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Most People Picture History Wrong, These Facts Will Set them Straight

Khalid Elhassan April 25, 2020 34 min

Franklin D. Roosevelt - Joseph Stalin — The Big Three of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943. Rare Historical Photos

37. Real Life Ninjas Were Nothing Like Their Depiction in Popular Culture

The word “ninja” often evokes images of masked warriors, all in black, scaling building walls and assassinating people all over feudal Japan. In modern popular culture, people think of ninjas as covert killers, using exotic blades, throwing stars, and smoke bombs to carry out assassinations, and locked in a feud with the more honorable samurai.

In reality, those kinds of super cool ninjas never existed. The ones who did exist looked and acted nothing like popular perceptions thinks ninjas looked like and acted. Far from having any feud with the samurai, many ninjas were actually samurai.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.