In Popular Culture
The image of the ninja entered popular culture in the Edo period, when folktales and plays about ninja were conceived. Stories about the ninja are usually based on historical figures. For instance, many similar tales exist about a daimyo challenging a ninja to prove his worth, usually by stealing his pillow or weapon while he slept. Novels were written about the ninja, such as Jiraiya Gōketsu Monogatari, which was also made into a kabuki play. Fictional figures such as Sarutobi Sasuke would eventually make way into comics and television, where they have come to enjoy a culture hero status outside of their original mediums.
Ninja appear in many forms of Japanese and Western popular media, including books (Kōga Ninpōchō), television (Ninja Warrior), movies (You Only Live Twice, Ninja Assassin, The Last Samurai), Satire (REAL Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book), video games (Tenchu, Shinobi, Mortal Kombat), anime (Naruto), manga (Basilisk) and Western comic books (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero). Depictions range from realistic to the fantastically exaggerated, both fundamentally and aesthetically, and often portray ninja in non-factual, sometimes incredibly flamboyant ways for humor or entertainment.
Modern schools that claim to train ninjutsu arose from the 1970s, among others those of Masaaki Hatsumi (Bujinkan) and Stephen K. Hayes (To-Shin Do).
Read more about this topic: Ninja
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)