Many years ago, I used to tell students of an interesting comment once made by ninjutsu teacher on one of our walks late at night after training. I was continuously probing with questions about what a ninja really was. I wanted to move on from my Western stereotype ideas, and closer to the authentic truth as to who the ninja were from the grandmaster’s view of history.

He told me that historically, the ninja was a bringer of good luck. Just being in an allied samurai general’s presence was the major benefit the ninja offered.

I did not know what to make of that.

I thought of ninja as spies, underground resistance fighters, intelligence gatherers, but as “bringers of good luck?”

Logically, a ninja could give you the power and vision and resources of every other person in his or her network. Subsequently he or she would have all the combined knowledge of what was happening in the world “behind the curtains” of public vision. 

A ninja could also have a bigger approach to solving your problem. He or she would be outside the restraints of conventional problem solving, being outside of the workings of authorized political power.

A ninja would be straightforward in giving you what you need to know. Others in your organization might out of fear of political consequences only tell you what they think you want to hear.

Obviously that is all true. but Hatsumi Sensei was talking about something on beyond the conventionally reasonable expected answers when he spoke of his teacher’s revelations to him.

There is a “beyond logic” way the ninja’s friendship would bring good fortune. The ninja teacher said that just being there at ones side was the ninja’s benefit. Some people are just magically powerful and helpful to have around. Their presence alone  is a gift and a blessing.

Could you imagine a person so special in your eyes, whose presence like an angel would enhance your life and assist you to get to your goals if only you got to spend more time around him or her?

I certainly have a few such people in my life, I am fortunate to say. I like to set up life so that I have good access to such people whose knowledge, care for me, understanding of my goals, and personal big vision helps spur my progress in life. Just being with them seems to encourage magically the advancements I need in my life.

How about you? Is there a ninja angel in your life?

Two young men in Texas – Patrick Tow and Rayford Outland - decided to do a History Fair high school project about ninjutsu training and my work. After gathering information from my books, DVDs, and the internet, their teacher asked for more detail and urged them to write to me personally with some more questions.

If you might be interested in some minor points about my life and how I ended up where I did, previous questions 5-8 and the answers follow the previously answered 1-4.

9. Why is it that ninja are often completely ignored in today’s history books (like textbooks, for instance), yet the books go on and on about the samurai for pages? Weren’t both ninja and samurai just about as interesting and important as each other?

The ninja were important in the 1500s and early 1600s, but once the Tokugawa family shoguns ruled a unified Japan, the ninja faded into the background of history. There was no possibility for a resistance movement, and perhaps no need for one. Japanese people forgot about the impact of the ninja families in the peaceful times of the 1700s and 1800s.

After that, many complicated things happened in the political scene of Japan in the late 1800s and early 1900s, after America forced Japan to leave isolation and enter the world of commerce and colonialism. When those of the early 1900s Japanese military industrial complex needed to build up the Japanese people’s sense of nationalism, in order to get them to support the imperial Japanese government’s plans for expansion into greater Asia, the ideal of the samurai selflessly serving the emperor was used to inspire the army. The ninja ideal, on the other hand, was too family and community oriented, making the building of a nationalized army and navy a difficult thing, and so the ninja ideal had to be reviled and portrayed as a negative or selfish thing.

10. How did you meet your wife Rumiko?

To support myself financially during the 1970s years I lived in Japan to study ninjutsu, I did advertising and movie and TV work. That kind of work allowed me to be paid well while still having the time to follow Hatsumi Sensei around all the time.

Rumiko had just graduated from Jochi Daigaku (Sophia University) in Tokyo, originally coming from Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu, and was working for one of the companies I did film, voice-over, and creative writing contract work for. She began to help me with translations that assisted me to read Masaaki Hatsumi’s books, and soon joined me in her own training in ninjutsu with Hatsumi Sensei herself.

11. What was the Shadows of Iga Organization all about?

The Shadows of Iga Ninja Society was the means I used in the 1970s and 1980s – long before videos, DVDs, and the internet – to promote the martial arts as I had studied them from Togakure Ryu Grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi. We used to publish a newsletter-magazine and schedule of seminars and workshops around the world.

The Society is pretty much dormant these days, now that we have schools and DVDs that teach the methods I studied. I also feel it is more important in our current times of unsure social, political, financial, and internationally uneasy states to emphasize studying the much more practical To-Shin Do approach to making the teachings of classical ninjutsu work for students around the world. Nonetheless, many of my top students also study with me in earnest the classical ways of Japan’s shinobi warriors under the inspiration of what began in America as the Shadows of Iga Ninja Society in the mid-1970s.

