Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth That Shatters the Bushido Mystique (11 page)

A sample of a Naganuma-Ryu manual, all of which is in mock Chinese.

Teachings inside a school could be divided into many different formats and normally followed a rising pattern of levels; there are multiple ways to divide the inner teachings of a school, so the following is a sampler to get the feel of how it would work.

The shinobi arts of Yoshitune-Ryu are divided into the following levels or gradients:

1.
法
Ho

2.
配
Hai

3.
術
Jutsu

Some of the shinobi arts that were transmitted by Chikamatsu Shigenori are not divided into sections; instead, each individual skill is divided into three, starting with the most basic teachings of that skill and moving to the highest level of achievement in that
specific
skill:

1.
初
Sho

2.
中
Chu

3.
後
Go

A similar concept is to have skills divided into three levels known as
shuhari
:

1.
守
Shu
– The form, the structure of a skill, and to follow the basics.

2.
破
Ha
– To break from the form, to start to allow the form to fall away, and the teaching to be used freely.

3.
離
Ri
– To be free of the form and to create using principles.

Remember, we must not imagine that the samurai is simply a brute, yet we must not see him as incapable of horrific acts; so to help to show the complexities of samurai thinking the following are examples of just how deep samurai thought could be:

本末

The concept of Honmatsu

Hon
本
—Meaning “source” or “origin,” this is the root of things, the focus and the center; an analogy would be the trunk of a tree and could be seen as internal.

Matsu
末
—Meaning “secondary,” this is the surface of all things, the outside; an analogy would be the leaves of a tree and it could be seen as things external.

The concept of
honmatsu
is to identify and discern between that which is an internal truth and the periphery, the reality of what is happening on the inside of a situation and that which is external—i.e., to identify if information is directly from the source or if it is secondhand, or to know a person’s true feelings above the feelings that they display publicly.

利
&
道理

Ri and Dori

Ri
利
– Constructed logic

Dori
道理
– Truth

A samurai and shinobi need to identify that which is a
truth
and that which is
constructed logic
. Ri is the false, the man-made information and the arguments constructed with an agenda, while Dori is the truth of a matter, the reality.

虚実

Kyojitsu

Kyo
虚
– Insubstantial

Jitsu
実
– Substantial

This term is heavily used in samurai and shinobi records; it is equated to
solid and weak, presence and the illusion of presence, a true attack or a feint
. The idea is that in warfare a strategic move is either a real and serious move or it is a feint. This is found in all warfare: the movement of troops, the positioning of forces, the outward structure of a fortress, etc. One of the main tasks of the shinobi is to discover if something is
kyo
or if it is
jitsu,
i.e., if it is fake or true.

There are numerous examples like the above, but only a few have been outlined here to show that the samurai followed the intellectual and the philosophical—yet at the same time, their primary aim was war.

Samurai and Shinobi Scrolls

When the period of the great wars came to an end, the samurai were concerned with the skills of their schools becoming useless and a massive increase in written scrolls erupted with the aim to preserve their teachings. At a basic level, samurai manuals are written to preserve the teachings when those teachings cannot be tested in warfare.

Samurai and shinobi skills are often given names and are collated together. This has led to the belief that samurai and shinobi scrolls are written in code, which is erroneous. Normally the name of a skill is poetic or has a visual trigger and the contents are taught by word of mouth—
kuden
. This means that often some samurai and shinobi scrolls are in the format of a
mokuroku
—a list. This list is unintelligible to a normal reader, not because it is in code, but because it is a list of skill
names
that the reader has not had the opportunity to have explained to them. For example, the
Bansenshukai ninja
scroll—
The Book of Ninja
in English—lists the following skills:

♦
Six points on preparations

♦
Three points of
Katsuraotoko no jutsu
(planting an undercover agent within a possible enemy)

♦
Three points of
Jokei jutsu
(planning an undercover attack in a tense or urgent situation)

♦
Two points of
Kunoichi no jutsu
when using
Kunoichi
(female agents)

♦
Two points of
Satobito no jutsu
(utilizing local people)

♦
Two point of
Minomushi no jutsu
(making a spy out of a local inhabitant)

♦
Two points on
Fukurogaeshi no jutsu—the skill of reversing a bag
(serving the enemy and then betraying them in the end)

♦
Three points on
Hotarubi no jutsu—the skill of fireflies
(the skill of writing a false letter to make an enemy’s retainer look like a betrayer)

♦
Two points on
Tenda no jutsu—spitting with your face skyward
(making the enemy shinobi convert to your side)

