The Ninjas today are the stuff of myth & legend in comics film & electronic games. But once they were real the medieval equivalent of the SAS: spies saboteurs assassins. In their secrecy undercover skills & determination to survive they were the opposite of the overt self-destructive samurai. Could they fly? Make themselves invisible? Of course not. It was just that their skills gave them a magical aura. As a result martial artists & story-tellers have turned them into fantasy creatures from James Bond to Mutant Turtles. In Ninja John Man goes in search of the truth. In a journey to the heartland of the ninjas he takes us from their origins over 1 000 years ago through their heyday in the civil wars that ended with Japans unification in 1600. But that was not the end of the ninja ethos. That re-emerged in World War Two as a little-known counterpart to Japanese militarism. Ninja ways live on in the real last of the ninjas Hiroo Onoda who held out in the Philippine jungle for 30 years. From feudal Japan to 21st Century Hollywood John Mans epic story reveals the reality behind one of the worlds most enduring legends.