The Lights Are Much Greater There

I’ve heard many people say that the city is too bright to accommodate ninja. Light is, after all, the purest enemy of stealth. But these people are usually not from the city and they don’t understand that despite the brilliance of many surrounding lights which a city contains, dark splotches always abound—on the roofs, in the alleys, parks, and fire escapes—and these shadows of the city are made even darker due to their location among such brightness. We can see far better in the dark when all is dark and our pupils expand. But our eyes are always dancing in the light, the light, the light, and we skip over the darkness because we are not accustomed to it; and so, while the dark of a city isn’t necessarily dark like the country, it is still quite adequate for a skilled ninja, dressed in black or navy blue, to remain invisible.

Having said that, the light of the city can actually work to a ninja’s advantage in another way. Besides the prey’s inability to see beyond the darkness, they are also more easily tracked, because while the ninja is up above in the shadows unseen, the prey is sitting out there like a lame duck, walking the streets or what have you, bathed in streetlamps. As opposed to tracking a target in the countryside, where both predator and prey are enveloped in near blackness, and the two must keep within a few yards of one another for the game to persist, the ninja can easily watch their target from a faraway distance, and wait for the blind fool to stumble themself into a vulnerable position, whether it be their place of dwelling, the bathroom of a restaurant, or, most preferably, most foolishly, into the very darkness itself.

Not all of NYC is Times Square you know. Heck, not all of NYC is Manhattan. There are thousands of crimes that go by unseen on these streets every year. Are you telling me that thugs and hustlers are smoother than a ninja?

Here’s an exercise you can try out with a friend. Go outside when it’s really dark and have your friend go some distance away. How well can you see him? What if he crouches? What if he’s up against a wall? I think you will find that the friend doesn’t even need to be wearing black—the night is a dark place and can hide things right out in the open. Now imagine your friend was dressed all in black and was fifty feet above you!

There are no lights on most roofs. A man on a roof is impossible to see!

The misconception is: “Oh, how could you kill unseen in a city of a million lights and a million eyes?” But, just look at the corpses. Look at where they’re found when they’re found at all: in alleys, on rooftops, in apartments, poisoned, cut, or worst of all, dead without apparent reason, dead by assumed heart attack—doesn’t anyone remember that ninja know death touches? Look it up! But we’ll get to that later on.

City light is not the only advantage an urban ninja--a true urban ninja--possesses.

Just Listen to the Music of the Traffic in the City.

The country is a place of deathly quiet, and so to remain unheard the ninja too must be deathly quiet. But as any resident will attest, NYC is not a quiet place. The amount of noise pollution, let alone general sound, in NYC is constant and astounding; and thus, the ninja are granted an enormous assistance—a buffer, if you will. In my opinion, it would take a miracle for a New Yorker to hear a ninja creeping about. And since being heard is half the game of stealth, I would also have to--once again--say that a city is more adequate for shinobi-style assassination than is the countryside.

For example, in the country one might step on a twig, cracking the eerie silence, while in the city a ninja could bathe underneath chatter and horns and engines and walk the concrete silent—and, to take it one step further, even wait for a truck or bus to roar by before striking, so that nobody, not even Batman, could hear the death shriek of the victim echoing out from behind the green dumpster in that tiny little alley out back of the Chinese restaurant, totally muffled.
More reasons to come. Hopefully some readers too. Does nobody believe?