Japanese ninja history student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink | Hacker News Reader

Japanese ninja history student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink

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213 pointsmomentmaker116 comments

When my father was in university (60's) he asked what size of paper they (students) need to deliver an engineering draft project on.

Professor told "Any, you may even use a postal stamp".

My father cut a paper of a size of a postal stamp and under spy glass draw perfect engineering architecture student assignment.

Professor unemotionally examined the work.

Well deserved top mark followed.

In today's schools you can get a failing grade for margins 0.1 inches off. Professors who reward creativity seem to be getting rarer.

From what my mom told about college in her day, her professors were much worse about those kinds of rules than mine were.

I had this kind of professor. We'd say that he was the human version of diff.

Having margins right should have no effect on your creativity. Attention to details is a nice skill to have, especially on areas where mistakes can cost human lives.

Essay margins don't kill people, people with bad word processing software kill people.

Details can be attended to without being nonsense specifications.

When I was in flying school, we had a fiendishly difficult navigation examination with a known curmudgeon of a CFI (Chief Flying Instructor).

Almost everyone in the class failed. One student got 68% and myself and another got 99.9% I was amazed as I am not often such a high scoring student, so I cheekily asked where I had lost the 0.1%? The CFI told me that I had copied one number down incorrectly from the question sheet onto the first line of my (4 page) working sheet. I had got the "right" answer at the end though, by following all steps of the spherical trigonometry through to the end.

Instead of marking me as a 'fail' for getting the wrong copybook answer, he still deemed it correct because I had followed all the correct formulae and logical steps, using the derived results in the next sections. He deducted 0.1% for the brain fart that transposed one starting value.

I didn't find out why the other guy lost 0.1%, but I was amazed at his integrity to mark the work and knowledge and not just see the final value different from the desired outcome and simply marking it wrong. It would have taken him some time and effort to validate my results from my wrong initial values.

1. That's usual for math tests run by non--corporate-robots.

2. IMO, copying numbers correctly is a critical skill for pilots, and you should have lost substantial marks and retaken later with a proper checklist for validating your work.

2 - that professor was teaching navigation. I don't think it's a part of their job to judge students on unrelated matter.

Which professor or class do you think should teach to copy data from the authoritative source correctly, if not all of them?

Funny, I did the same thing at Uni and was accused of cheating. Never wanted to smack an old man before.

> "I didn't hesitate to give the report full marks - even though I didn't read it to the very end because I thought I should leave some part of the paper unheated, in case the media would somehow find this and take a picture."

This guy gets social media.

I think he meant media as in the news media, not social media.

That reminds me of a character from Discworld called Vetinari who is a trained assassin (which is established as a legal guild in Ankh-Morpork, a quite respectable profession for the upper-class) that failed his stealth examination due to 'not attending'. :D

(I might be missing details, it's been a while since I read Night Watch.)

Vetinari is the ruler of Ankh-Morpork, and is notable for imaginative solutions such as "Tax the rat farms" when asked how to solve a plague of rats.

He's like Machiavelli, only with more style.

I heard an anecdote from a ninjutsu instructor (a European). He was visiting Japan, meeting with friends; and to one of the meetings he wore a T-shirt with the Nin kanji. Suddenly one of his hitherto very friendly acquaintances changed to being only coldly polite. Later it turned out he was from an old samurai family, which was mostly wiped out by assassins some 400 years ago.

Talk about holding a grudge...

I don’t understand people who somehow feel involved in things that happened literally 100s of years ago, it does neither impact nor reflect on them in any way.

History matters. Where can anyone draw the line?

We draw the line at personal involvement. If not for that no German would walk the streets abroad safe in Europe.

WW2 isn't a good example. A Nazi flag would be horribly offensive for a holocaust survivor. Or a Japanese rising sun flag in Nanjing

Being a holocaust survivor would imply personal involvement.

That's right. Germans abroad such as myself do appreciate that a lot. :)

It feels like once again some Unix philosophy could be applied for the better: be strict in what you emit (ie. be kind and consider how your behavior reflects on you, but also be cognizant of your or your culture's history), but lenient in what you accept (ie. do not take offense easily/unnecessarily).

I believe this is a TCP principle not a Unix principle. Aka Postel’s law.

Indeed, thank you, won't mix that up again!

This is a ridiculous comparison. A proper analogy would be someone with a swastika symbol on their shirt talking to a Jewish person. I think we can all agree that wouldn't go well.

