My interest in the Ninja stems from my study of Tae Kwon Do as a teenager. The small group of friends I was skateboarding and working with took Tae Kwon Do lessons at a local dojo, Sun Duk Choi lead the classes. It was a time of pummeling, beating the crap out of each other. I really enjoyed taking Tae Kwon Do but I wasn’t really strong or as skilled as some of my friends. I remember, our dojo fought in a city wide “light contact” tournament. Light contact meant pulling kicks and punches. If the referee deemed your strikes as anything more, you were penalized points or forfeited the match. I did well and brought home a trophy after fighting several opponents in my skill class.
I found out about the Ninja from their weaponry. And further study made me realize they were like professional soldiers and assassins. They could be hired to take out un-wanted enemies by rival clans. I had a few books on their style of fighting and the philosophy of their ways.
It’s funny as I look back on my life, what I studied, my interests is where I ended up or part of the reason why I went where I did.
The thing with the ninja was that they practiced skills no one anywhere did. Their skills by design were esoteric in the sense that they controlled themselves within nature. They understood the senses of human beings and capitalized on the senses for stealth and surprise. The ninja were shadow warriors. They weren’t interested in popularity or ruling anyone except themselves. Their craft was for hire and their skill set was highly specialized in the fact that they had a command over their existence with nature and knowledge of how humans senses behaved and act. They didn’t constrain themselves in rules and laws of man, nature and human behavior were their guidelines so to speak. Understanding nature and human spirit, this was the way of the ninja.
I really like the idea that the small clan of martial artist warriors as professionals. I thought they were the epitome of martial arts. The understanding of their environment of nature of human emotions was just on a different scale even today. They are highly misunderstood as a sect of the Japanese esoteric arts. Everything that I studied about them was interesting. Even today the ninja are highly misunderstood and have not been taken advantage of in the media, cinematic entertainment. What has been reported about them is highly inaccurate.
Ninjutsu was just flat out interesting. The more I studied them the more I realized how deep this secret society was, and how much I would never know about them. Their command of the human spirit within nature is what really made me interested in the ninja.
As a teenager, my aunt had taught me how to sew on a machine. Already I had made pants for snow surfing and some for going out to bars and dancing. I wanted to be like the ninja as much as I could be and ended up sewing my own ninja clothes. I had hidden pockets and it was a suit of all black. This was in the early 80s. I remember going out for missions so to speak and all I wanted to do was see if I could travel on foot through my neighborhood in my black suit without being detected. I was a teenager and had no idea at the time how I could’ve been taken for a burglar or a thief by the authorities if I was caught on my night missions. More than likely, I would’ve just been arrested for sneaking around, for being suspicious and probably the police would have tried to link me to burglaries and crimes in the area. Back in those days I would have been mistaken as a “cat burglar” Thats what they called thieves in black back then. Today, I would’ve been shot because I carried a blow gun and a short bow and arrows. I had a small sword and no one was gonna believe me that I was just practicing on my own this Japanese form being a shadow warrior. I never committed any crime, I didn’t do anything except role play.
I found out about the Ninja from their weaponry. And further study made me realize they were like professional soldiers and assassins. They could be hired to take out un-wanted enemies by rival clans. I had a few books on their style of fighting and the philosophy of their ways.
It’s funny as I look back on my life, what I studied, my interests is where I ended up or part of the reason why I went where I did.
The thing with the ninja was that they practiced skills no one anywhere did. Their skills by design were esoteric in the sense that they controlled themselves within nature. They understood the senses of human beings and capitalized on the senses for stealth and surprise. The ninja were shadow warriors. They weren’t interested in popularity or ruling anyone except themselves. Their craft was for hire and their skill set was highly specialized in the fact that they had a command over their existence with nature and knowledge of how humans senses behaved and act. They didn’t constrain themselves in rules and laws of man, nature and human behavior were their guidelines so to speak. Understanding nature and human spirit, this was the way of the ninja.
I really like the idea that the small clan of martial artist warriors as professionals. I thought they were the epitome of martial arts. The understanding of their environment of nature of human emotions was just on a different scale even today. They are highly misunderstood as a sect of the Japanese esoteric arts. Everything that I studied about them was interesting. Even today the ninja are highly misunderstood and have not been taken advantage of in the media, cinematic entertainment. What has been reported about them is highly inaccurate.
Ninjutsu was just flat out interesting. The more I studied them the more I realized how deep this secret society was, and how much I would never know about them. Their command of the human spirit within nature is what really made me interested in the ninja.
As a teenager, my aunt had taught me how to sew on a machine. Already I had made pants for snow surfing and some for going out to bars and dancing. I wanted to be like the ninja as much as I could be and ended up sewing my own ninja clothes. I had hidden pockets and it was a suit of all black. This was in the early 80s. I remember going out for missions so to speak and all I wanted to do was see if I could travel on foot through my neighborhood in my black suit without being detected. I was a teenager and had no idea at the time how I could’ve been taken for a burglar or a thief by the authorities if I was caught on my night missions. More than likely, I would’ve just been arrested for sneaking around, for being suspicious and probably the police would have tried to link me to burglaries and crimes in the area. Back in those days I would have been mistaken as a “cat burglar” Thats what they called thieves in black back then. Today, I would’ve been shot because I carried a blow gun and a short bow and arrows. I had a small sword and no one was gonna believe me that I was just practicing on my own this Japanese form being a shadow warrior. I never committed any crime, I didn’t do anything except role play.
