I’ve met a few people that claim to have studied something with a direct lineage from the ancient ninja. I suppose they might have been incredible badasses but they certainly didn’t come across that way in the dojo. Maybe it was “too dangerous to demonstrate.”
I’ve also read a few books by that guy who claims mastery of ninjutsu, hatamori or something like that and an American who supposedly trained with him. Neither of those impressed me as any kind of serious buttkicker. Just my two cents on the whole ninja-worship thing.
Certainly any local trainers you see advertising “ninjutsu” are definitely a pack of crap. Wakinyan’s teacher’s teacher was quite famous as a master of martial arts and learned from a man considered to be possibly the best in the world at the time. What I don’t believe was that any of them studied ninjutsu. Doesn’t mean, of course, that I would want to meet either of them in the ring unless I had an UZI.
I hear ya on the ring thing. An ass-whoopin is painful regardless of what it’s called.
If there ever was an official, standardized sort of martial art for the ninja, I wonder what it would have been like. Some flavor of JiuJutsu maybe? Or just a “street-fighting” kind of thing? Considering their jobs as spies and assassins, I wonder how lengthy their training was, and in what?
