Bushu.ch: Hi Antony. It’s a pleasure to finally do this interview with you. How are you?
Antony Cummins: All is good… all is good. Christmas is just finished. I am just cleaning up and getting started again.
Bushu.ch: Yes, here too. The official vacation is just over and work starts again soon. I know some of your Books like “in Search of the Ninja”. I really like that one, and I also watch your YouTube Channel regularly. Until today none of yours books are published in German. I think that’s why many Students of Bujinkan, Genbukan or Jinenkan Schools in Switzerland and Germany know very little about you and your work. May we start with your background. I know you trained in the Bujinkan and then you started to write books and started your video channel.
Antony Cummins: Yes; basically, I was always interested in the Ninja but it was not until about the year 1999 that I joined my first Bujinkan class. Even though I'd followed Hatsumi since I was a young boy, we got the books, the magazines. I knew who Hatsumi was, I knew who Stephen K. Hayes was and eventually I found a Dojo to train in the Art of Ninja.
It was there that I met what was to become my Shidoshi, which was Steven Powell. He was from the north east of England, and he had only just moved to Manchester. He was a 5th dan at the time, so I started to train with him personally and we just formed a small group of friends who trained in the Bujinkan. After that I continued to go up to the north east and train with Dennis Bartram who also did the Amatsu Tatara teachings.
Bushu.ch: I have a question: I think the big thing I want to put in the interview really, is this: The big controversy in which you stated that there is no historical proof that there ever was a hand-to-hand combat system of the Ninja and that the Ninja are part of the samurai class. From a combat point of view, if the Ninja wanted to train in martial arts skills, they trained in the same type of stuff the Samurai did because there are Samurai. But the ninja training was not about combat; it was really about the art of espionage. Things like gathering information about castles, persons and also troop movements. On what basis did you arrive at this conclusion?
Antony Cummins: First of all, you have to remember, this is not a case of me proving there is no ninja martial art. You have to show me where it's from. Where is the ninja martial art? So remember, I was an enthusiastic Bujinkan member, I would love it if there was a ninja martial art but let's start with the word martial art. Of course, in translation this will be difficult. What we mean by that is hand-to-hand combat, physical fighting between two people, not martial arts as a generic term with the meaning warfare.
So, a lot of people try to say warfare is martial arts, therefore ninjas did martial arts, therefore, hands-on combat is Ninjutsu, it just doesn't work. It's a stupid argument. So, what I did was when I went to Japan, I looked through all the books, I went around to all of the secondhand book shops and collected all of the old books on the ninja and I went through them with Yoshie Minami, my translator. But first remember, I believed Ninjutsu was hand-to-hand combat at the time. But after some research, it appeared that a lot of these books from the 1950s and 1960s were just made up and did not have any basis for their claims.
The people at the time where just guessing, but none of them said there is a hand-to-hand combat system of martial arts used by the ninja. None of them except Takamatsu; he was the only one. Even Seiko Fujita said why are you doing fighting techniques? It's not Ninjutsu. Some of the people at this time were showing how a ninja might fly or get sneaky and things like that. So, it was just a big mess and it seems that nobody had any real knowledge. For me this was a big problem.
Then I decided that I get rid of all 20th century books. It's not primary research so I just said right, let’s scrap all of that. So, I had to go back and start all over again. And from then onwards we only used primary research. This means we only used scrolls from the past and we only used historical information. There is no mention anywhere, not a single mention of any form of specific hand-to-hand combat used only by the ninja.
But there is so much information to say that these guys are just normal people who are highly trained in espionage. Every single Ninja scroll is about espionage, magic, saboteurs, etc. It never ever mentions hand-to-hand combat at all, it even says as a Ninja sometimes you need to learn Kenjutsu or sometimes you need to learn how to escape, how to get out of a situation, but it doesn't say you learn a special type of swordsmanship, it just says go and study the sword because you might need this skill in an emergency.
Bushu.ch: So real authentic Ninjutsu had no fighting techniques in their training to become a ninja. Other skills were taught like espionage, transmission of information, sabotage, infiltration, poisoning of important persons etc.
