In the evening twilight, a circle of dark clad figures stands over the dead body of a Buddhist monk.

They wait and look at their former adversary, in indecision, havering, until one bends down to go through the monk’s clothes and possessions. There it is! A rolled-up document, the compact.

Since 2015, Japan has once again been experiencing a small ninja boom, this time in response to the Japan Anniversary Association declaring 22 February “Ninja Day”¹ and thanks to the so-called Cool Japan tourism and nation-branding campaign. After Japan’s speculation bubble burst in the early 1990s and the recession-plagued country entered its second “lost decade” (Funabashi and Kushner, 2015), there was greater receptivity to the notion that the nation’s soft power lay in cultural products. Borrowing the “cool” from the United Kingdom’s Cool Britannica Britpop euphoria of the 1990s, Japan’s cultural administrators sought to cash in on the world­wide success of manga, anime, and games. Repackaging the post-World War II nationalist discourse of Japanese uniqueness into a product (Otsuka, 2015; Tamaki, 2019), the ministries of trade and foreign affairs continue to allocate a substantial budget to Cool Japan. These endeavors remain focused on tourism, with efforts placed on multilingual support for foreigners, but also give much attention to the economic growth of rural areas. Today, not only contemporary pop-culture products but also traditional ceramics, for example, are indiscriminately subsumed under the “cool” label. At this junction of national identity, country marketing, rural development, and tourism, the figure of the ninja emerges.

Public interest in the ninja has waxed and waned during the 20th and 21st centuries.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-10

National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo, and it offers not only an English-language website but also a video series by the public broadcaster NHK World entitled “Ninja Truth,” which began in 2018. Rather than sparking merely generic interest, as was the case in pre­vious ninja booms, the towns of Kδka and especially Iga currently receive much direct attention, the latter as a so-called mecca for people interested in ninja. The few available written sources about ninja arts come from their region, and Iga in particular has ramped up its marketing efforts (Yamada, 2016, Kindle Loc 130). Located in Mie prefecture, five hours by train from Tokyo and half that time from Osaka, the small city seeks to benefit from the newfound enthusiasm and invites both domestic and international tour­ists to its museums and annual festival. The fieldnotes above emerged from something novel in Iga’s offerings to people interested in Japan’s historical assassins and saboteurs: a ninja larp.

Based on participant observation during the first runs of this larp and on conversations with the designers and players, this chapter explores the rela­tionship between the popular figure people have come to expect—the assas­sin and spy dressed in black—and his historical counterpart. Once cast in the ninja’s disguise, players in the larp can experience missions and take on roles that are closer to documented activities of the historical shinobi. How does the ninja larp navigate between hopes for more tourists and educa­tional aims? What do participants gain from the larp? With larp itself being a novelty to many, in their assessments, the participants focus more on this mode of curated experience than on historical knowledge gained. Still, the events in Iga point to the possibilities of learning about the past through “history larp.”