Looking at the authentic samurai armors at Kyoto’s Samurai & Ninja Museum, you’d think the beards that come with most helmets are meant to represent the kind of facial hair their owners would wear. Well, think again, our tour guide said: “Actually, those were put on the 12-year-old boys, also forced to go into battle, to make them look less like an easy target.” Huh. I’d never have guessed!
One of the ninja’s weapons, the kusarigama, looks like an ice pick with a chain attached. It appears to be invented by a crazy arms expert with dark imagination—but it’s not. It’s simply a sickle, repurposed by the everyday farmers who were accustomed to using it into a tool for the spy-assassins they sometimes became at night.
As part of the guided tour, you get to throw a plastic shuriken, a throwing star, several times at styrofoam targets. In the movies these usually metal weapons commonly zoom out of a fighter’s sleeve and straight into an opponent’s chest, killing them in the process. Back in reality, meanwhile, they were used mostly for distraction. Create some clinkering and clankering a few meters away thanks to these tools, and your enemies might investigate the noise, hopefully giving you enough time to escape in the process.
Whether it’s the samurai, ninjas, or anything else in life: Almost nothing is what it seems to be at first glance. So always look twice—and, if you can, ask a kind guide: “What’s that really about?”
