Escrito por Peter Urban
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Joe Lewis (Rhee Nationals em Washington, 1967).
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Miguel Bruno Duarte demonstrando a arte de pontapear ao marinheiro Carlos Rosado.
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«Martial arts lore is replete with stories of the shadow warrior, invariably a menacing character. The most notorious of the shadow warriors was the ninja, a practitioner of ninjutsu, often translated as "the art of invisibility". Ninjas were credited with being able to vanish in a wisp of smoke, transform themselves into small animals or birds or inanimate objects, be two places at once. They were also skilled masters of disguise, specialists in the art of assassination and fomenting wars, usually leaving no traces behind that would associate them with their foul deeds.
Today the ninja has become favored heavy in martial arts films. He appears almost as a joke, scurrying around in a head-to-toe black outfit, his face hidden behind a black mask.
But shadow warriors are no joke, especially when they take the form of lawyers, friends, and advisers to one or both of the parties who are having a problem. In that capacity, like the ninjas of legend, the shadow warrior is most often invisible, but the havoc he creates is very real indeed».
Chuck Norris («The Secret Power Within. Zen Solutions to Real Problems»).
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| Mike Stone, James Coburn, Chuck Norris e Bruce Lee. |
The ninjutsu people
In the olden days there was a strange group of men and women who always dressed in black. The black clothing covered even their faces, and their feet cushioned in the softest of black felt. They walked in silence and lived at night. They had no friends, for they were universally feared and hated. Many people considered them magicians of the black arts, in league with all that was evil. These "black knights" of the old days, who did not believe in magic themselves but who could perform seemingly magical feats, were the professional assassins of feudal Japan. They were hnown as "ninja", or "ninjutsu people".
They devoted their childhood to training for mastery in their peculiar skills and thus were highly skilled in the martial arts. Raised utterly without morals, which they referred to as "imaginary restrictions", they were bereft of virtue.
Since they thrived on darkness, their training halls were painted completely black; varying lenghts of nails and spikes protruded from the walls. Upon these spikes and stone walls, they practiced jumping, climbing and wall-scaling techniques. They were masters of sword-handling, archery, horsemanship, jiu-jitsu, stick fighting, body balancing, and the art of throwing tiny poisoned darts and the small, sharp-cornered coins of that era. This last was a favorite weapon, for who would believe it possible to put out a man's eye and kill him at a distance of more than fifty feet by throwing a coin the size of a silver dollar? No weapon could ever be found - just an ordinary coin lying in the street.
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Jennifer Garner
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Hundreds of hours were spent practicing walking across creaky wooden floors without making a sound. This was done by unwinding their long, black, felt waistband: rolling it across the floor; carefully, lightly, and quickly darting down its entire length; then rolling it up and repeating the maneuver until the desired distance was crossed. They did everything with their own inimitable magic and called it "ninjutsu", the art of stealth.
Their training, being supremely realistic, also took into consideration every adverse situation they could imagine.
They were the original practitioners of the "art of programming". They were taught from the cradle that nothing was impossible. Not knowing that a thing could not be done, they proceeded to do it.
They had many services to sell to the lords and ladies of the great houses of the day, their specialty being murder and terror. Many provincial lords, in rivalry for one reason or another, often used the ninja in preference to the expense of an all-out war against an enemy. A ninjutsu man could sneak past guards, fool alert watchdogs, do his job, and leave no traces.
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They used black coal dust and chemically-produced smoke screens to distort the sight of pursuers. Their visual memory and sense of direction was so exact that, with one swift glance, they could evaluate all means of egress from a building. This enabled them to leap from any second or third story window, knowing in advance that a tree would be underneath to break their fall. Rooftops were nothing but stepping stones to be adroitly traveled upon. Using their uniquely fashioned silken rope and grappling hooks, they scaled the highest, most forbidding cliffs and walls. A skilled ninjutsu man could run down a hallway, jump across the entrance area, grasp the eaves to a doorway, and pull himself up and over onto the roof in a matter of seconds. From the roof, where he blended into the night, he was in a perfect position for throwing darts, coins, or circular dirks that looked like the blades of a power saw. No wonder everyone was afraid of them. Chasing them was almost certain death, for they would seem to disappear right in front of a pursuer's eyes; the next thing the pursuer felt would be the sting of a poisoned dart in the back of his neck.
Occasionally, a ninjutsu man was discovered and captured, but rarely for very long; they had mastered the arts of disappearing and escape as surely as the art of murder. Even when stripped down to nothing but their "fundoshi", or loincloths, they almost always managed to escape. When the guards led a ninjutsu man out to be executed (a foregone conclusion), he would wait until they were outside and surround by a very high wall, too high for even him to scale unaided. Suddenly casting off his bonds (for the knot was never invented that could hold them for more than a few minutes), he would completely confound his captors by running full tilt toward the seemingly impregnable wall. Just before he did so, he had urinated into his fundoshi. Removing the sopping wet cotton cloth, he ran up the wall as far as he could, letting out a piercing scream and slapping the wet cloth with all his strenght against the top of the stone wall. Without stopping his momentum for an instant, he would swing the remaining distance to the top of the wall, using the cloth as a rope, and, before the astonished and terrified guards could move, he had disappeared.
The mystique of these almost legendary professional assassins increased as the centuries went by. The secrets were handed down from family to family, generation after generation. Some say that even today the ninja exist, but this is not officially certain or admitted. All that is known is that there are a few old martial arts teachers in southern Japan who, for the sake of tradition, still practice the ninjutsu training. These old senseis occasionally give an exhibition of the dying art at the more important martial arts events. They are always looked upon a little fearfully by the younger participants in the exhibition, for after all, who knows?
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| Jean-Claude Van Damme e Sho Kosugi. Ver aqui |
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Ninjas iranianas
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