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While the Occident's interest has waned somewhat and a lot of this sort have gone back to teaching judo to inner city youths or selling famous monuments to tourists, Hollywood (and the rest of the film industry) does retain many of the trappings of the 1980s Ninja fever. As central characters, Ninja are rarer now, but from time to time a squadron of slightly inept martial arts assassins in black pyjama's will turn up and start creating mayhem, or a lone warrior will have to battle for survival in the savage urban jungle armed only with his wits, fists, Ninja lore, and an arsenal of bizarre or improvised weapons.
The diametric opposites of evil assassin and noble hero still appear (you can always tell which type a movie character is; if he has a name and takes his hood off he's a hero, if not then he's a villain), even if with reduced frequency. We no longer live under the threat of yet another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel (although a yet another Batman is still in the works), or the latest installment in the epic kiddie Three Ninja saga. As a general rule, Ninja are no longer the heroes of choice in Hollywood, but they still make occasional appearances as evil henchmen.
It was ten years ago now that four rubber faced heroes burst onto the cinema screen, becoming as notorious for their cries of "Cowabunga!" and craving for pizza as for their Ninja skills. The Ninja craze was actually coming to an end by then, but the 1980s saw Hollywood go Ninja mad.
Unless they were a cute kid or a mutated reptile, very few of these Ninja even wore hoods or masks, but they kicked really high. Ninjutsu basically became a fashionable replacement for karate or kung fu in a lot of films, having the great strength that someone who did it could be called a Ninja, which was catchier than 'bloke who does karate'... Which is not to say that other martial arts don't have such catchy terms for their practitioners, or that Ninja doesn't mean something much more than just 'bloke who does ninjutsu', just that they aren't as well known.
A popular element in these films is the Ninja code of honor. In Hollywood terms, this was usually more akin to Bushido than to whatever internal code the Ninja families may have practiced. A great many Hollywood Ninja also carry a Samurai sword, or even the daisho, the paired katana (long sword) and wakizashi (short sword), the bearing of which was the unique prerogative of late-period Samurai. To compound the error, they usually wear the katana with the cutting edge down, like an Occidental sabre, which is patently incorrect. In short, Hollywood Ninja were like Samurai in black pyjamas.
The pop culture Ninja - if he is not a faceless bad guy - is typically a heroic sort. In stark contrast to the grim necessity which spawned their namesakes, these Ninja selflessly battle crime, usually in the Batman mould. (Michael Dudikoff's American Ninja films for instance) The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a case in point, at least in their cartoon incarnation.
From their comic book origins to their cinematic grave, the Turtles straddle the complete range of modern Ninja representations. Spawned as gritty violent isolated creatures, the half-shelled ninjas battling a gang of organized criminals led by their sensei's old nemesis. The Turles become a bunch of goody-two-shoes Martial Arts crime fighters who seem quite unwilling to put in the extra effort to make sure their foes do not just come back next week to try to kill them again. In fairness, this is perhaps because you can't have the heroes chase down and kill the fleeing villain for a children's cartoon, let alone poison his food and water without being seen. Likewise, from being brutal and devious warriors, they adopted the hampering, sweeping Hollywood honor code.
Perhaps the main thing that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their ilk show us was that the 'real' Ninja does not have a heroic place in mainstream culture. The brutal ethos that served them in the harsh feudal society of medieval Japan sits uneasily in the context of a modern world.
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