Let’s start with the premise that most people think ninjas are cool; especially kids.
Now walk past any strip mall in America and you will see every variety of Tae Kwon Do (sp?), Karate, Jui-Jitsu, MMA, boxing, etc. school/dojo, but none are dedicated to ninjitsu. Why not? If I had to enroll a kid in a martial arts program, it would seem like there would be a coolness factor to going to The Ninja Academy, yet somehow this idea has missed everyone, or has it? I have personally never seen one and I would think the costume alone would be worth the price of joining. Is it just that ninjas are a big joke in the martial arts community? Or is there something about it that makes it so ‘advanced’ that you have to learn other martial arts first? (Sort of like how you have to learn to fly fixed wing aircraft before you can get a helicopter license).
It would seem to me that even the very obese kids who want to take a martial art for self defense would gain an advantage in the eye hand coordination of being able to throw objects accurately at a bully and make use of objects around them as weapons if needed (at least that’s what I think of ninjas as doing). So what’s the straight dope, because you can’t tell me there wouldn’t be a market for this?
It is because ninjas are a big joke in the martial arts community.
Your idea of a ninja–a guy in a black costume who is a master martial artist–is completely wrong. Ninjas were just spies, and it would be kind of dumb for a spy to wear a distinctive constume, now wouldn’t it? And they weren’t master martial artists, because if you’re a spy and you have to fight then you’re already screwed.
I’ve read that the origins of the black-pajamas ninja costume come from the conventions of Japanese theater. Stagehands can be on stage at any time, and they’re dressed all in black so as to be unobtrusive, but they’re still visible, so the convention is for the audience to just ignore them. Well, some playwright made a play with ninjas in it, and achieved the effect of making them “invisible” by dressing them as stagehands: From the audience’s point of view, they came out of nowhere, because they never expected the stagehands to interact directly with the actors.
The most common attire for real ninjas was to dress like beggars. Though of course they’d also dress differently, if it would work better for the particular mission.
In addition to teaching kids how to fight with swords and throw shuriken, the rest of the training is just brutal–teaching them how to run up a wall or jump off the roof of a 2nd story building ends up with a lot of injuries, and that’s kind of hard to explain to the parents. All that tumbling and falling is usually a lot more punishment than most kids are willing to put up with, and it’s really hard getting the parents to sign off on the waiver that gives you permission to teach the kids how to use poison.
Kenjutsu is more precisely the study and practice of fighting with a katana. The contrast is to kendo, which is also studies katana combat, but is a little more stylized, like modern-day fencing is to actual longsword combat. Kenjutsu is (or at least claims to be) truer to the old style samurai sword training. Still, there was a hell of a lot more to samurai training than simply sword training, and the accuracy of modern kenjutsu is debated. Personally, I think fairly well of it, but to claim that it’s not a subject of some controversy would be misleading.
I have seen martial arts schools that advertise themselves as “ninjutsu” academies. I’m not really qualified to judge how much of a joke they are in the martial arts community, but my impression is that they are a big, big, big joke.
Why would you tell an insurer you’d be training kids to use edged weapons? Haven’t there been training methods for thousands of years to train with that don’t require you actually use the sword? Like kali sticks of appropriate weight and length or better yet, an actual training sword?
Isn’t “samurai” just a term for the military nobility in feudal Japan? If so, asking why there are no samurai schools is like asking why there are no knight schools: because you don’t become a nobleman by going to school. But even if you wanted to learn to do all the things that a knight or samurai normally did, this would involve a heck of a lot more than combat training, including learning skills which are no longer useful, practicable, or even fun in the modern world.
Looks like a run-of-the-mill fencing and swordplay school to me. Where are the classes in socage, serjeanty, enfeoffment, frankalmoigne, and pimp tenure?
When I was 15 I started taking lessons at a ninjitsu dojo a friend located precisely because we thought being a ninja would be really cool. We were interested in trying martial arts and when we discovered that ninjitsu was really something you could learn we were immediately sold on it.
I don’t think it’s well respected by other martial artists, but I don’t see what that has to do with opening a location at a strip mall and attracting neighborhood kids. So basically I don’t have an answer for Yarster - I think it’d be a great way to draw in business.
By the by, my ninjutsu dojo was in the guy’s barn and almost everybody in class was 30+. Nobody had any interest in martial art as a sport, they were all very interested in it as a practial self defense. Most of what we did was joint locks and other pain based techniques… I don’t think they ever called them pressure points but I forget the word they’d use.
We occasionally did work with knife fighting but it was very self defense based; the primary point of the lesson was that you were likely to get all cut up and might die but if you have no chance here’s your best ninja technique to get your assailants knife away, etc.
We did the same thing with guns once, but obviously that was general ninja technique applied to a handgun, not the ancient 1000 year old ninja technique for dealing with pistols.
I believe they do use a wooden sword at the beginning. They eventually have to graduate to something that actually cuts and it chills the blood to think of some of the MA people I’ve known waving a giant razor blade around.