Movies give misinformation all the time. Because of these movies, ninjas have a very bad reputation. First off, ninjas do not just come up and chop off your head or anything like that. Most of the time, you would not see them if they attacked you. Often, they would use poison darts from far away. If you did see them when they attacked you, they usually used a poison on their weapon. Ninjas were very knowledgeable about poisons, like which ones will actually kill someone, and which ones will just put you in pain for a while.

The first ninjas were neither martial arts masters nor experts at poisons. They were outcasts of society. No one wanted them in town, so they were shunned and were forced to live in the mountains. I suppose their anger at the rest of the world made them come up with this martial art.

Ninjtisu was created when the samurai ruled things in Japan. The outcasts of society really didn't want the samurai to be in charge, so their way of stopping it was to try killing all of the samurai with poisons, weapons and other stuff. Ninjitsu was born.

Back then, the ninjas really didn't compare to the samurai. They weren't as strong, and didn't have much training. But the reason that people think that ninjas can turn into animals or turn invisible is because the samurai spread rumors about it. Somehow, the rumors stuck, and people today still think that.

Although ninjas cannot disappear, they would hide in trees, set off smoke bombs and quickly hide behind something, or distract their opponent and hide somewhere. I don't know where the samurai got the idea that ninjas could turn into animals, and the websites I've seen don't have an answer for that either. If I had to take a guess, it would be that the ninjas trained animals to attack certain people. I'm not too sure about that, but it seems to make sense, especially if that animal was a cat. (See the next paragraph.)

Ninjas had tremendous knowledge of things other than poisons. They knew how to roughly know the time of day by the eyes of cats. If they could find that out, that means that they had to have cats around them. Here is an image of how they told time:

If you cannot see the image, at 6 a.m. a cat's eyes look like they are perfect circles. At around 8 a.m., their eyes would be egg-shaped. At 10 a.m., the eyes would look like seeds. Then at noon, their eyes would appear to be as thin as a needle. At 2 p.m. they would look like seeds again. Then 4 p.m., eggs, and 6 p.m., back to perfect circles. Just so there isn't any confusion, I'm referring to the black part of the cat's eyeball.

I hope some people gained some knowledge about ninjas from this. Even though this article probably will not be published because of the content, I had a great time writing it. And, even though ninjas sometimes deserve a bad reputation, it's not for what's in the movies. By the way, if you happened to see XMA (Xtreme Martial Arts), a special presentation on the Discovery Channel, you saw a preview of the movie, "The Last Samurai." It showed the characters dancing and performing certain rituals, and then the main character yelled out "Ninja!" When you saw the image of the ninja and observed what they were doing, that's pretty much how a real ninja would act, just so you know.

Unfortunately, I feel I cannot show my sources, because they are too violent and tell what poisons ninjas used, which surprisingly are still able to be bought.

Have a great day,
Timantha

Editor's Note: Who can find information about ninjas that supports Timantha's article? How about info that challenges it? I'm sure there's more than one side... what do you all think the facts are about ninjas, and what's the fiction? And what do you actually know is fact and fiction? :-) Are there real ninjas out there anymore?