The real history of the ninja does not begin in Iga. When you go into the letters, the diaries and the pay records written by the men who actually hired these people, a different name keeps surfacing — a district one mountain ridge to the north that almost nobody outside Japan has ever said out loud. Koga.

You will stand on that ridge, walk into a mountain district that governed itself by written articles and majority vote in the 1400s, and follow the documented operations one by one: the shogun's army that camped for eighteen months and lost anyway, the night raid at Kaminogo in 1562 that freed Tokugawa Ieyasu's family, the Koga marksman who put two shots into Oda Nobunaga in 1570, the eleven days at Fushimi in 1600, and the last shinobi field operation in Japanese history at Hara Castle in 1637. Every claim is sorted as it comes — what the chronicles record, and what is only legend. And you will find out why the men who did the work are not the men whose name ended up carved on a gate in the capital.

Would you rather do the work and lose the name, or own the name and never have done the work?

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