That’s what my son calls it. I sling my Nikon F3 and roll out to take street photography and he says I’m role playing as an 80’s photojournalist…😂
I wasn’t then or now, a bad person at all, I just didn’t care what people thought. Being a Ninja was my super power and that’s what I did. I actually practiced it. I kept the hood I made, it’s in my closet and every once in a while I pull it out and put it on…
It was purely innocent, I just lived in my head way too much and made those thoughts real. I was just acting out a sort of role-play of how cool it was to be a Japanese stealth soldier but I really did it. As far as the cops go, already I would have been thought of as a criminal, guilty by design, wearing black in the middle of the night, sneaking around from shadow to shadow. I would’ve been arrested, booked, photographed and marked on my permanent record. Apparently, I was pretty good at it because I was never caught on my shadow missions in the middle of the night until one evening, I tried to sneak up on one of my friends who was a black belt in taekwondo. Remember, this is like 1980 or 81, I can’t remember. He was the guy that got me into it and really that’s how I found out about the ninjas from learning about tae kwon do. He was a bit older than me and had a home in the next neighborhood. He was swimming in his backyard and I climbed up on the fence, got up on his roof and hid in the shadows watching him. Already I had traveled from my home about a mile away. No one seeing me, but there I was up on his roof, ready to jump down to announce my arrival. As I crouched up to the edge of the roof to jump down, he must’ve detected my presence because I remember him looking up at me on the roof.
Busted.
So I jumped down and pulled off my suit and hood and went swimming.
I’ve always been a person that instead of just thinking about something, I did it, I actually would act on those thoughts. Imagine that instead of becoming a professional assassin just a couple of years later, I became a professional soldier in the army.
I really needed to grow up.
It was purely innocent, I just lived in my head way too much and made those thoughts real. I was just acting out a sort of role-play of how cool it was to be a Japanese stealth soldier but I really did it. As far as the cops go, already I would have been thought of as a criminal, guilty by design, wearing black in the middle of the night, sneaking around from shadow to shadow. I would’ve been arrested, booked, photographed and marked on my permanent record. Apparently, I was pretty good at it because I was never caught on my shadow missions in the middle of the night until one evening, I tried to sneak up on one of my friends who was a black belt in taekwondo. Remember, this is like 1980 or 81, I can’t remember. He was the guy that got me into it and really that’s how I found out about the ninjas from learning about tae kwon do. He was a bit older than me and had a home in the next neighborhood. He was swimming in his backyard and I climbed up on the fence, got up on his roof and hid in the shadows watching him. Already I had traveled from my home about a mile away. No one seeing me, but there I was up on his roof, ready to jump down to announce my arrival. As I crouched up to the edge of the roof to jump down, he must’ve detected my presence because I remember him looking up at me on the roof.
Busted.
So I jumped down and pulled off my suit and hood and went swimming.
I’ve always been a person that instead of just thinking about something, I did it, I actually would act on those thoughts. Imagine that instead of becoming a professional assassin just a couple of years later, I became a professional soldier in the army.
I really needed to grow up.
The army helped me with that. However, the army empowered me by earning enough money to do the things I wanted to do. At the time in addition to being a ninja I wanted to learn how to fly, how to soar taking off on my own power and that’s exactly what the army empowered me to do. I learned how to hang glide and often I would take my hang gliding ninja skills and sneak up on hikers on the cliffs of the Hawaiian ridges. I had a bird eye view of people, hiking on the steep trails and I would dive in from the sky, swooping very close to them and screaming really loud.
Anyway.
I had enough of actually being a Ninja. It was stupid to think I would be good at sneaking around and why? I wasn’t a thief, not an assassin, I’m a good guy with a big imagination and a long history of dreaming shit up and doing it.
Three decades later, I visited the Ninja Village of Iga.
I was learning about Japanese style fly fishing and decided to go to Japan to practice it with the experts there. No way was I going to Japan, halfway across the world and going to miss the Ninja village of Iga.The gentleman I visited in Mie prefecture helped me by guiding me to Iga. It was a pretty long way away and little did I know at the time, very much a hassle for him to map it out. We took five trains to get there! Each one a little bit smaller and finally down to a light rail we reached the Ninja village of Iga. He took me solely on the fact that he knew I would not make it without his assistance. I remember him looking at me with wonderment. He was a fisheries biologist and me, an enthusiastic fly fisher that wanted to learn about an old form of Japanese style fly fishing. Why would I want to do that let alone travel so far to see a tourist attraction like Iga, way out in the countryside.
He didn’t know who I was or how I thought about things, he only knew I had to go to Iga.
I finally made it.
