Quote Originally Posted by Bloodclaw View Post
Never mind he actually went to Japan and talked to the decedents of real ninjas.
Because it's not like the Japanese hypermythologize ninjas and samurai, which was my entire point.

After the Meiji Revolution, there was a monumental amount of internal propaganda that mythologized medieval Japan. It happened over a century ago so having talked to your grandpa/grandma about ninjas, samurai, or whatever means next to nothing because they were the ones raised by the people exposed to said propaganda and most heavily influenced by it. It's why people think that every Japanese archetype was bound by and followed a code of extreme honor and self sacrifice there really *was* no code and, at best, was something like a general guideline. The government wanted to create links to their nation's heritage while they were changing *everything* by rapidly modernizing from the enforced medievalism of the Edo era while simultaneously setting exceptionally high standards of behavior for people to strive towards.

The mythologizing of the ninja and samurai are effectively the same thing as the mythologizing of the European medieval knight. No knight seriously followed the code of Chivalry nor did anyone think that the Arthurian tales were anything approaching reality. They're idealized constructs based upon what we *wanted* those archetypes to be, not what they actually were.