The "NINJA" in modernity (summary)
Lecturer:Masato Mori
This paper attempts to figure out a sociality of Ninja, elaborating how Ninja has been interpreted in Japan's social context from the 1900s to 1980s. This exploration employs a discourse analysis of text of newspapers and published books. Ninja obtained a popularity in paperback series called "Bunko (文庫)" for boys in the 1910s. Two deference of characters of Ninja could be observed between the one performed in Kabuki dance and storytelling in the Edo period and one in the "Bunko" series. In the Bunko series, variety of Ninjutsu, the art of ninja, were introduced, and Ninja became younger than before: often they are boys in the Bunko paperback series as readers of the series were that generation. The 1910s also witnessed a new social attitude that understands Ninja from scientific viewpoints. This attitude echoed with an attitude which cope with psychic and supernatural phenomena with scientific view. However there were many people who were interested in old-fashioned supernatural phenomena such as ghost and monster. This article introduces two men, ITO Gingetsu and Fujita Seiko, who wrote about Ninja and Ninjutsu in the early 20th century, to discuss that the figure of Ninja was put the pre-modern and the modern public interests, and further that the juxtaposition of pre-modern attitude and modern attitude is a uniqueness of Japan's process of modernisation. The arts of Ninja were often performed in Misemono-goya, a show tent, that inherited a legacy of public leisure facility and performing arts in the Edo period, in the 1930s. During wartime in the late 1930s, Ninjutsu and Ninja were re-interpreted as an incarnation of Japanese spirituality of patience as Chinese character of Ninja's 忍 means the patience. FUJITA worked as a spy of a Japanese troop in China using Ninjutsu. This paper is concluded how Ninja became a national icon of culture of Japanese-ness in the 1980s when a series of Ninja film make a smashing hit in the USA.