Two young men in Texas – Patrick Tow and Rayford Outland - decided to do a History Fair high school project about ninjutsu training and my work. After gathering information from my books, DVDs, and the internet, their teacher asked for more detail and urged them to write to me personally with some more questions.

If you might be interested in some minor points about my life and how I ended up where I did, questions 5-8 and the answers follow the previously answered 1-4.

5. What makes ninjutsu and To-Shin-Do different from other martial arts?

Mechanically and technically, we have a very unique way of moving in position-in-space and action-in-time. This method allows our techniques to work even when we are up against one or more aggressors who might have technically superior strength and more violent fighting anger. We do not go to position and unload; we use the positioning process as a major significant part of our defense and counter attack. That allows smaller defenders the opportunity to win and get home happy and healthy.

As a second big difference, psychologically or spiritually we emphasize high reliance on self-knowledge. Know yourself and know the ways that others are most likely to trick or goad us into unwinnable situations based on our psychological or personality blind spots. Our 5-element training shows us the value of many possibilities for many situations and many different personalities. I think this is most unusual in martial arts training, though it is an important core part of our study in the To-Shin Do adapted from ninja taijutsu.

6. What would our lives be like here in America if you hadn’t brought us ninjutsu?

Well, most people do not like to read what appears to be a person praising himself, so this is awkward for me. But OK - since I was asked directly – I’ll give the blunt immodest truth. (A friend reminds me, “It ain’t bragging if it’s the truth, you really are that good, and you really do know that much.”) 

Without my bringing ninjutsu to America, we in the world martial arts community would lack a well-respected earned-reputation spokesperson that advocates a practical protector approach to stopping violence, based on handling dangerous aggressors with intelligent tactics informed by heroic compassion from a big-picture perspective. All we would hear in the martial arts media would be pretty conventional thoughts on either building discipline through martial arts (…valid but certainly not unique; don’t all martial arts claim this?), or questions of who is the cruelest dominator in the cage or ring (…though I am of course proud of our winning competitors who rely on their To-Shin honed skills).

What makes our To-Shin Do martial science unique is our heavy emphasis on how to get home happy and healthy and hugging the ones you love every day of the year. It’s how to be a power for good, based on martial experience as outer armor and deep inner exploration as personal empowerment. This is not about glorifying brutal or cruel behavior or “fighter” mentality. We advocate turning out more protectors in a world that already has too many predators.

7. What have you been doing recently?

At this phase of my career, I enjoy promoting our member schools and our DVD study programs through my www.SKHQuest.com and www.DaytonQuestCenter.comweb sites.

I am also doing more work to encourage other martial artists to consider running full-time professional SKH Quest affiliate To-Shin Do schools of their own. We need more people sharing this ideal with their home communities.

On a personal level, I continue to travel and study in earnest with Asian teachers of the spiritual and psychological sciences that lead to more self knowledge and a bigger truer picture of the nature of reality and the role of the individual human in that reality.

I also encourage all of those who teach our To-Shin martial art to get out there and take the risk of exposing yourself to something new and threatening. Don’t just stay home and practice what you already know. Explore and grow, and then share your insights with all the rest of the To-Shin community. I did just that when I was in my formative years of my 30s, 40s, and even into my 50s. Keep growing.

8. The ninja everyone know about in popular culture really are nothing like the ninja of reality. Do you wish that true ninja would play a bigger role in this aspect of society?

Movies and popular culture have fixed on the idea of the ninja as ultimate villain. This stereotype has been going on for a long time. It is an equally bad image in the West just as it is in the popular culture of Japan.

My experience of ninja training in Japan, back in the days of the 1970s when Masaaki Hatsumi was still teaching ninjutsu to a few of us (as opposed to budo taijutsu to a huge following today ), was very different from the ninja movie stereotype. I learned that the ninja were warriors willing to endure anything for the sake of their families and communities – hence the name ninja, which means “person who endures”. It is too bad that the world has not seen much of the real ninja heart in the movies. Perhaps someday there will be a ninja movie that tells the real story.

Answers to the next questions in the series will be published soon:

9. Why is it that ninja are often completely ignored in today’s history books (like textbooks, for instance), yet the books go on and on about the samurai for pages? Weren’t both ninja and samurai just about as interesting and important as each other?

10. How did you meet your wife Rumiko?

11. What was the Shadows of Iga Organization all about?

12. We realize this may be a touchy subject, but we heard you were recently expelled from the Bujinkan’s list of authorized judan 10th Degrees. We would love to hear your personal take on what happened.