History of the Ninja

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Home of the Ninja

Iga is considered the home of the ninja, and their history is intertwined with the history and developments of ninjas. It was a cold day, and my meanderings through ancient forests guarded by castles and training temples was crisp indeed. There was practically no one around and I soon saw why – nearly everything was closed until the weekend. After hearing this bit of disappointing news (I was planning on spending the entire day in Iga to save some money on train fair), I decided to walk through the ninja museum. This wasn’t like a typical American museum, but was instead an old ninja house. It had trap doors, secrete observation rooms, places to hide weapons and tools, revolving walls, the whole nine yards. There were many women donning traditional ninja garb, albeit a more flamboyant color than the typical dark navy blue, whose job it was to show how ninja’s operated the various traps. For all extents and purposes, they are modern day ninjas who don’t assassinate people.

After the guided tour, I was freezing, and pretty hungry. So I asked the ticket vendor where a good place to get ラメン、そば、or うどん (ramen, soba, or udon) was. Japanese take hospitability very, very seriously. Imagine if it was your job to sit in a small cubical, dressed in relatively thin ninja clothing, and walk around helping tourists outside in the middle of winter. When I asked in Japanese where a ramen restaurant was, the woman said “wait just a minute” and literally ran away. 5 minutes later, she returned with another woman, and both were running at top speed up the hill. Completely winded, the other woman proceeds to tell me in English that she wrote a local restaurant guide (although she may have meant that she brought one, not sure). She then proceeded to outline several restaurants in a 1 km radius, and tell me which ones were local, which were franchises, which had English menus, and which didn’t. She did all this while trying to catch her breath. I felt a bit overwhelmed, and thus kept bowing while expressing my thanks and calling them “nice people”. (ありがとうございます！矢指人です!（やさしひと）

Homemade Soba

I decided to hit up the closest, local soba shop, and it was quite obvious when I entered that this man wasn’t use to seeing foreigners in his shop at this time of year. It’s actually hard to tell it’s a restaurant from the outside, and if I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have thought it was a house and passed it by. When I entered he spoke to me (possibly asking if I were lost) and I’m afraid I couldn’t understand him. I said I wanted soba, and he asked me to sit down. The entire menu was in kanji, so I couldn’t really understand it, but I picked out a “warm soba basket” and waited for my soup. Once again, this was the outside style of eating, where you add wasabi and green onions to the soup sauce and then eat the noodles one slurp at a time. In case I forgot to mention, the respectable way of eating noodles in Japan is to slurp them up, using your chopsticks as a guide to keep the noodles from spraying sauce everywhere. Since slurping was a deadly sin in my house, I am far from mastering the technique, but I’m always certain to make loud slurping noises to show my appreciation of the meal. The soba was delicious, and everything on the plate was made from scratch. The noodles were made from beans right there in the shop – he even took out some beans to show me that he was making them fresh. And the wasabi was certainly homemade as well – it had garlic and ginger in it, and didn’t have the biting sting that store bought wasabi usually has. Nonetheless, it was delectably spicy. I really enjoyed the meal – I just wish there was more to it than a basket of noodles, sauce, and a tiny tiny bowl of brown rice. I thanked him for the meal, and bowed myself out of the store, making a note to show my friend that place when we returned.

After lunch, I meandered to an unnamed side street to drink in some edo style architecture and 7 beautifully constructed Buddhist and Shinto temples. After enjoying the temples, I meandered back towards the museums, only to discover that I had very little time before I was supposed to meet my friend.

Local Tea Shop

バンクオエン(bankuoen), was the name of the tea shop I was supposed to be meeting my friend at. After wandering lost up and down several unnamed side streets, and asking several friendly locals for help, I finally found the shop. Freezing, numb, and tired, I walked into a warm local shop that my friend had driven me to the night before. The shop owner もらいさん (Morai-san) is a nice old man who showered me with free gifts, free 魔茶(まちゃ)(macha), and sweet bean candies. Macha is a very bitter green tea used in tea ceremonies, and enjoyed with sweet bean cakes. I was introduced to macha on my last visit to Japan, and I really enjoy the process of consuming a strongly bitter drink with a sweet dessert. My friend was a bit late, so I enjoyed the company of locals in the shop, and expanded my conversational Japanese. The conversation turned to birthdays (Japanese commonly and unabashedly ask people’s age), when I discovered I had made a relatively serious mix-up in vocabulary. 単語(たんご) (tango) means “vocabulary” in Japanese and 誕生日(たんじょうび)(tanjoubi) means “birthday”. So for the last two days, instead of saying “My Japanese is terrible, there are many vocabulary words I don’t remember” I had been saying, “My Japanese is terrible, there are many birthdays I don’t remember”. Once we realized my mistake, which I admitted to the room at large, we all had a good laugh. For the most part, everyone was very considerate towards me and appreciative of my attempts to use their language – even if I sometimes said incredibly silly things.

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Photos

Ninja Train
This is the train I took into Iga.

Iga-Ueno Castle
This castle stands well above the trees, on top of the mountain where Ninja's trained.

Iga-Ryu Museum (Ninja House)
This Ninja house is full of traps, secrete passages, and tricks. It is also made for short people.

Buddhist shrine
These small shrines to Buddha are dressed in red hats and scarves. People leave offerings of incense and tea.

Ninja Pose
Morai-san always takes photos with a ninja signal. He doted on me each time I visited his shop, giving me free tea and sweets.