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NINJA

(Plural: “ninja.” No “s,” please.)

The colloquial name for groups and individuals who carried out intelligence-gathering, assassinations, and other espionage-related work for Japanese warlords, mainly between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, with their peak being in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. In Japanese, the word is written with the kanji characters nin 忍, meaning “clandestine,” and ja 者, meaning “person.” The use of the term “ninja” to refer to these individuals is relatively recent; historically, they were more commonly called by a wide variety of regional colloquialisms including (but by no means limited to):

Hayamichi no mono (The Short-cutters)

Iga-mono (One from Iga)

Kamari (Those Who Hide)

Koga-mono (One from Koga)

Kusa (The Grasses)

Ninjutsu-tsukai (A practitioner of ninjutsu)

Nokizaru (Roof-monkeys)

Onmitsu (The secret service)

Rappa (in the Kanto region)

Shinobi

Shinobi no mono

Suppa (in the Kai region)

Ukami (The Silent Watchers)

Yama-kuguri (“Mountain-runners”)

NOTE: Although the kanji characters are identical, the name of the region that the Koga ninja hail from is actually pronounced “Koka.” For ease of understanding, we use Koga to refer to both throughout the book.