Ninja Hacking

Chapter 16 Sabotage

During the Sengoku period (1477 to 1600), the demand for ninja by warlords engaged in civil war was high – the ninja families of Iga and Koga were sought after for their abilities to “infiltrate fortified towns considered impenetrable, to commit selected assassinations, and to conduct guerilla warefare.”¹ In the histories of ninja comes one story where ninja infiltrated the castle of Ujizane and set fire to structures inside the fortification; that alone qualified as sabotage, but what makes it notable was that the ninja set the fires in a way that the castle inhabitants “believes that traitors coming from their own garrison had attacked them.”¹ When we examine the topic of sabotage as Zukin, we need to understand how malicious ...