Rekishi

There are several theories of the ninja tradition origins but those were passed orally from father to son in a very secret way.  It was not until the 15th Century when a ninja named Fujibayashi Nagato initiated a documentation process for the tradition.  The product of this process was a five-book ninja encyclopedia called  Bansenshukai which are stored in the Mie Perfecture Iga Ueno Museum.  Therefore the real story of our tradition origins remains uncertain.

As I told you before, there are several theories for this matter but the Togakure Ryu practitioners supports one of them.  This is the theory that I will be telling you in the following lines.  Remember, there is more information about this in the internet, and you may find some theories slightly different from the one discussed here.  The truth is that nobody really knows which one of them is the real one, so you must not underestimate none of them.

In the 12th Century there lived a man called Daisuke Nishina who was a mid-rank samurai who fought against a local resistance group but lost the battle.  In order to save his life he fled to the mountains finding a Yamabushi Monastery as safe place for him and some of his comrades in arms.  The Yamabushi were warrior-monks (like the Shaolin in China) who used to practice martial arts from sunshine to dawn.  Daisuke met a monk named Kain Doshi who got him as a student.

After a couple of years Daisuke learned the fighting way of the monks and also their living way.  But then Daisuke felt like he has been reborn and so assumed a new name to commemorate his new life style, since then he was known as Daisuke Togakure.  When he merged his old war knowledge and his new fighting techniques, then was created the first ninjutsu tradition in history.  But it would not be known as "ninjutsu" until the 14th Century, until then it was known as Togakure Ryu (which literally means School of Togakure).

Several years passed and the teachings of Togakure were inherited from father to son as a family tradition.  When a family didn't had a son as their heir, they used to teach their son-in-law to carry on the family tradition.  Sometimes the son-in-law used to be a warrior himself and merged his knowledge with the ones inherited from his fathers-in-law, then a new style of Togakure was made.  Sometimes there was no son or daughter to inherit the tradition, so the family's head used to pick a student and left him as the tradition carrier, also known as soke.

When a new style of Togakure was created, usually they changed its name using the family name of the creator.  That is why there were so many kinds of ninja families in a certain point of Japan's history.  By the 14th Century the emperor created the title of shinobi (which means stealth) for certain duty made by one of the warrior of Iga (the province in which the Togakure mountain was).  The title granted by the emperor was represented by a specific kanji (japanese character) which sounds as "nin" so, every person who used to practice these kind of techniques were granted the title of ninja (for nin meaning stealth and ja which means person).

By the 16th Century another civil war reached Japan for the unification of the land in which the leading warrior was Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582).  In his quest for the land unification, he fought several battles against another samurai and ninja families.  By the end of this war, several ninja traditions were lost.  The remaining ninja families got together and merged their techniques to safeguard them from extinction.  Therefore the present day ninja style has four ninja schools as part as their teachings.

For more information about the history and tradition of Togakure Ryu, please refer to the books of Masaaki Hatsumi (actual soke of the ninjutsu tradition), or to any other recognized ninjutsu master.  There are several ninja masters all around the world but, please do not let be deceived from some unscrupulous martial artists to claim to be masters of some extinct ninja tradition. To prevent this to happen, you can go to our ninja styles page and see which ninja traditions are still taught and which ones are already extinct.  This information was obtained from original documents saved in the Mie Prefecture Iga Ueno Museum in Japan.  If there is anyone who claims to teach a ninja tradition reported as extinct, the proper original documentation must be displayed in order to update the museum information.