Ninja: 1000 years of the Shadow Warrior - John Man

This is John Man's second book on Japan, a follow on from his first book "Samurai" which ostensibly about the Samurai class used the story of Saigo Takamori as the framework to structure his analysis. Once again picking a topic which is likely to appeal to the masses, John Man attempts to take on the historical phenomenon of the Ninja, using the historical references to the Ninja through the ages from various historical texts to structure book.

Starting from the Kojiki, proceeding through the Tahiei Monogatari, Heike Monogatari, Warring states all the way to the second world war and present day, he picks up the various references, talks about the Ninja homelands of Koga and Iga and interviews numerous "experts" to debunk various ninja myths.

While this all sounds quite promising on paper, the overall execution leaves much to be desired. Unlike his other books on Mongolia and China, John Man is a rank amateur when it comes to Japan, speaking no Japanese and heavily reliant on his tranlator Noriko (their interactions take up much space in the book, sometimes as comic relief, sometimes as filler). This makes the book part travelogue, where Man marvels at things like the tanuki, gets confused when Mt. Hiei is referred to as Hiei-san - confusing the honorfic with the word for mountain and composes haiku. Many of the pictures in the book look like vacation snaps - badly centered and edited. Finally due to the rapid sweep across history the large number of Japanese names make it difficult for a new reader to keep track of who is who.

While there is some interesting information here, the "experts" that he interviews seem to be an assorted rag-bag of people that he came across while on his travels. For instance, one man - Takino, who had the same name as the founder of castle, he found in a field. Another is a restaurant owner, another a gardener.

Looking at his bibliography, the usual sources in English are here - Stephen Turnbull, Anthony Cummins, Donn Draeger,Karl Friday with nothing in Japanese, there were few revelations in additional reading. With only about 40 books cited (including irrelevant texts such as Ian Fleming's You Only live Twice) his reasearch left much to be desired.

If you are truly interested in the topic, and want to spare yourself John Man's holiday stories, I would adise you to look elsewhere.