9781422286739

What is Ninjutsu?

Creeping out of the shadows of history, the ninja peers at us from behind his or her trademark black face scarf that obscures everything but his or her eyes. Part hero, part villain, the ninja was Japan's very own superhero. Trained from childhood in the arts of war and deception, ninjas were at the height of their power during Japan's feudal age, from the 12th to the 17th centuries. The ninja's art, called ninjutsu, was not a single set of fighting techniques, like the modern Japanese martial arts of karate or judo. Rather, it was a composite made up of both armed and unarmed fighting methods drawn from native Japanese and Chinese traditions, as well as the “art of invisibility,” the techniques and ruses the ninja developed in order to avoid detection. WHAT'S IN A NAME? The Japanese language is extremely rich and subtle in levels of meaning, much of which is lost in translation. The subtlety occurs not only in the spoken language, with its elaborate levels of politeness, but also in the way it is written. Japanese is written by combining three different systems: the 20,000 or so kanji (pictographic characters)

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