November 26, 2012

From “A Pro-Pirate Counterpoint” by William “Black Bill” Cubbins IV

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This rebuttal to a rebuttal was received yesterday from prior editorial contributor Black Bill Cubbins, whose prior article elicited a lively discussion and a contentious response from ninja activist Felisa Lloyd Matsumura-Tamaribuchi. In the interest of covering both sides of the contentious pirate-ninja conflict with armed neutrality, we present his statement here.

-The Editors

I was disappointed but not surprised to learn that my plea for tolerance of pirates and pirate culture was viciously appropriated as an opportunity for the pro-ninja lobby to make its vile and disenfranchising views known. I am used to the pro-ninja bias in the media and the constant agitation of ninja-affiliated terrorists and lackeys using whatever excuse they can to forward their anti-pirate agenda, after all. My essay on the disgusting and disenfranchising use of my people as Halloween costumes became just another excuse for an anti-pirate diatribe by ninjas for whom civilized discourse instead of violence is as foreign as giving open battle.

If I mentioned ninjas as a costume possibility, it was only because they do not constitute a nation unto themselves like pirates. That label has been forced on discourse by the pro-ninja movement despite the fact that ninjas have never been anything but a small subset of larger peoples. If you had asked the ninjas living on Plunder Harbor, Jolly Roger Cove, or Dead Man’s Cay (the Takeshima, Okinotori, and Senkaku islands, to use the invented ninja terms) what they were before the war they would have said anything but ninja. That would have been the same as giving “construction worker” as your nationality today.

Therefore it’s impossible for my remarks to have been racist, as the loosely ninja-affiliated Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi claimed, because ninjas (unlike pirates) are not a race but merely a mongrel people who made their living by assassination and sneaking and just happened to live on the islands in question when pirate resettlement began. Each island was historically dominated by pirates until their expulsion by the shogunate a thousand years ago, after all.

But pro-ninja activists like Matsumura-Tamaribuchi and her friends in the pro-ninja mass media refuse to engage in civil discourse with pirates, despite the pirate nation’s status as a representative democracy (unlike the feudal and dictatorial ninja government, dominated by terrorists). To them, violence and name-calling are the only forms of communication. Perhaps I shouldn’t encourage children to dress up as ninjas for Halloween, but then again perhaps Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi shouldn’t bear the cross of an apologist and project moral equivalency on the peaceful pirate people and the inherently unreasonable and violent ninjas.

Like many, I look forward to the day when pirates and ninjas can live in peace. But that day will never come if racist anti-pirate demagogues like Matsumura-Tamaribuchi and her cohort of terrorists hell-bent on disenfranchisement have their way.

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October 20, 2012

From “A Pro-Ninja Rebuttal” by Felisa Lloyd Matsumura-Tamaribuchi

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This piece was contributed by Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi as a rebuttal to “Black Bill” Cubbins’ article which appeared last week. We neither endorse nor condemn the views expressed therein, which remain solely those of the author. A noted pro-ninja activist, Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi has written extensively on the topic and participated in several demonstrations, including the controversial Takeshima Freedom Flotilla intended to break the pirate “blockade of the pirate-occupied territories.” The wife of the late Sensei Takeharu Matsumura-Tamaribuchi of the Black Shadow Clan, Ms. Matsumura-Tamaribuchi was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska.

-The Editors

It’s indicative of the pro-pirate media bias that exists in the West, with its pirate-owned and pirate-operated news and entertainment media outlets, that “Black Bill” Cubbins’ recent article has gone unchallenged for over a week at this point. I would like to specifically rebut his claims by framing them within the context of the larger ninja freedom struggle, in which I am a long-term participant.

