In the history of Japan, a ninja (\u5fcd\u8005ninja) was someone specially trained
in a variety of unorthodox arts of war. The methods used by ninja included
assassination, espionage, and a variety of martial arts.

In the Japanese culture, they were usually trained for dangerous
missions.Their exact origins are still unknown. Their roles may have included
sabotage, espionage, scouting and assassination missions as a way to
destabilize and cause social chaos in enemy territory or against an opposing
ruler, perhaps in the service of their feudal rulers (daimyo, shogun), or an
underground ninja organization waging guerilla warfare.

The ninja use of stealth tactics against better-armed enemysamurai does not
mean that they were limited to espionage and undercover work: that is simply
where their actions most notably differed from the more accepted tactics of
samurai. Their weapons and tactics were partially derived from the need to
conceal or defend themselves quickly from samurai, which can be seen from
the similarities between many of their weapons and various sickles and
threshing tools used at the time.

Though typically classified as assassins, many of the ninja were warriors in all
senses. In Stephen K. Hayes's book, Mystic Arts of the Ninja, Hattori Hanzo,
one of the most well-known ninja, is depicted in armor similar to that of a
samurai. Hayes also says that those who ended up recording the history of the
ninja were typically those within positions of power in the military dictatorships,
and that students of history should realize that the history of the ninja was kept
by observers writing about their activities as seen from the outside.