HI
I think the straight sword was more a creation of
Steve Hayes in the late 70's and early 80's. He ghost
wrote a book called Ninjutsu history and traditons
which was a butchered version of a book by his teacher
Hatsumi masaaki called Sengoku Ninpo Zukan which is a
wonderful work on ninjutsu. Its a shame he wrote
something that is only 50% accurate
The ninja were not all alike, in fact depending on
there location and period in history that each school
exisited there skills could be greatly different. For
instance there is one school recorded that used young
girls to sleep with passing high ranking samurai to
use sex for information, they have no fighting skills.
Then there are schools such as Iga ryu which would
have had amassive variety of skills fomr Taijutsu
(jujutsu) to spear, sword, maybe even explosives at
some point.
As for holding doors open.
Many of these schools would have had items they could
use for opening doors such as the kunai, and also
metal spikes that could lock a door shut ot keep it
open by 'nailing' it into place.
Caltrops when made of metal are called Tetsubishi and
when dropped always fall with one spike upwards. there
are also natural plant seeds that worked the same
(forgot the name).
Many ninja things are not exclusive to the ninja.
Samurai would involve the same items as well if
needed. Also some skills are not solely ninja only.
For instance the negoro ryu of Ninjutsu was a school
that specialised in the use of the gun, but so did
some samurai schools. This school just made itself a
specialist in this field.
Today ninjutsu is as good as dead, there are many good
historians and even some practioners in the modern
aspects of the art. What can be classed as old style
ninjutsu is long gone, and I speak of this as an
instructor of the Bujinkan dojo which pushed the
Ninjutsu boom in the 80's. It is a long time now since
I pushed ninjutsu aside and just look on it now as a
area of interest for reading. I prefer the samurai
aspects of the bujinkan
Anything you see in a western movie that involves
ninja is as good as 95% inaccurate, japanese movies
etc are also not accurate.
Paul
--- samurai_dokoro <
samurai_dokoro@...> wrote:
---------------------------------
I read the ten misconceptions about the samurai. the
one that talks
about the ninjas fascinated me. it's only now that i
learned that
ninja-to swords are of hollywood creation, and so did
i learn that
ninjas do not only rely on shuriken for throwing barbs
but also use
knives, etc. my question is that is it really true
that ninjas also
use steel bars to pry open shut and locked doors? is
it also true
that they use caltrops to injure or even kill their
pursuers?
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