"the rude / Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude"

[larryhammer]

So according to this and several other Japanese-to-English dictionaries, a mantô is a "ninja weapon disguised as a pair of garden shears." This, of course, demanded immediate investigation. As in, hello what?

However, the usual ninja reference sites don't seem to know about it, nor do ninja weaponry stores offer to sell any. None of the main online Japanese dictionaries know about it either, nor Japanese Wikipedia. The bulk of the first couple pages of searches in Japanese are ... all Japanese-to-English dictionary sites. (Searches in English are overwhelmed with noise from Spanish hits.) Hmmm. And, hmmm.

There are a couple Japanese hits that claim to know of this thing and even a couple images, one even more or less claiming that it's used exactly how you'd expect: for infiltrating a castle while disguised as a gardener. So while I'm not fluent enough to evaluate webpage reliability in Japanese, it looks to not be a complete invention of a translation dictionary compiler, propagated outward. But I can't completely rule out feedback from same.

Has anyone ever heard of this? Anyone have an All Things Ninja Reference Book? Or a ninja joke?

(Found because I was looking up 萬, an outdated kanji for 10,000 used in one of the two ways of writing the word.)

---L.

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed. I would think that any ninja worth her salt could improvise a weapon out of any garden tool. This makes it sound like she'd have to go to the Ninja Supply Store before every mission.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I'm getting a cockamamie vibe from this.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the garden supply stores? A true ninja weapon would be in deep cover.