Ninja AD 1460-1650

Warrior 64
By Stephen Turnbull
Colour Plates by Wayne Reynolds
Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2003
ISBN 1-84176-525-2
64 Pages, Softbound

Reviewed by John Prigent

Who can resist a book about the legendary Ninjas of Japan? I certainly couldn’t! As Osprey rightly points out, Stephen Turnbull is the leading English-language authority on medieval Japan and the samurai warriors, and here he tells us about a sub-class of them. The Ninjas in fact rather resembled today’s Special Forces, though the latter are not usually thought of as assassins – a Ninja speciality, according to popular legend, though they undertook sabotage missions to spread dismay among the enemy and also acted as assault troops.

The popular image of Ninjas is summed up by those black-clad figures descending on ropes in the film You Only Live Twice. Truth, however, is stranger than fiction. The real Ninjas tended to come from two particular provinces of old Japan, where there were Ninja villages whose children were trained from an early age. No, they couldn’t fly as some legends would have us believe, but they did have special techniques for climbing walls and crossing obstacles. The whole story is here, with great colour plates to show some intriguing features of their lives and exploits.

To cap it all, Japan even has Ninja museums and surviving houses with anti-Ninja features. Stephen Turnbull gives us photographs of some of these, and the plates include layouts so readers can follow the story of an attempted assassination!

This is one to fascinate every reader, not just those with a particular interest in Japanese warfare. Very highly recommended!