Conclusion: Debriefing the Ninja Larp
The ninja larp involves experiences in fictional scenarios approximating situations that shinobi of the past could have found themselves in. Included among these are investigating rumors of insurgency or fending off assassination attempts against their feudal lords.
Acting as authorities for authenticating knowledge (Agnew and Tomann, 2020, p. 21), the Mie university ninja scholars still allowed for and even favored much play and liberty in their collaboration with CLOSS and GroupSNE. They adopted a similar approach as did Japanese Studies in the 1970s after the publication of James Clavell’s extremely popular novel Shogun enticed many readers to study Japan: scholars used the interest sparked by the novel to guide students into a more sophisticated understanding of Japan, at the least by trying to correct the exoticizing image and many historical and linguistic errors they perceived in the novel (Hurst, 1981; Smith, 1980). Similarly overwhelmed by all the manga fans flooding Japanese Studies departments today, some scholars seek to use this interest as a route into more complex and complicated engagements with the plurality that is Japan.Learning of past situations or understanding another’s lifeworld through larp never happens on its own but needs phases of reflection and debriefing. However, the debriefings after the test play in 2018 focused principally on the larp design and possibilities for later iterations—such as increasing the potential for immersion by going outdoors into actual forest trails around the city, as one Mie university scholar suggested. One participant in the Ninja Festa larp, without any analog gaming background but with a connection to the research center, echoed this opinion and called for a more realistic, historically accurate environment like a castle. So-called 360° illusions (Stenros et al., 2016), where “what you see is what you get” (theReenacting Japan’s Past That Never Was 165 environment and all props match the setting, everything can be used as it should be), are understood as favorable for character immersion in larp theory.
Participants would not need to stress their suspension of disbelief so much, so they could concentrate on embodying their character and subsequently experience a deeper emotional impact and understanding. In contrast, the teenager from Iga, who was a ninja fan, expressed how easy it was to immerse oneself into the larp: “With all the realistic props and the great costumes, I dived into the story.” However, they would have preferred more in-character role-play and communication. The majority (17) of players would have liked a longer scenario of two hours or more—most of the larpers thought so, but so did participants without any gaming background. All emphasized that they wanted to play again.The two comments on realism above, affirming expectations on the one hand and asking for more material realism and historical accuracy on the other, mirror the vectors of interest of participants, be it the popular ninja figure or the historical shinobi. With the exception of these two statements and one female larper appreciating the fact that she had learned something new about the past conflicts during Tokugawa’s campaign, post-play conversations and written feedback left out historical knowledge and concentrated instead on the larp experience. For those larping for the first time, the novelty character of this experience stood in the foreground. Some compared it to narrative play in their childhoods and fond memories. Participants explicitly stressed delight about freedom and agency, that they could move about and were not bound to pre-scripted dialogue. The larpers offered feedback on the rules—which all participants found easy to understand—and complimented on the integration of the known hand gestures as a tool for conflict resolution, especially in light of player safety vis-a-vis actual fighting in closed quarters. With the focus on the larp aspects of the experience during the debriefings, learning effects remain elusive. Still, the participants could be and were guided to other institutions of Iga, such as the museum.
The “classically” presented historical information there—such as the mannequin and its plaque—interact with their new first-person experience and awareness of some techniques documented for Edo-period covert agents.Instead of mediated knowledge through history books, films, or other forms of curated representation, the ninja larp focuses on direct (but still curated) experiences. In this, history larp struggles with the same challenges as other reenactment practices: privileging immediacy and emotion as a more “authentic” or at least more involved (individual) experience, which remains, however, linked to “facts” established in history departments, the representatives of bookish learning reenactment questioned at its outset (Brauer and Lucke, 2020, p. 55; Schwarz, 2020, p. 65). In this particular ninja larp, the added difficulty is that it is not (amateur) scholars playing at being historical figures they have extensively studied, wearing elaborate costumes they have made themselves, but rather people playing characters they created a few minutes before the game begins. This mayfactor into bleed, a key concept in larp theory referring to the emotional and cognitive interaction between a player and their character (Bowman, 2015). Important for most experiences called larp is the understanding that player and character are not identical (Montola, 2014; Stenros, 2014a). Alibi, the social contract between participants that actions taken are those of the character (Montola and Holopainen, 2012), allows players as their characters to scream at each other, or even subject one another to torture, but ensures that they remain friends out-of-character. However, things do spill over, of course—a bad day at work may lead to a cranky character portrayal, a love affair in-game can become serious off-game, and a democratic worldview surfaces in a supposedly hierarchical space marine unit (Hugaas, 2019). Most unwelcome are decisions based on player knowledge instead of character knowledge (e.g., the larp-shinobi deciding to help Tokugawa because he was not assassinated in real life instead of helping because of their duty to do so from their characters’ perspective).
For educational and political larp organizers, the reverse process of bleed is most welcome: when what characters do and learn spills over to their players. The characters in the ninja larp were rather close to home, with maybe just a name change, and not radically different from their players. Still, a thin veil between character and player may favor the bridging between the two, as “[t]hin characters can be a useful way to shift focus from the character to situation” (Stenros et al., 2016).The ninja experiences in 2018 and 2019 should be seen as initial tentative steps into experimenting with history larp. Design challenges remain, especially concerning educational aims. Several other goals, especially those of the tourist association seem to have been met—for example, to invite people to their Ninja Festa who would not have come were it not for the larp, and to involve younger and older ninja enthusiasts. With simultaneous interpretation for the group of non-Japanese players, they could also show that this event was foreigner-friendly, meeting Cool Japan expectations. The black-dressed shuriken-tossing saboteur functions as a cipher that is easily recognized worldwide. The larp form as a novelty equally gathers attention. How their interplay may contribute to a better understanding the past needs to be explored more in the future. With all parties involved being committed to do so beyond 2020, ninja history larp may enter into a fruitful reciprocal relationship with other forms of reenactment.