Ninjas

I recently did something I've been wanting to do for long time, and visited the ninja museum in Iga.

Nin-nin

Iga is one of the areas famous for ninjas. Apparently they used to have a secret base in the mountains surrounding Iga's Ueno castle in the middle ages.


There is a 'ninja house' demonstrating the various tricks and traps they used to disguise their base as a farm house, and some friendly, pink-clothed Ku-no-ichi [female ninjas] to show you around (cultural note: ku-no-ichi didn't really wear pink clothes), and there is the museum itself, in which you can marvel at a collection of old ninja gear, including the famous smoke grenades for 'disappearing' and the equally famous 'water-walking' shoes (ninjas couldn't actually walk on water, but they could walk over the slightly more viscous marshes that comprised the castle moats of the day). And, of course, a heap of old shuriken.

Then there was some not-so-famous ninja gear. I wasn't aware that the ninjas had develop land-mines. There was also a cannon. Ninjas were around at the dawn of gunpowder so that was pretty high-tech stuff.

There was also a ninja show with some battling etc. It was pretty corny. They had this nu-metal pump-up track before the show, and all of thes choreographed sound effects when swords clashed and so forth, like and old episode of Monkey. But there was a nice surprise at the end, when the audience had the opportunity to throw some shuriken at a target. It's harder than it looks.

The museum is pretty small, but I would recommend it to anyone who falls into the category of "really into ninjas".