I was thinking about this one too. It's true that ninja were found in film and literature before this. But I also remember a particular moment in my little fraction of California youth culture in the late seventies when suddenly everyone wanted to be a ninja - in real life and in D&D games - and they hadn't before. I was never sure what caused this.
I'm pretty sure I first heard of ninjas in The Great Escape: A Source Book of Delights and Pleasures for the Mind and Body (1974). It had a one-page article detailing varieties of martial arts. Later they showed up on my TV in Shogun (1980), but I don't recall if the word "ninja" was used.
Roald Dahl wrote a James Bond Film? Wow.
ReplyDeleteThis is like the guy I gamed with back in the day who claimed D&D invented the term "Long Sword"...
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this one too. It's true that ninja were found in film and literature before this. But I also remember a particular moment in my little fraction of California youth culture in the late seventies when suddenly everyone wanted to be a ninja - in real life and in D&D games - and they hadn't before. I was never sure what caused this.
ReplyDeleteCalithena
In Australia the TV series 'The Samurai' popularised ninjas even earlier.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Samurai_%28TV_show%29
I'm pretty sure I first heard of ninjas in The Great Escape: A Source Book of Delights and Pleasures for the Mind and Body (1974). It had a one-page article detailing varieties of martial arts. Later they showed up on my TV in Shogun (1980), but I don't recall if the word "ninja" was used.
ReplyDelete