I don’t know if I’d portray them that way. Ninja were employed by samurai, and some ninja were samurai themselves. Tokugawa Ieyasu was famous for his spy network and the number of ninja he controlled.
I saw a kid get hit in the forehead with a throwing star when we were about 10. He was sitting on the low pull-up bar on the playground and another kid was showing off his throwing stars that he had bought at the swap meet. The kid sitting on the pull-up bar was declaring to all present that the throwing stars weren’t real. Presumably to prove him wrong, the harried owner threw one at him from about 3 meters away. Improbably, it struck him almost dead center in the forehead and stuck there. He uttered a piercing scream and tried to look up at it with both eyes, resulting in a horrible grimace. Then when he tried to reach up with both hands and pull it out, he fell off the bar flat onto his back. Horrified and convinced we had just witnessed a murder, about 30 kids ran through the gate in a panicked shrieking exodus.
The victim was the hero of the primary school the next day when he showed up with only a small band-aid on his forehead.
So… effective in distracting and unbalancing an enemy/antagonist, definitely.
You, too, huh? Hurts being ninja’d…especially on ninjas. >_>
I can’t remember where, anymore, so no cite, I’m afraid, and it could very well be fiction… But I read, somewhere, of one group of ninja, after this convention was established, who did, occasionally, dress in the black pyjamas look - but it was deliberately to be seen. They’d work in teams, and one or two dressed as ‘ninja’ would act as a distraction while the main guy, who was in a more typical disguise, did his work. Which strikes me as being the only real way the black pyjamas look would work for a ninja - their usefulness for stealth is limited, and if you get caught wearing it, unless you’re infiltrating a kabuki or bunraku troupe, good luck bluffing your way into looking like you belong there. Although if you’re spotted, but not stopped, at least your face is covered.
Are you implying that the Samurai were gay?
I’ve done this before. Well, not with pliers or ninja stars but I once buried a hand scythe in a piece of wood and removed it by grabbing it with both hands and pulling as hard as I could. One of those lessons of youth.
When talking about throwing stars one should think in terms of the lbs per sq in of force that is transmitted to the point. If thrown at someone chasing you it would hurt like a mother if it lands solid. Think of it as a can of mace.
Maybe it is a nitpick, but ninja did not use nunchaku - nunchaku is an Okinawan weapon based on a rice flail. One used it to whack the rice harvest to separate the rice grains from the chaff (for dry cultivation of rice).
The Japanese conquered Okinawa and forbade the peasants from owning weapons, so they had to make do with farm implements like flails (nunchaku) and sickles (kama) and mill handles (tonfa). The story is that this is also why they developed hand conditioning, and breaking boards and so forth - this was allegedly to break thru the wooden armor of the Japanese soldiers.
As for weapons in “empty hand”, the character for the “kara” part of “karate” meant “china” - “China hand”. It was changed when Gichin Funakoshi brought karate to Japan, since the Japanese didn’t like the Chinese. It is only at this point that karate changed to a almost entirely weaponless art. In Okinawa (as with traditional jujitsu) the weaponless parts were always incorporated into a broader approach to combat training that included training with available weapons.
Regards,
Shodan
Not all of them, but yeah, homosexuality in Japan didn’t carry any negative stigma. Since warrior castes are the same all over the world, homosexual love ended up being considered to be the purest form of love, since it didn’t involve those icky deceitful unmanly wimmin.
So, not that proficient, then? 
The black-pyjama ninjas were made famous by the miniseries adaption of Sho-Gun. A long tedious boring show, which droppped 3/4 of the subplots and political intrigue and replaced them with pans across Japanese scenery and architecture.
But the one scene had a swarm of ninjas in the clasic black pj’s and ski masks coming over the walls and through the windows, to be (barely) fought off by Richard Chamberlain and friends. That pretty much started the western craze about ninjas and set the style. Before that, most westerners probably never heard the word “ninja”.
Throwing stars (and nunchuks) are illegal in Canada too - restricted weapons, in the same category as machine guns. I once closed a whole wing of an airport when the rentacops thought I had one in my carry-on. Apparently lead crystal is as black as metal on xrays. Because they were not real police, they had to shut down and call police in the event of a suspected illegal weapon. Nowadays, you probably can’t take cut glass or lead crystal in carry-on anyway, star-shaped or not.
Maybe Americans -the rest of the world (well, Australia and South Africa) got to watch this (even if it was dubbed into Zulu) and you may be familiar with a fellow called Bond? James Bond?
My friend was really into the ninja thing in the early 80’s and he had a few black, unsharpened stars that we threw at a fence a few times. But it got boring pretty quickly.
Do you have a cite for this? If what I’m reading on wiki is correct, they changed the name to karate from various other -te names, not that the character 空 used to mean something other than empty.
