Free In Search of the Niinja by Antony Cummins

displaced. When the wars ended, the people of Iga were placated with an ‘in-between’ status, not samurai and yet not peasant. They were known as Musokunin and were classed as village leaders under their new samurai lords, a situation that must have been painful to endure, yet a transition that some modern scholars have ignored, defining the once-proud samurai of Iga as merely lower class people.
    We can safely say that the shinobi have been misrepresented to a modern audience and that they were a functional part of any army. It was only after the coming of peace that the ninja were ‘blacklisted’.

    Notes
    41     Literally, ‘lower officials’.
    42     Literally, ‘spare’ but the latter part of the quote establishes that you need it to change your guise into a different social class.
    43     You should not travel in luxury but place yourself in lower quarters and mix with dubious people to display that you are not a member of the government, helping to strengthen your cover as a lowly traveller.
    44     This is made up of two classic ninja elements, ‘ togiki ’ meaning listening scout and ‘ nawa ’ or rope. To ‘carry a togiki ’ would make no sense, therefore it appears to be a tool as yet unknown, some kind of a rope that is either used for listening by scouts, or to detect listening scouts.
    45     Often misnamed Kishu-ryu.
    46     This mention of Doushin comes from the 1844 listing, however, the men of Iga probably were Doushin , just below samurai level, a status they assume after the loss of their territory in Iga.

6
Medieval Japanese Scouting
    When you construct your camp and you have to raise the watch towers, lay Kusa ambush [scouts] to watch the opponent’s camp
    Medieval War Poem

    T hroughout all of my work concerning the shinobi I am always referring to ninja ‘scouting skills’. Whilst a high proportion of a ninja’s role was indeed scouting, there are some fundamental differences between the work of the ninja and the work of a ‘conventional’ war scout.
    The term ‘scout’ in Japanese is translated as ‘ Monomi ’and has a different application to the word ‘shinobi’. In short, the art of the Monomi is predominantly mounted scouting, taken up by groups or individual samurai, who are sometimes accompanied by foot soldiers or samurai on foot, who observe the enemy up close but at a ‘safe’ distance.
    The Monomi rode into no-man’s-land with the intention of getting within visual range of the enemy to record and bring back information about the enemy forces and their activities or to scout out an army route and acquire topographical information. These Monomi scouts are ‘external scouts’, who do not penetrate the enemy’s position but observe from a distance.
    On the other hand, shinobi,in general, gather information from either very close by an enemy position or from inside the opponent’s camp or fortress. Whilst a Monomi may discover the general outlay, position, route and strength of an army, a shinobi will gather passwords, detailed positions, names of commanders and their command team, code words, secret signals and information in detail; information that normal scouting would never garner.
    Whilst the above distinction is a simplified one, it shows how the two are distinct and provides an ‘anchor’ to hold on to, as often the two concepts of Monomi and shinobi merge.
    There is no way to establish if the shinobi and the Monomi scouts were the same people performing two separate jobs, or if they were separate individuals, or if there was an overlap between the two, meaning that some people were specialists in either shinobi or Monomi and that some individuals were trained in both. Whilst there is evidence to show that shinobi used horses (which is discussed later on), the general lack of documentation about shinobi using mounted tactics leads to the conclusion that it was rare. In addition, a shinobi may not have been paid enough to support