Cubbins’ note that “ninja” is an appropriate Halloween costume cuts to the crux of the long ninja freedom struggle, in which the so-called pirates have long sought to minimize ninjas, deny our existence as a distinct group, and legitimize their occupation as “free ports” of many traditional ninja lands. If children are allowed to dress as ninjas but discouraged by pro-pirate activists from dressing as pirates, the inequity that is so often expressed in the media is ossified and ninjas find themselves further marginalized, disenfranchised, and demonized by the racist pirate policies.

In a larger sense, the issue is directly tied to the continuing, illegal, racist, fascist, and tooth-decay-promoting pirate occupation of the Takeshima, Okinotori, and Senkaku islands. You will note that I refuse as a matter of principle to use the so-called pirate names for the occupied territories (Plunder Harbor, Jolly Roger Cove, and Dead Man’s Cay). What does it matter what the children dress as for Halloween when the entire existence of the holiday indicates a monstrous indifference toward the plight of ninjas living in pirate-occupied lands? Even a child dressed as a pumpkin should be appalled that they are receiving food and clothing when so many ninjas oppressed by prates lack even basic niceties such as honed katanas and richly embroidered gis?

This Halloween, readers, discourage your children from dressing as a ninja. Discourage them from dressing as anything at all, or receiving any candy. Turn off your heat, your water, your air, your gravity. For only in lacking those most basic amenities can you (and they) understand what ninjas in pirate-occupied lands suffer every nanosecond of every day and be moved to radical political action to remedy the situation. Black Bill Cubbins used the right words, but he could have been speaking them into a mirror, for every one applies to his deceitful, wealthy, and irredeemable piratekind.

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July 12, 2012

From “A History of European Privateers and Shogunate-Employed Shinobi-no-Mono” by Daisy “外人” Dejanira

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While there had been a flourishing trade with the outside world at times in the past, the ascension of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 gradually put an end to that. The Tokugawa shoguns recognized the need for trade and technology but were deeply suspicious of foreigners, and viewed Christianity in particular as a threat to the shogun’s authority. As such, outside trade was gradually curtailed until the Sakoku-rei or “closed-country edict” prohibited Westerners from entering, Japanese from leaving, and Catholics from existing.

A single area, Dejima Island in Nagasaki harbor, remained open to Portuguese and later Dutch traders, who were able to realize astounding profits of 50% or more at the cost of being confined to the small island and bound by a draconian set of procedural rules. But, as with the rest of the world, there were many adventurers from other areas—England, France, Scandinavia—who were unwilling to abide by those restrictions. After all, Japan had developed a taste for eyeglasses, firearms, astrolabes, coffee, chocolate, and other items that could only be obtained overseas.

The remaining Christians in Japan—persecuted, occasionally in open rebellion, and often driven underground—were a particularly lucrative source of income, as they had nowhere else to obtain crucifixes and weapons (and many of the illicit traders fancied themselves defending the faith in addition to making a profit). Their seamanship and swordpoints honed by the constant inter-European naval warfare of the period, these privateers were formidable smugglers.

Naturally, the Tokugawa shogunate was not helpless in the face of such unwanted foreign incursion. To maintain the fiction that Japan was inviolate, and to exercise the immediate death sentence the law proscribed for unauthorized foreigners on Japanese soil, the shogunate employed a network of coastwatchers and spies. Lucrative rewards were quietly offered for those who discreetly informed upon Catholics or those trading illicitly with outsiders, and specially-trained shinobi-no-mono retained by the shogun from the Iga and Kōga clans were dispatched to deal with such incursions.

During the great siege of Hara Castle during the Catholic-led Shimabara Rebellion in 1637-38, for example, European privateers supplied the rebels and engaged in gunnery duels with both Japanese ships and their shinobi-no-mono crews and Dutch vessels hired by the shogun. Though few records ever existed due to the illicit and clandestine nature of the struggle, quieter and small-scale actions would be contested between smugglers and shogunate mercenaries and troops for over a hundred years until the Napoleonic Wars at the turn of the 19th century.

And that, my friends, is how the long-standing enmity between pirates and ninjas came to be.

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