♦
Two points on
Shikyu no jutsu
—
the skill of relaxing a bowstring
(falsely defecting to the enemy’s side when you have been captured but in truth betraying them in the end)

♦
Two points on
Yamabiko no jutsu—the skill of echoes
(the relation between the commander and the
shinobi
and how they should have a good accord)

♦
Three points of
Mukaeire no jutsu
(infiltrating into the enemy long before they get close)

♦
Two points of
Bakemono jutsu
(disguise and transformation)

♦
Three points of
Katatagae no jutsu
(infiltrating the enemy when they attack at night)

♦
Three points of
Minazuki no jutsu
(infiltrating the enemy when they retreat from a night attack)

♦
Five points on the skill of
Taniiri no jutsu
(infiltrating the enemy sporadically)

♦
Two points on
Ryohen no jutsu
(using a prisoner)

♦
Two points on
Fukurogaeshi no jutsu
(making the enemy’s commander or retainer look like a betrayer by forging letters to his family or relatives)

The above skill list has had explanations added in brackets, but the original terms still remain poetic or cryptic. For example, the skill
Bakemono jutsu
means “the skill of the shape-shifter” and includes the idea of a ghost shape-shifter, making the skill sound supernatural to the uninitiated. This is while
Fukurogaeshi no jutsu
means “the skill of reversing a bag.” As can be seen, if there was no explanation to these teachings, it would be impossible to decipher what the skills actually were, some of which are extremely ambiguous. Of course, if the scroll is simply a mokuroku, or list, then the teachings are missing. Yet it is extremely important to understand that many scrolls were written down to capture and record these skills. For example, the above skills are all explained in detail in the actual
Bansenshukai
manual. Therefore, the first question when looking at a scroll is if it contains a full explanation or simply a list.

Something that is very much a staple part of Japanese life is to make a “Way” out of a subject, to give it an identity. Inside that identity the Japanese love to give names to skills. These names have various suffixes attached to them; the following is a selection of the most common, with their respective translations. However, these are normally considered less strong than the intention of the English word. It sometimes can be generally seen as “things to do with X” or “points and items to discuss about X.” So you often find that the Japanese themselves will swap between them even within the same manual:

♦
…ノ傳
–
no Tsutae
can be translated as “Tradition of ”

♦
…之事
–
no Koto
can be translated as “Art of ”

♦
…大事
–
no Daiji
can be translated as “Principle of ”

♦
…ノ術
–
no Jutsu
can be translated as “Skill of ”

The schools of the shinobi are much harder to pinpoint than straight samurai schools. There is an extremely difficult line to identify between a samurai school with a shinobi syllabus and a pure shinobi school, if such a thing ever existed. There are of course samurai schools with zero shinobi skill sets. However, many of them have some form of shinobi teachings. For example, Sekiguchi-Ryu Battojutsu—headed by the seventeenth inheritor Yamada Toshiyasu—have scrolls with a small selection of points on shinobi ways. These include poisons, sleeping powders, and shinobi torches. Even while smaller than other schools, they still are shinobi related.

Yamada Toshiyasu, the seventeenth inheritor of Sekiguchi-Ryu Battojutsu.

Other schools, such as Chikamatsu Shigenori’s Ichizen-Ryu and Natori-Masazumi’s Natori-Ryu, contained high levels of shinobi arts. Yet schools like Fujibayashi-Ryu,
^*
Iga-Ryu, and Koka-Ryu appear to have taught only, or predominantly, shinobi arts. However, in the main, military schools have a headquarters with a lineage that connects their students to the past. The two schools that seem to fall outside of this theme are predominantly shinobi schools, which only add to the confusion. Iga-Ryu and Koka-Ryu are famous for being shinobi schools; however, they have no central organization and no unified direct lineage. They do not share the same teachings between their incarnations. That means that the terms Iga-Ryu and Koka-Ryu appear to be used in the literal sense, that is, they are considered “flows of tradition from Iga and from Koka.” In most cases their teachings are passed on from master to student and attached to another school of military arts. It is likely that a samurai would study a “standard” school and then study the teachings of Iga and Koka, which would add shinobi expertise to their skill set. These two schools have varying lineages and histories, and appear to be branches of Iga and Koka shinobi skill sets.

People in Samurai Life

Samurai is a generic term for a thousand years of history and a very stratified social system. When dealing with samurai history there are certain words that continue to appear and certain subsections start to form. The classification of samurai and samurai life is a vast subject; therefore, the following is a basic outline of some of the elements found within it. Each title can have many variations depending on dialect and the ideograms used, and even the geographical location, but most importantly, chronology has a drastic effect on samurai terminology—therefore not all terms existed at the same time.