Ninjas: the mystical warriors.
Mystical or maybe not so mystical at all.
Common knowledge among the common people is that ninjas were mindless assassins, and they were able to fly over houses, disappear in mist or smoke, and they posessed supernatural abilities of mind control, hypnosis, and so on. But that's hollywood hype. It's how they sold the movies. Yes, sure, they were interesting in the movies, but the movies only told half of the story.
In reality, ninjas were human beings
who according to legend, came in contact with an alien civilisation called
the "Tengu", and according to history, they were in the beginning ronin- a
samurai without a master - disgraced samurais or fed up ones,
meaning they just had about enough of serving a master 100 times more
ignorant, stupid and simply evil, then they were supposed to. So, they
rebelled at first, and left their masters, or their master simply died
off, and they left to wander around the country, looking for a job (sound
familiar ?) and eventually became known in the places where they settled
as helpers of the villagers because of their fighting skills and combatant
abilities (There is an excellent movie by the way, by Akira Kurosawa, "The
Seven Samurais" or something like that, which played around the 80's, and
the story depicted came pretty close to the real situation the japanese
society was living at the time of the legendary ninjas... )
Later on, the ronin started gathering and training together, and formed gangs, and later on , gangs became interrelated families. While the training methods depicted in movies do come close a little to the level of seriousness of the trainings these guys used to have, according to more "realistic" history, the movies rarely touched on the subject of social relations, social life of the ninjas.
They had families, regular "day time jobs", and if you saw a skilled soldier, a ninja specialized in lots of stuff, during the daytime, in the field harvesting the crops, you would definitely not be able to tell the difference.
So, when thinking of the ninjas, I don't think of a killing machine, I'm not thinking of an assassin. I'm thinking of a person who was capable of living two separate lifes, having multiple personalities, but keeping both lifes, both personalities under control.
And that's an achievement that's worth thinking about !