The time scale is way off - 400 vs 70 years. The sword and eye of Inquisition might be a better match.

Surely by now very few feels any sensitivity regarding Rome's Aquila.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Old people here (80 and up) still loathe the Germans and for what was done during the war. Their personal involvement is what make it impossible for them to move on. But as one of their children I have absolutely no grudge against Germans, old or young, simply because I wasn't personally involved.

Jewish people come in all shapes and sizes, and I know quite a few of them. The bulk are very well educated and are able to see history and their own part in it quite clearly. They are definitely not going to like some one with a swastika symbol on their shirt but the chances of that happening here in Europe are relatively slim because there would be a lot of other people - non Jews too - who would take offense.

That's nothing to do with personal involvement but with recognizing that those that wish to engender a second round of Nazism in Europe need to be dealt with before they become a problem.

This is bizarre, you start your comment saying that I have no idea what I'm talking about and then go on to agree with everything I wrote.

jacquesm's really disagreeing with the person above you, probably just replied to the wrong comment.

The swastika has existed for thousands of years before the Nazi party ever existed and has never represented war before Hitler borrowed it. You can still see occasional swastika designs all around Europe in pre-WW2 buildings as well as used commonly outside of Europe and North America.

The question of the usage of the swastika then becomes intent. eg is it used as part of a Pagan, Indian or other non-Nazi design?

I figured it was obvious from the context that the hypothetical person is wearing it in support of Nazis, and not as a buddhist symbol...

Not really. You wanted a more direct comparison with the GP and the GP wasn't wearing his T-Shirt in support of the Nazis. Which means either your counter-analogy is also flawed or the context should be that the wearer isn't doing so in support of the Nazis.

At the point where all the people involved are dead because the world belongs to the living. About 100 years is enough.

The descendants are involved. The deaths of ancestors has an effect on the descendants.

Also, gauge theory suggests that someone who thinks assassination was cool in 1600 would also think that assassination is cool in 2000.

Their death directly lead to the other events which lead to other events. You can always blame the fate if death was natural, but if some other party was involved, that party directly played god with their actions and ruined someone else's life trajectory and thus their descendants life trajectory. And now you find out that the descendants of the murderers are proud of their heritage and hero worship at the expanse of you.

Turkey is doing almost the exact same atrocities today under Erdogan that they did in the 1920s under Ataturk.

I won't comment on where exactly the line is, but this is on the level of me getting angry over someone practicing horse archery because of the Mongol invasion.

Horse Archery was a common martial technique which predicates the mongols (Its way ancient), and during the mongol period it was practiced by a lot of civs, both allies and enemies of the mongols.

But yes, a lot of people still hold a grudge against the Mongols in Asia and Europe

Attitudes like this are often passed down from generation to generation, as stories which can form the basis of family identity and culture. When your parents tell you about the band of ninja that nearly wiped out your ancestors, it probably seems like a much bigger deal than, say, some random battle from the history books. Especially if they seem to care about it.

>it does neither impact nor reflect on them

You're definitely not Japanese.

Similar story, though less "exotic":

Someone I know retraced their genealogy. They discovered that a few generations back (maybe 5 generations?), a girl was banned from the family. I don't remember why, probably something like getting pregnant from the poor miller's son.

They found out that she had had children, and that her branch of the family now lived the next valley over, so my friend and brother/cousins contacted them with a nice mail like "Hey believe it or not, we're related! Here's what happened 200years ago blahblah it would be great to do a big family reunion dinner!"

The response wasn't so enthusiastic, more along the lines of "we know. We've been raised to hate you. History matters, please do not contact us again."

People, even from the same country (literally the next village over), have very different view of lineage and history

Reminds me of Sarah Taber's thread about how people whose ancestors were in the Salem witch trials are interested in it in direct proportion to which side they were on.

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/118304392158632755...

> Ms Haga has been interested in ninjas - covert agents and assassins in medieval Japan - since watching an animated TV show as a child.

I would find it absolutely hilarious if that "animated TV show" was Naruto.

Naruto is an epic story.

I don’t know why they’re so reluctant to admit it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Say it loud and proud, Turtle Power!

Turtle Power!

Isn’t this a popular anime with a ninja theme? Why would that be hilarious?

It's been a while, but ISTR that in an early arc Naruto passes an exam for promotion to the next ninja rank after turning in an empty sheet for the essay portion.

No, he has an empty answer sheet at the end of a written exam with multiple questions.

