Someone Give This a Shot
Why isn’t there a manga about contemporary ninja that use guns? It would make perfect sense that samurai may retain a traditional reliance on swordsmanship, but ninja strive for efficiency and success, and therefore would logically adopt the most modern and efficient weapons. It’s true that guns are typically loud, which would be the antithesis of a ninja’s trademark strategy, but ninja guns are quiet! Just image a manga, or possibly even an anime or live action film filled with ninja pulling off crazy gun tricks, impossible shots, last second saves with hidden weapons, wild reloading tricks, and using fantastic weapons like guns that shoot ice bullets which leave no evidence, exploding bullets, bullets that drill through walls, homing bullets, plastic guns that aren’t detected by metal detectors, and so forth. You could also have ninja that specialize in the use of particular types of firearms like sniper ninja and two-handed automatic fire ninja. Perhaps a story revolving around a small clan of gun ninja opposing a large mafia that contracts professional hitmen to fight the ninja would allow for plenty of action and a high body count. Just imagine a small team of “gun ninja” facing off against a gang of 12 ultimate hitmen, finally fighting their way to a climactic battle with their ultimate assassin boss “Duke 13” (obviously a Golgo 13 homage). We’ve seen gun crazy live action films like Hard Boiled and Desperado, and live action films with amazing gun tricks like God of Gamblers and Pom Pom & Hot Hot, but we’ve yet to see anything that combines these characteristics. I know that gunplay isn’t typically especially popular among Japanese manga enthusiasts, but action oriented titles such as City Hunter, Gunsmith Cats, Shikabanehime, and even Soul Eater establish the fact that gunplay manga isn’t entirely unknown or unpopular among Japanese artists and fans.
If a title like this exists and I’m just not aware of it, I’d be grateful if someone would enlighten me.
Related Posts
About The Author
john
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Nabari no Ou anime introduces a ninja who has no qualms about using a gun (even to the extent of sneering at one of the main characters who questions his honour) in the third episode, although I’m pretty sure he’s a side character considering the size of the cast. He may or may not be in the manga, but I don’t see why they’d introduce a gun-wielding antagonist purely for the sake of the anime.
the anime samurai gun uses guns
Why Americans like ninja so much?
Err, Japanese readers has left a pile of responses to the entry in the Japanese translation blog.
ttp://ask-john.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2008/05/askjohn_4ea5.html#comments
hmmm…that does sound pretty cool. Why wouldnt they use guns? Maybe they could make their own guns that would be super quiet…or invisible.
It might just be me but i think Ninja’s and guns dont mix well together and hers a few reasons.
Certain generic elements or be it genre traits for a ninja anime normally involve things like feudal Japanese like setting, some sense of historical accuracy and a world in which sword play is most effective. A ninja based anime taken away from these elements and settings in my opinion really doesnt work, or ok it works very rarely. I’ll agree Nabari no Ou was an impressive anime which worked well with 21st centry ninja’s. However alot of the time it doesn’t.
Its like baking a cake but instead of something sweet you use something savoury. Sure you get the occasional masterpiece (the cheese cake), but alot of the time it ends up in a big mess of tasteless nudity, exaggerated fight scenes and story so predicable it makes Tite Kubo look genius and original.
What I’m saying is its bad to mix the two although only elements I’ll illustrate my point using genre. Take for instance Ultimate Muscle, it was Sci-Fi and sport. If you take sport out of its natural habitat its going to look silly and ridiculous, whether set in the future or in the past and by god did it look silly.
Or Ah My Buddha, ecchi and religion … yea lets not go there.
Legend of the Blue Wolves made a good attempt with its mecha yaoi (that was a joke).
Ok but i admit sometimes it works, and when it works, just like that awesome cheesecake its fantastic. Example being something like Cowboy Bebop with its Sci-Fi, Western jazz theme which almost redefined anime itself.
So in answer to your question why isnt there any Ninja Gun play around, i suppose no ones got the balls to pull it off yet.
Not that this is especially relevant, but the upcoming American live action film “Ninja” depicts modern day ninjas that carry semiautomatic pistols as standard equipment beside their swords and shuriken.