I remember a show called Wiseguy starring Ken Wahl about an FBI agent deep under cover. One story arc had an assassin Named Roger Lacoco who used 2-3 fairly large ball-bearings he could throw at the head. That seems more effective as a primary weapon because you could more easily kill someone with a temple shot.
I’ve played with shuriken off and on for a long time but never considered them to be much of a weapon. I always thought that if I actually hit someone with a shuriken, the next thing would be some very lightly wounded and incredibly pissed-off guy holding a shuriken in his hand and looking for a good place on me to put it.
On an associated topic, someone mentioned that they weren’t poisoned and that got me to thinking, what kind of poisons would ninjas (or doctors for that matter) have had in ancient Japan? I would think it would take a pretty good dose of most poisons to actually disable/kill an opponent. Did they have anything that effective prior to modern chemistry? The only thing I could think of might be fugu liver but I don’t know if that would actually work.
Testy
I have one good throwing star. At 10 feet I can stick it in a 2x12 deep enough that it would be enough to make a person stop and think about what there doing. If it hits you in the chest is it going to kill you? Hell no. But if you just have on a shirt, it is going to stick in you. It will hurt like hell. And if a person who can throw 7 of them at you with good aim is after you, you best take cover.
There are all sorts of plant poisons that would work. The problem is that they would work much too slowly to be any good in combat. Aconite, for example. Lethal dosage is small, but it takes a few hours to work.
Silenus
Thanks for this. Admittedly there are a lot of poisons that can be made from plants. I was more wondering whether ancient Japanese chemistry knowledge would be up to the job of extracting and concentrating them to the point where they would be effective in combat. Aconite, as you say, probably wouldn’t be too effective in a battle. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that would actually be effective.
Testy
I find it so hilarious that on any single damn thread about any Eastern religion/culture/military/whatevere, there are about fifty posters with nothing better to do than spout gibberish nonsense they “heard from somewhere.” Oh well. The other fifty posters are brilliantly correct, of course, but trying to filter hthrough the garbge is tough. I’ve studied a lot of Japanese and Chinese history, and there’s cartloads iof things I know nothing about, some because not much is known, and more often because there’s too much to even try to know it all But I still know enough to laugh at the /facerolling inanities posted throughout the thread here.
Alex_Champ
Sure, I agree that they’re no problem to carry around, but where do you get the “fatal” part? I suppose you might conceivably nick someone’s jugular vein with a spinning one or stab someone deeply enough to be fatal with a throwing spike. . . if you were close, and they weren’t moving, and they weren’t wearing heavy clothes, etc. Inflicting a fatal or even disabling wound seems so unlikely that carrying shuriken/shaken is not worth even the tiny weight of these things.
As an OBTW, I’ve seen a guy get hit with one of the spinning ones. It was a scalp wound and bled a good deal but didn’t distract him that much and certainly didn’t disable him. What it did do was really really piss him off.
Am I missing something here?
Testy
Testy: No, you have it right. They did exist, but they were primarily a distraction weapon. Ninja did weild actual throwing knives, which could be a bit more lethal.
On Ninjutsu: There was never a unified, authentic “ninja” martial art. In fact, most ninja probably didn’t even qualify as warriors by the standards of the day, although a good many were competent in the use of weaponry. If they studied them at all, they mostly studied the same combat arts as Samurai, but would not have been even remotely as good at them. Unarmed “ninjutsu” styles are almost certainly a pack of crap.
Non-samurai ninja would have been considered little more than peasant soldiers, although with a good skillset and more value as specialists. Samurai Ninja were often leaders of villages, and trained with samurai weaponry, of course.
Wakinyan: While I would definitely agree that your instructor was no doubt very skilled, I see evidence that anything like Ninjutsu actually survived in any present form. I also see very little evidence that he studied anything like a real “ninja martial art.” That doesn’t mean he’s not badass, mind you.
Ninja Garb: It’s totally unknown, and more or less no adequate desacription of ninja garb gives us anything save telling us that they wore disguises and used passwords or signals to identify themselves. While dark clothing would have been perfectly practical on some missions, we have no evidence of what they might have used.
Who/What were the Ninja?: We don’t really know, exactly. or rather, we do know, but it’s simply not a well-defined term. it could be applied to anybody eho used somewhat underhanded techniques, although most refer to the specialists of Iga and Koga. They were somewhat isolated, few in number, and relatively poor and unable to afford the same armies or defenses of other lands. Add in their disunited political structure, and it’s no surprise they consequently developed somewhat sneaky methods of fighting and defense. Other Samurai began hiring them as mercenaries, but both before and after their heyday others with similar skills existed.