Antony Cummins: Yes; that’s the problem with my research, everybody wants to learn about martial arts, they think Ninjutsu is a martial arts system and most people are disappointed that there's no Martial Art in Historical Ninjutsu.
Bushu.ch: Do you still train some martial arts?
Antony Cummins: Not really. I enjoy martial arts and occasionally I train with a friend of mine. I've been to Japan, and I've seen the sword schools. I've been to a Jujutsu school, but I was not happy with it, I actually recently went to train in Japan for a few months just for fun with a school and I found out the school was resurrected and reinvented, so I gave up on it, just because it was clearly obvious it wasn't continued from the 15th century.
But with martial arts, the history is difficult to find because you're trying to describe moves and not described troop movement. The last couple of years I got some ShinKage-Ryu scrolls. I spent 22 days in Japan and I visited the Yagu village. Did you know there's not a single swordsman left in Yagu village, not even a class. Just a Kendo Dojo; that’s it. This really shocked me and I found out that what it says in the original scrolls of Yagu is not the same as what they’re doing today.
So, I've just put a stop to all martial arts training from the Japanese until I can find someone who actually teaches what used to happen. I am going to do it myself and get to the scrolls.
Bushu.ch: Very interesting, nobody really knows how they trained in the past because there are no videos from the Edo Period or before.
Antony Cummins: The other thing with a lot of Koryu Schools is that they do many techniques from sitting positions. But most of the time they were not sitting techniques originally, this was changed later. So even the school's themselves will say, “Originally, our style did it standing up so there is obvious change”.
The other thing that's clearly a problem is that there are never multiple fight scene scenarios. You always get one man on one man. It seems most sword schools today are from the Edo period because nobody's ganging up on you. In the original scrolls of Natori Ryu it says you have to create kill squads on a battle field. You will have three people ganging together, but in addition to this, every samurai always had asides.
Bushu.ch: I also would like to know if you have a normal Job besides being an author and maintaining your big YouTube channel.
Antony Cummins: No; just this.
Bushu.ch: That’s very cool.
Antony Cummins: I only just barely make a living and that's why I have to keep doing the YouTube videos to make sure people are aware of my books. I need people buying them all the time because I need money to continue my projects. I need money to fly to Japan, get some more scrolls, and obviously sit down with the masters and say, well, how come this doesn't match? But that's a lot of money because in Japan, you have to buy drinks, take people for meals and also the gifts are quite expensive.
Bushu.ch: Yes; Japan is expensive, especially when you are traveling around, staying in hotels and going out.
Antony Cummins: A lot of people don't realize how much work it is to do the background research.
Bushu.ch: Sure; with so many different books…
Antony Cummins: Yes; first my translator team puts together a basic English script and from this we go back and forth. We do cross-source checks and finally we have book which is interesting to read. I also write my own books, as well. For example, “The Ultimate Art of War” is just out and I've written it solely by myself.
Bushu.ch: So, the Ninja are parts of the Samurai class and also trained in hand-to-hand combat in the same way the Samurai did?
Antony Cummins: Well, actually the question is “what did the Samurai learn”. We know a lot about the Edo Period. So actually, what did the Samurai in the Sengoku period (c. 1467 – c. 1603) actually study? One mistake people often make with the Samurai is they think they're all living in towns with castles, but that's in the Edo period. Before that, they were living in farms, they were living in villages and they ran the village for the Lord.
Bushu.ch: Yeah, like kind of a sheriff?
Antony Cummins: Yes; pretty much like the sheriff of the village if you like. They lived in a mini-fortified mansion, not a castle, but a fortification. They would have their family with them, their extended family.
Of course, the Lord has his own retainers around him there's times where there's lots of Samurai together. But on the whole Samurai are studying their family art. They are studying their family ways and some people are getting together into schools. So, when you say what do the ninja’s study like? Well, what did the Samurai study? There is not so much information about this aspect of the Sengoku period and it’s also interesting that in this period, there are not so many different schools (Ryu Ha).
Bushu.ch: What do we find in a traditional martial arts school like in the Koryu Schools?
Antony Cummins: All we have is really late Sengoku period schools who then mostly change in the Edo Period. In the Edo Period, basically a law was passed which says every domain, all 66 of them or 60 of them, in Japan must have only one castle and they have to destroy all of the other castles. At this point all the Samurai have to come into the main city and they end up having a district of Samurai. That is also the time when Koryu schools start spreading en mass and everybody starts learning skills, but that’s already in the Edo Period.
