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Thread
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What secrets lurk in the filecards?
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04-01-2011, 03:35 AM
zuludelta
EQ-Viper
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 4,343
Quote:
Originally Posted by
blackrazor1
The people that claim Koga lineage never got famous (except Frank Dux, but he's considered a fraud for all his secret agent claims). I don't believe there are any koryu ninja schools, but there koryu martial arts that have ninjutsu techniques as part of their curriculum.
[groan!]Don't even get me started on Frank Dux.
But yeah, the thing is, if you ask many serious martial arts historians, the widely acknowledged conclusion is that ninjutsu, as a formally distinct and codified collection of martial arts and espionage techniques, probably didn't survive past the Edo Period, unlike many of the other koryu martial arts. Whereas all the other Japanese and Okinawan martial arts survived in some form during the relative peace of the Edo Period and the early 20th century (either transformed into sport, absorbed into religious/ascetic practice, or incorporated into family/community tradition), without the extended civil wars of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, feudal lords' demand for a full-time cadre of espionage agents declined and so did ninjutsu. Techniques that are likely similar to that employed by the medieval ninja are taught in some koryu martial arts schools (
Tatsumi-ryū Hyōhō
teaches the art of
monomi
-- the art of surveillance and observation -- as part of its advanced curriculum, for example) though, and are probably the closest surviving "relatives" of the real thing.
But like I said, the most reliable evidence of medieval ninjutsu's existence past the late 19th century was the late Fujita Seiko (who wasn't an infallible or 100% reliable source, either), but he didn't really teach much outside of the Nakano School (Imperial Japan's premier center for military intelligence and counterintelligence training), and even there, a lot of the unarmed fighting techniques taught were actually based on Daito-ryu jujutsu and similar arts which emphasized grappling.
A lot of "modern" ninjutsu is really just an attempt at recreating what medieval ninjutsu would have been like (nobody says that on the school pamphlet, though
). Some schools, steeped in history and a knowledge of koryu martial arts, are better at this than others and are more "authentic" in a sense, while a lot of others are just "bullshido" (a derisive term in the martial arts community to refer to martial arts built on unsubstantiated claims and outright fabrications). But since we don't really have a surviving and/or confirmed primary source for the art, there's really no way of telling definitively who has it right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
blackrazor1
As you know, many of the most famous "ninja" in history were known samurai. Hattori(sp?) Hanzo being one of them.
Heh. The romantic notion of the samurai and ninja as polar opposites is probably because their opposition looks so good in movies, posters, and novels. In many ways, they were really just opposite ends of a single spectrum, samurai on one end, ronin in the middle, and ninja at the other end. Warriors could inhabit the whole spectrum through their careers (a warrior might start out as a samurai, become a ronin after his master's death, work as a ninja while being a ronin, and then become a samurai again if he takes up after a new daimyo).
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