To his luck, the exam was a psychological torture test, and he passes when the time is up by sheer virtue of still being in the room.

The empty sheet is not found by the proctor until after the students left, with the proctor being amused by the fact that such an idiot could pass his exam.

Because this anime has very little to do with "ninja".

Whether it is the black pyjama variety or the historic one, Naruto does something very different.

There are Ninjutsu in the serie but more often than not they create large explosions or summon a 30 meters tall creature. The whole has very little (if anything, but I don't know all the arcs) to do with espionnage.

Which is 100% fine, but explains why it would be funny to have it as an inspiration.

The first season is the best, and also the most realistic. It gets increasingly over the top from there.

If you've seen it, you'll know I don't mean to say it's realistic.

They pretty much reveal from the very beginning that Naruto hosts the 9 tailed fox. And Naruto is the protagonist. So you know it's going to get wild.

But it's a pretty good show!

I have seen it an eternity ago and I really liked the Zabuza ark. It was indeed way more grounded, at least compared to what happens afterwards.

I wonder how much of the over the topness was planned from the start and how much is just the result of the scaling phenomenon that many shonens suffer from and semi improvised "head above the water" weekly publications.

When I tried to jump back into the Shippuuden arc a while back I had to find a site that gave synopsis of the episodes so I could skip watching the filler episodes. There were... Quite a lot.

The show is kinda closer to the pre-martial-arts-boom idea of magical, mystical ninja in Japan, though. It literally borrows character names from that. Jiraiya for example.

Or ninja scrolls. Or basilisk.

Reminds me the story of the philosophy student who was asked to write an essay about "What is courage?" and handed a single page with the words "This is.".

The professor didn't finish heating/reading the essay because he was saving it for the media, which someone in class reached it to.

What's the term for this concept, where the expectation of media coverage changes the event being covered, even though the event wasn't originally intended for the media?

I think physicists won't mind if we extend the "observer effect" to cover this case.

I have so many questions:

- Ninja student? Is there a ninja school??

- How do I go to ninja school?!

- Is ninja school considered elite, and if so has there ever been an Operation Varsity Blues type admissions scandal?

- What is the post-ninja school career path? I mean obviously you're going to be a ninja, but who are the dominant employers in that field? Does it make sense to join a ninjitsu startup and get more experience but lower pay?

This article really feels like it's burying the lede...

The first rule of ninja school...

As I understand it, it's somewhere between a martial arts discipline and historical reenacting[or larping?] It seems pretty fun tbh. I suspect graduates might find work as instructors.

The student in question isn’t a ninja student, she’s just taking a ninja history class.

> What is the post-ninja school career path?

In the modern era, we just call them special forces or intelligence officers

The "ninja student" in the article is studying ninja, not studying to become a ninja. Yamada Yuji, her professor, does not look especially dangerous in the "Ninja Truth" series by NHK [1]. I suppose that may be a ruse.

[1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/tag/ninja/?type=...

Damn, I guess I got too excited and skip the subhead that calls her a student of ninja history. I do think it's wildly misleading to call her a ninja student in the headline, though...

Dreams: crushed :(

it's ambiguous, but no more so than "Japanese student", which could mean someone studying Japanese or a Japanese person who's in school

Japanese (resp. Ninja) person who is in school is actually a third option!

Antony Cummins' channel[0] is also a good source for "real" ninja history.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkRwb4iXDfw-6FEgqkCQqUQ

I wouldn't use him as a reliable source.

Why not, and what sources would you recommend?

Antony doesn't read, understand or speak Japanese. All his information is from other people and books. If you want some legit information from a westener, I suggest looking out books and texts from Kacem Zoughari, who has Ph.D. in Japanese History and Culture. He also reads and speaks fluent Japanese, and has lived there. Plus he has a lot of martial arts experience.

Ah, so it's like the magicians in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: students of a long-dead art that would scoff at the idea of actually attempting any of the things they study so passionately.

Like the "theoretical magicians" in the aforementioned book.

Masaaki Hatsumi, boss of all Bujinkan ninjas, is old, has anime-purple hair and often wears garishly coloured shirts. What him, dangerous? Ninjas be sneaky yo.

Apparently there are some bogus requirements like you have to be dropped off at one of the particular orphanages where they drop off future ninjas, and apparently it helps if you have a birthmark that resembles a symbol that is associated with fighting ability.

Alternatively, if you aren't an orphan, you can produce an antique weapon emanating a faint humming noise which your father never allowed you to hold, but when you did sneakily one time its blade started to glow!