Koryu is like a golden threat that goes back to the history, but you have to dig by yourself. It’s not just there ready to be picked up. It would be amazing if the techniques did not change for the last 500 years, but you cannot expect that to be true. We know how much techniques change in one or two generations.
Bushu.ch: Yes; I just know that in many schools like in the Takagi Ryu, there were no sword techniques because the young Samurai learned the Sword from the father or uncle or another family member or a friend of the family.
Antony Cummins: Yes; this is problematic to prove because we don't have lots of letters saying, “I sat down with my uncle and…” we just don't have it. What I'm trying to say is that when the schools become popular, it's always towards the end of the Sengoku period and toward the beginning of the Edo period, and then there are hundreds of them.
Bushu.ch: Did you ever find any indication that the ninjas trained in something else other than the Samurai did in hand-to-hand combat?
Antony Cummins: Not a single shred. That's why when people say, “Oh, how can you prove the ninjas didn't”, you are like, “well, where did this idea come from that they did?” That's not how professional historians work. You can't just make something up and then say, disprove it. You know, like I was visited by aliens last night: disprove it. That is just ridiculous.
So, what you do with history is always the same across the world. You get your evidence, and you build the story from your evidence. Then you find out if the evidence is true or not true. You can't just make a statement and then have no evidence for it and then say, “well, it's true”. That’s just not the correct way.
Bushu.ch: Yes; only the scientific method provides us with reliable results.
Antony Cummins: Yes; and the Ninja hand-to-hand combat and the claims of the Bujinkan just don't make any sense. My aim is not to go against the Bujinkan. That’s not what I want. I was actually a Bujinkan practitioner, but my aim was to find the truth. Unfortunately, what they train in the Bujinkan doesn't fit with the facts, the truth of the authentic Ninja. People are constantly asking, “why are you attacking the Bujinkan,” but I'm not. For me it is more like, show me the proof. I have got a postcard from Hatsumi, I asked him to show me the scrolls, and he politely refused. And I've got that postcard still. So if he can't show the scrolls, if the history doesn't match it, if there's no mention of a Ninja Martial Arts anywhere in history, then that's suspicious.
But all the history about Takamatsu and the scrolls are very strange. Especially in their lineage there are many people which are famous. They are ancient people such as the Natori clan but they're famous in the 20th century because of their connection with Ninja Stories. And you can find them all together in their lineages, so it looks basically like this all was researched and put together in the 20th century.
Bushu.ch: You mean they put the names in there later?
Antony Cummins: Yes; the names are in the lineage in the charts and the branches. So, if you're going to say Natori and other names like that then you are just screaming 20th century ninja research. They never say any of the names that were unknown before me. I found out some new ninja people like Hagiwara Juzo, and Chikamatsu Shigenori. They don't mention them before, but I found him. So, why is that? Because the research wasn't there at the time.
Bushu.ch: That’s interesting.
Antony Cummins: When you piece the entire picture together, there is literally nothing anywhere that has any form of hand-to-hand combat specific to the ninja, and it would be really strange to find it now. Because it wouldn't match our current understanding of the history of this time.
Bushu.ch: Yes, true. So your goal of the publication, really, is to just provide knowledge; yes?
Antony Cummins: My real goal is that I want, by the time I die, for everybody to totally understand the Samurai in history. This also means the ninja, as well. I want to people to apply the history. If people are making a film or a computer game or writing a history book, then I don't want them to write the wrong thing. At least start from the basics. I've seen so many books on the Ninja which are just totally wrong. I mean, even real history books are totally wrong because, at the time when they wrote them, no real research on the ninja or shinobi (how they were called in Japan) was done.
Bushu.ch: You know I recognize more and more that most people and even most martial arts teachers have their inputs and inspiration from novels and movies. The real martial arts were very different.
