Life is a war. Along the way, we have battles to fight and periods of relative peace, but always the war is present. Sure that sounds like a rather belligerent approach to life but what the heck, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, life is no crystal staircase.
So, if you accept my premise, then the question you must consider is: What is the best way to win this war? To answer that, I have taken a look at warfare as it has been practiced (“practiced” makes it sound like a flag football game) and come up with this simple maxim: Plan for samurai, prepare for ninja.
Let me assure you that I am not an authority on either samurai or ninja history. I know a little about the history, and my experience tells me that it is much easier to write authoritatively on a subject when one doesn’t have a lot of knowledge getting in the way. I won’t be telling you about the Yamato Dynasty or the origins of samurai weaponry starting with the arrival of bronze and rice on the island of Japan. Suffice it to say that the decision to use bronze instead of rice in making weapons was a good start for the samurai. For my purposes, I have acquired all the knowledge I need by watching Kurosawa films and that very under-rated Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai.
For those of you who have never seen The Last Samurai or the films of Kurosawa, or those of you still contemplating the value of weapons made from rice, let me briefly explain the basic samurai and ninja models of warfare.
The samurai practiced a very formal kind of warfare. Large armies beautifully adorned with armor and banners displaying the colors of their clans. Without a doubt, if current history is any indication, there was even an occasional banner that compared the opposing warlord to whoever was their Hitler. Although tradition was important, the samurai were practical enough to adopt certain technological advances like stirrups, which allowed them to shoot arrows while on horseback.
The battles were set up ahead of time when one warlord would send a messenger to another warlord with an invitation that said something like, “Warlord Temmu requests the presence of Warlord Ishi at the plains of Kanto on Saturday, 21 June 743 AD. Dress – Formal.”*
The pageantry of these battles must have been something incredible to witness. Two huge armies marching toward each other in their finest battle gear. The brilliantly colored uniforms and banners must have made it a visual feast, that is until the decapitation and dismemberment started. At that point it would have been similar to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade marching into a giant woodchipper. But certainly the samurai practiced a warfare guided by a pageantry and honor that wouldn't have been the case of the Celts, Saxons, or Danes of the eighth century.
So Japan was, for several centuries, ruled by samurai lords who fought and made alliances much the same way European kings did. Territorial boundaries shifted as the result of wars up until someone decided that it was better for business to centralize the rule of Japan. This centralization couldn't be accomplished while samurai lords held power, so something had to be done. Enter ninja.
Unlike the more honorable samurai, the ninja preferred not to engage in open warfare. They practiced a covert form of warfare, specializing in espionage, infiltration, and assassination. Instead of fighting in a big pen field, they would surprise their targets by dropping out of trees or from rooftops, or jumping out of a bowl of breakfast cerial (okay, the last one was made up, but never order the Ninja Pops just to be safe.) Because the ninja seemed to attack from out of nowhere, they were thought to have the ability to become invisible and to walk on water. It is even thought that a number of ninja who had the ability to become invisible but not to walk on water tried to walk on water but fell in and drowned because no one could see them and save them. Their origins seem to go back to the fourteenth century, but the secretive nature of the ninja meant that there were very few written records. Much like the Underground Railroad in the USA, ninja did not want to have a lot of written records around where they might end up in the hands of Wikileaks.
So, this very brief and somewhat questionable history of samurai and ninja is a metaphor for life because, no matter how much we plan, life is filled with surprise attacks. Everyone knows somebody who had planned for retirement and thought they were winning the battle (or at least not going to have to perform seppuku**) when they were suddenly attacked by the ninja at Goldman Sachs and a number of other investment firms that devastated their 401k's. For so long we had lived under the delusion that "what's good for business is good for America" that we forgot that business doesn't really care about what's good for people if it keeps the leaders of those businesses from receiving huge bonuses that they haven't really earned. We thought that they were honorable samurai and found out that they were assassins.
The pageantry of these battles must have been something incredible to witness. Two huge armies marching toward each other in their finest battle gear. The brilliantly colored uniforms and banners must have made it a visual feast, that is until the decapitation and dismemberment started. At that point it would have been similar to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade marching into a giant woodchipper. But certainly the samurai practiced a warfare guided by a pageantry and honor that wouldn't have been the case of the Celts, Saxons, or Danes of the eighth century.
So Japan was, for several centuries, ruled by samurai lords who fought and made alliances much the same way European kings did. Territorial boundaries shifted as the result of wars up until someone decided that it was better for business to centralize the rule of Japan. This centralization couldn't be accomplished while samurai lords held power, so something had to be done. Enter ninja.
Unlike the more honorable samurai, the ninja preferred not to engage in open warfare. They practiced a covert form of warfare, specializing in espionage, infiltration, and assassination. Instead of fighting in a big pen field, they would surprise their targets by dropping out of trees or from rooftops, or jumping out of a bowl of breakfast cerial (okay, the last one was made up, but never order the Ninja Pops just to be safe.) Because the ninja seemed to attack from out of nowhere, they were thought to have the ability to become invisible and to walk on water. It is even thought that a number of ninja who had the ability to become invisible but not to walk on water tried to walk on water but fell in and drowned because no one could see them and save them. Their origins seem to go back to the fourteenth century, but the secretive nature of the ninja meant that there were very few written records. Much like the Underground Railroad in the USA, ninja did not want to have a lot of written records around where they might end up in the hands of Wikileaks.
So, this very brief and somewhat questionable history of samurai and ninja is a metaphor for life because, no matter how much we plan, life is filled with surprise attacks. Everyone knows somebody who had planned for retirement and thought they were winning the battle (or at least not going to have to perform seppuku**) when they were suddenly attacked by the ninja at Goldman Sachs and a number of other investment firms that devastated their 401k's. For so long we had lived under the delusion that "what's good for business is good for America" that we forgot that business doesn't really care about what's good for people if it keeps the leaders of those businesses from receiving huge bonuses that they haven't really earned. We thought that they were honorable samurai and found out that they were assassins.
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*Names and events in this example are fictitious, except for Warlord Temmu who, if he were still alive, probably wouldn’t be able to read this anyway.
**Seppuku was a form of suicide practiced by samurai so that they wouldn't fall into the hands of their enemies or waste away in some state funded retirement home for samurai with no 401k's.
