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, Power Rangers Ninja Storm), 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).
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Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
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