The Art of the Ninja

Catalog description

The ninja is arguably the single best-known representative of Japan in modern popular culture, instantly recognizable in video games, animation, film, TV, museums, popular histories, martial arts books and more. Despite this, ninja are almost entirely unstudied in English-language academia. This course takes two approaches to ninja. First is weighing the evidence for 'historical ninja,' the claim that there existed groups of spies and assassins in medieval Japan. Second is asking what the 'cultural' ninja, as hero of movies, folktales, video games, Naruto, etc., can tell us about the societies in which he (or she) emerges.