Antony Cummins: Yes; absolutely. And that is actually true of all history. If you asked anybody, “what did you read?” Let's pick any topic; let's just say the Knights Templar. You say, “what have you read about the Knights Templar?” I bet you most of it is from Dan Brown's novels or Dan Brown's movies. How many of them have gone to a university and read a peer reviewed journal on Templars? They've not. They've watched a movie. They may have read one or two books that are probably popular history, and they've never done any research. It is the same way with martial arts.
My aim is actually to produce a set of books that are easy to read so people can understand what the Samurai actually were.
Bushu.ch: Yes; many martial artists dress up like Samurai and set strange hierarchical rules in the Dojo. I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, you can do it but it has nothing to do with real Samurai at all.
Antony Cummins: I agree, and if you actually read a lot about the Samurai, you know there's actually a lot of foreign accounts of the Samurai and of Japan from the 1500s when the Jesuits came up, there could be about 1,000 to 2,000 pages of it. They say the Samurai are vicious; they are brutal, they will betray each other straight away. Some of them even say that you can be at meal and two enemies are having a very polite meal and within a few seconds one of them chops the other’s head off after the other is drunk, just to trap them.
The Samurai must have been super fighters, and some of those Jesuit accounts, they say all these guys are vicious. They're real good fighters. What a lot of people don't know is that Samurai were hired as mercenaries in Southeast Asia.
Bushu.ch: I never heard that.
Antony Cummins: Yes; Steven Turnbull had an academic article on it. People used to come across and say we need some Samurai and some of the Samurai used to be pirates and they used to go into South East Asia and were involved in all sorts fighting. But that was before Japan locked itself down and chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world.
Bushu.ch: Oh really? That’s not the romantic Samurai picture we normally watch in movies.
Antony Cummins: There's so much stuff that people don't realize about the Samurai. The strangest thing I ever heard anyone say was something said by a Kenjutsu Master. He said the reason that swordsmanship is done very slow and elegant is because Samurai are so honorable that they never attack from behind. They just wait for each other. I was like, “What?!” What are these people drinking? They are crazy. Samurai were murdering each other left, right and center.
Bushu.ch: Yes; true. I saw so many techniques in Koryu where you block the other guy and you don't let them pull the weapon out and you just go to kill them.
Antony Cummins: Don't get me wrong, for me the Samurai and their customs are amazing. But there is so much more to it than what you just see today in the movies. Nobody knows what Samurai actually did. So that's the question I'm going to answer.
Bushu.ch: Great. I can’t wait to read more about it.
Antony Cummins: Well, a lot of people don't understand why I'm publishing the Natori Ryu scrolls. I am doing them to answer the question about the ninja. We have to really understand the Samurai. When we understand the Samurai, we can understand the ninja. So how can I get everybody to understand Samurai? It was here that I realized and looked at all my scrolls and from the Natori School. I have 28 scrolls - it's massive and they contain the real words of a real Samurai who was also a real ninja. That is why I focus on Natori Ryu, it’s a single system with everything we need to understand the Samurai.
Bushu.ch: That’s a big project you have here.
Antony Cummins: I will explain something called Gungaku. Most people know the word Budo and all similar words connected to that, but Budo originally didn't mean martial arts. It means Bushido. They just shortened it to Budo. You also get Heiho which actually means martial arts or warfare. As I said, we have Gungaku which is the study of martial arts. Today all people know only the word Budo, but that's not the word they used in the past. Budo used to mean spirituality or the path of the Bushi.
I think when I finish the series about Natori they will be something like a million pages or half a million pages or something. This will help explain the Samurai better.
Bushu.ch: Many martial artists have an interest in the history of the Samurai.
Antony Cummins: Most people just want to do the martial art side and not the strategy. However, for me personally, now that I've studied the strategy, my life is much clearer. Its gives me structure in my life. In fact, I'm writing a new book soon, which is called ‘How to be a modern Samurai’ and it comes out in July 2020. In this book I will write how you can use the strategy for yourself. I hope I can change some minds and promote interest for the strategy side of the Samurai.
Bushu.ch: Yes, this sounds great. Thank you so much for your time.
Antony Cummins: Thank you very much.
Bushu.ch: Hope to talk with you again soon.
On the part of Bushu.ch Raoul Haldimann conducted the interview with Antony Cummins on the 7. Januar 2020 by Skype.
Mehr Informationen about Antony can you find here:
