

“My grandfather did Shugend
o
. He died from sitting under a waterfall.”

“What?”

“It happens all the time.” She sounded really casual.

“But
what
happened?”

“I don't know. It was long before I was born. He was forty-five. My father was five.”

“B-but . . . ,” I stuttered, “did he drown? Or catch a cold?”

“Well, it was December.” She was speaking to me as if surprised at my surprise. “It's religious training! If you don't believe in the religion, don't do it. It has to be tough, so obviously it was winter. If you go under a waterfall in summer, it's not training, it's called ‘nice.'”

That was half a century ago, but the traditions are still strong. My hosts in K
o
ka took us to a Shugend
o
fire festival, where, in an open space on a mountainside, a high priest in a green mantle led twenty elderly acolytes in honoring the spirit of the mountain. It deserved respect because this mountain, Iwao, had an eminent pedigree: It was one of three where the ninth-century founder of Buddhism's Tendai sect, Saich
o
, built temples and trained. A respectful audience of two dozen included five ladies in white, who would later offer light refreshments. There was much single-note, rhythmic chanting, punctuated by the sound of two conch shells being blown like bugles. Once upon a distant time I played the trumpet, so I tried one after the ceremony. It had a simple mouthpiece, and its sound was something between a hunting horn and a very resonant one-note fart, which could be briefly pushed up an octave if you felt ambitious. Everyone was in traditional costume—white shirt, baggy white plus fours, white bootees molded to divide the big toe from the other toes, a white cape, and a sort of harness with two red bobbles on the back. In the middle of the open area was a pyre of green cedar branches. After more chanting and conch blowing, a devotee picked up a bow and arrow and prepared to fire. For a moment I imagined the creak and twang of a longbow and an arrow zipping away over treetops, but it was a ritual bow and a toy arrow, which flopped to the ground after a couple of meters. Never mind; it did its symbolic job, which was to break the power of evil spirits. A ritual axe and a few ritual chops cleared the holy space of invisible trees.

Then, despite my skepticism, the ceremony began to get to me. The high priest threw some bits of wood and paper with writing on them onto the pyre. They were messages to the god, I discovered later, to be burned like a child's Christmas list. “It's very, very strange,” the priest told me, “but if you make a wish, it often comes true.” Candles lit long broom-like tapers, which were applied to the pyre. Smoke poured out along the ground, like liquid oxygen in a stage show, before the heat built, and the crackling branches slowly caught and the smell of fir spread like incense, and smoke billowed around us, turning the participants to ghosts and the cathedral of trees to a faded backdrop, all this happening to the hypnotic, regular beat of a chant.
Ma ka han ya ha la mi ta
. . . It was, I discovered later, a Japanese version of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra.

Afterward, I asked the high priest to explain. “We do this twice a year, in autumn and spring, wishing everybody good health and success in business. We are praying to a dragon god. A long time ago, a white snake was found here and someone heard the god saying that one should pay respects to it, because when snakes become old and die, they often become a dragon god. There is also
Fud
o
-my
o
o
”—a guardian god—“which you can see carved into the stone up there, where the shrine is. Have some sake.” He gestured to a tray held by one of the white-clad women. “It is the best sake, and now purified because it has been touched by the god, which makes it taste even better.”

The shrine, up a flight of steps, was a wooden side chapel of this natural cathedral, set on stilts. It shielded a rock face into which was carved a rough bas-relief of a man with a club over his right shoulder, as if he were a bodyguard ready to spring to the defense of the dragon god.

It was, of course, as much theater as many a Christian religious service. But I was touched by an element absent from Christianity: the sense of being present at something primeval, stemming from a time when we were awed by nature and were part of it and eager to please its good spirits and defend ourselves from the bad ones. The spirits were once part of life. For these worshippers, they still are. I'm no believer, but I could imagine myself believing that the good wishes and the smoke and the chanting and the shell blasts summon, or create, the very spirits that must be honored or banished. A Stone Age shaman would have understood. A shadow warrior would surely have been inspired.

All of which is to explain the background to the Forty-Eight Waterfalls, which in their foundation narrative reach back to the roots of Shugend
o
. You can't actually become a modern
yamabushi
or ninja by walking or running over these towering cliffs and through these looming forests nowadays, because the Forty-Eight Waterfalls is a protected area, but it doesn't take much to see the challenges they present from the safety of the paved path.

White waters foamed under little bridges and past massive boulders shaken loose by earthquakes. Falls tumbled into the sudden silence of pools that would have been crystal clear, except for the gray-green cloudiness left by the recent floods. Not far upstream, a sheer cliff and a series of falls, flickering in the dappled sunlight, once blocked the way, which today is carried on upward by a footbridge. It was entrancing. If I ever seek enlightenment, this is my sort of a place, especially on a still September day, with the heat of the sun reduced by leaves above and cool waters below, and absolutely no chance of defying death on some vertiginous rock face or overarching forest. I glanced down and saw, where rock gave way to rising undergrowth, the stone statue of a cow with red eyes.

“Yes,” said the guide, Kazuya Yamaguchi, raising his voice above the roar of rushing water. “When En was training here, he saw a red-eyed cow, which is how this place got its name—Akame, Red-Eye.”

This, apparently, was as far as ordinary people could go in the old days. But off to the right, clear of trees, was a petrified cascade of boulders. In heavy rain, like the storm that had hit earlier, it turned into a torrent that stripped it of vegetation. Now, after a few days of warmth and sunlight, it was a steep and rocky way leading up into the overhanging forest. That, said Kazuya, was where Shugend
o
practitioners and their ninja students could climb to get to the upper falls. Remember this place; we shall be returning here to follow the last of the ninjas as they escape the army sent in to eliminate them, some nine hundred years after En opened it up.

Another tale of ninja-like intrigue takes place during a famous rebellion in the tenth century by the warlord Masakado against his own family, the Taira. This was a time when local lords had all but broken free of the central government and set up what were in effect independent kingdoms with their own armies. Masakado was the most ambitious of these great landowners. He claimed that the sun goddess Amaterasu had actually intended him to be emperor, and set about making this a reality by seizing eight eastern provinces as a prelude to taking the capital, Kyoto, and ruling the whole country. He had one main obstacle, the opposition of his uncle Yoshikane. In early 940, Yoshikane attacked, devastating his nephew's lands, forcing him into hiding, but inspiring in him a fierce determination for revenge. The main source, the
Sh
o
monki
, describes the two armies skirmishing, without either gaining an advantage, until Yoshikane found himself a spy, in the form of one of Masakado's young servants. The teenager, a boy named Koharumaru, had been traveling back and forth to a nearby farm to visit relatives. Thinking that the boy might be a useful source of information, Yoshikane summoned him and put the idea to him, bribing him with a bolt of silk and talk of high office and all the food and clothing he could ever want. The young man happily accepted, his only condition being that he have an accomplice in the form of one of Yoshikane's farmhands.

So the two spies, ninjas in all but name, went to Masakado's residence as night watchmen, each carrying a load of charcoal. Over two nights, Koharumaru took his accomplice around, showing him the armory, Masakado's sleeping quarters, and the four gates. Yoshikane's man then returned to report to his boss.

All to no purpose. Masakado infiltrated Yoshikane's army, discovered the plot, executed the young servant, and was ready when Yoshikane's attack came. Yoshikane's soldiers dropped their shields and ran away, dispersing “like mice unable to find their holes, while those who gave chase showed the strength of a hawk leaving the hunter's gauntlet.”