While ninja lore has actually long been popular in Japan, the masked assassins experienced a popularity boom throughout the Reagan years in the United States, a natural advancement of the martial-arts movie fad. While the 1970s saw Bruce Lee's Get in the Dragon (1973 ), the 1980s ushered in an excess of B films like Go into the Ninja (1981 ), which worked tossing stars into its box art, and Hope for Death (1985 ), with a poster that featured a ninja cloaked in a face cowl with a shuriken stuck right above the brow.
We saw shuriken flung in comics and cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We even chucked virtual ones in computer game like( 1988 ). It was no accident that one of the most desired G.I. Joe figures was the ninja Storm Shadow, who happily displayed 2 shuriken in his waist sash.
I wanted one similar to the by-then renowned throwing stars I saw in films and video games. Sure, I was young and naive. I didn't learn about the shuriken's real history. I didn't understand that the ninja star in fact can be found in a selection of styles, from square to x-shaped. Not all tossing stars were even, well, tossed; some were used for slashing and stabbing.
I didn't know that so much of ninja iconography had actually been developed as late as the 19th century by Japanese artists and writersdespite that ninjutsu, the art of the ninja, had actually existed for centuries prior. Artist Katsuhika Hokusai, for example, is typically credited with first illustrating ninja in their renowned black outfitsa outfit obviously motivated by the dark clothing of kabuki stagehands.
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