The Iga-Ueno Ninja Museum does have a ninja house. In fact they picked one up out of the mountains and brought it to the center of the city to be their museum. The Iga area is famous for its ninja, if you didn't get that already, namely the Iga clan of ninja that competed with the Koga ninja as the two main schools of Ninjutsu in the Tokugawa era. The museum is dedicated to the truth of the ninja, rather than the mythology.
The first and most important myth they dispelled, at least for me, is one that showed up on Mythbusters. Sort of. A while ago, Mythbusters did an episode in which they tested a lot of ninja myths, one of which being that ninjas used flat wooden structures tied to their feet, or sometimes the end of a barrel, to walk across water. Mythbusters then went to show that the contraption would not allow you to walk across water.
Actually, that's not what it was meant for. In the time of the ninjas, even better than dry moats or water moats were mud moats, which didn't allow walking or swimming. But by using a flat piece of wood to distribute your weight you can walk across it. So these contraptions (Seen in the gallery here) actually did work, but as something other than what we believe they were. The house itself had a number of hidden features, like a spinning wall panel, a hidden spy room, a secret compartment outside on the porch for their valuables, a hidden compartment inside under a floorboard for a sword, and a secret passage.
Then there was the ninja show. It was about the coolest thing I've ever seen. They demonstrated the ninja's most common weapons and even did this:
In case you can't tell. He is throwing chopsticks--blunt-ended chopstics--at a wooden plank. And they are sticking into it. This guy was awesome.
I left something out, though. On my train ride to the Ninja museum, I met a Taiwanese couple from Texas and their two kids, the Lin family. We actually made quite a pair. They could read chinese characters (which I am dreadfully bad at) and I could translate spoken Japanese for them. I felt quite good about my language skills when I managed to translate the entire ninja show for them, because it was in Japanese. I basically leaned over and gave them the gist of what the guy had just said. I felt very useful.
And then, after riding part way back home with the Lin family, I was on the next train when a wasp started flying around. Fleeing the wasp, a girl with a suitcase sat down in my booth (the train had sets of two bench seats facing each other. I tried to tell her it wasn't going to sting her if she stopped panicking in Japanese, and when she found out I could speak Japanese, she wanted to talk. Minami-san was from the area near Kyoto that we were heading towards, and she goes to school in the Shiga area. Oddly enough, I told her I liked Japanese music and she said she really liked American music. But she doesn't speak English. And I don't really understand Japanese lyrics anyway. We did have the same taste in American music, but I was more impressed that I knew enough Japanese to keep up a conversation with a complete stranger for an entire train ride. It sort of validated the last three years of my life, in a way. It turns out I haven't been doing as bad as I thought I was.
Oh, so back to the Ninja museum (sorry I'm skipping around). After the ninja show was over, I walked the long way back through the city. It should be mentioned that I finally got to a more rural place in Japan. The train traveled through farmlands and small towns and Iga-Ueno is a small city about the size of Johnstown, a small city near where I live back home. I walked to the train station and on my way back, as a favor to someone back home, I stopped at a Fire Department to ask how they worked in Japan. I was lucky enough to catch the firefighters when they were outside. And They have a fake building in back to practice on.
complete with zipline entry
Here's what I found out. Even in small areas, they have full-time fire departments in Japan. These departments do enlist the help of Volunteers, but the volunteers do not have their own departments, as far as the man I spoke to knew. He was a career firefighter, so I trust him. He said that especially in big cities, its impossible for a fire department to know all the addresses in a crowded area, and so the volunteers help by navigating for the firefighters or cordoning off the area before they arrive. So, since they have full departments, they don't fund raise like ours does back home. It isn't too surprising, as I have family from the midwest who say that they don't have volunteer departments either. And this isn't to say there are no volunteer departments in Japan, just in this part of Japan. Although there's no way to tell for sure where one might be if they do exist.
When I met up with the Lins at the train station, they told me that it's like that in Taiwan, and their volunteers will sort of indicate the area of the fire for the fire trucks.
I would have liked to stay a little longer and explore a smaller city a little more, but the trains run far apart in Iga-Ueno, and I had to get back.
Cory
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