Don't rush your child into ninja school like I did. We got my son's prophecy mixed up, he's 6.5 feet tall and blond, and ninja credits don't transfer to viking school.

I wouldn't imagine the skillet transfers very well between sneaky assassinations and pillaging. Are ninjas noted seafarers?

The thing is, a notable ninja seafarer would only be notable as a seafarer, that's kind of the point.

There probably were ninja who specialized in that. Sailors who took up the profession or were recruited to turn against their crew or captain, or regular ninja who did it the old fashioned way.

The skillet is really only good for blunt force trauma and it attracts a lot of attention.

> Are ninjas noted seafarers

Of course. How would they get to fight pirates otherwise.

A quick study of the Hávamál should get him back on course.

You apply for the CIA/Navy Seals or your local equivalent and do VERY well in the admission test.

It's not as easy as that unfortunately. You would apply to the SEALs and get in and be a SEAL for a few years. Then you would apply to SEAL Team 6 and get in there and do that for a few years. And then, finally you would get a tap on the shoulder and be invited to apply to the CIA Special Activities Division, and if you get in there, congratulations, you've made it!

> I have so many questions

You should ask a ninja!

https://www.youtube.com/user/digitalfilmmaker

This is not what TFA is about, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujinkan

In terms of career options, I know there is at least one group within the US Marine Corps, and a private military contractor in San Francisco which recruits from their own dojo.

The answer to most of your questions are found in the first sentence of the article

> A Japanese student of ninja history

Later it is revealed that she is studying at Mie University.

Yes, it is a shitty headline.

Ok, we've squeezed some history into the title above.

If ninja school doesn't work out, you could go to MIT and get your pirate certificate: https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-ce...

(In case anyone actually wants to know the answers to the above)

The legit organisation is the Bujinkan[1] run by grandmaster Hatsumi [2] (although some other guy claims to hold the lineage apparently Hatsumi has "the scrolls" that get passed from grandmaster to grandmaster). There are Bujinkan schools all round the world. Make sure you find a teacher who regularly goes to Japan. If you're interested, check it out.

Ninjutsu isn't like other martial arts because it's a combat art, it hasn't been diluted to be a sport. In my experience (former black belt but haven't trained in years) training is fun and generally safe (unlike say Krav Maga where every time I've been to watch a class someone's been hurt).

> What is the post-ninja school career path? I mean obviously you're going to be a ninja, but who are the dominant employers in that field?

Samaurai used to be the main employers, but now it's mainly large, sewer-dwelling rats...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bujinkan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaaki_Hatsumi

As kids we obviously wanted to be ninjas, which was mostly about fighting using exotic weapons and sneaking around. We learned the ropes from VHS rentals and pirated copies of the Last Ninja games on C64.

Secret messages mostly belonged to different universes, where we wanted to be secret agents or detectives. We sent encoded messages written in invisible ink, usually caesar cipher variants, written using filtered lemon juice. Milk might also have been involved, as I distinctly recall heating up and decoding really smelly paper notes.

I was just thinking the other day how I couldn't think of a historical analog of our modern intelligence agencies. Now I'm realizing that the CIA is just a modern ninja clan.

doesn't lemon juice display similar effect? I remember writing secret agent letters to my friend (who lived in a house in front of mine) so he can iron the paper and read the content.

Yes, lemon juice has the same effect. Ironing is an interesting way to do it. I used to just hold a candle up to it, trying not to burn the whole thing up.

Anyone else remember the website "Real Ultimate Power"?

http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm

I, too, turned in a blank piece of paper for my American Ninja Warrior class. But I told the professor a sob story, so I got an "A".

I have read when i was in fourth grade that onion juice could be used to make invisible ink that appears when the paper is heated.

There was also a scene[0] in National Treasure film (2004) where they use lemon and heat to reveal a hidden text

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTA7KR9-9lM

Soya juice (what she used) probably has the advantage of not smelling. Onion and lemon would give themselves away, I feel!

It looks like any organic liquid works, including milk in the case of Lenin, soya juice in your case, lemon and onion if you want to tip off the spied ;)

I’m curious about how it bends the paper. The retractile nature of drying juices must create visible irregularities on the surface.

I read a lot of books on Ninjutsu, and the Shinobi as a kid, and I recall that a popular form of invisible ink that they used required the recipient to urinate on the paper to reveal the words. Glad this student didn't utilise that form of invisible ink...

True story: British agents in WW I used sperm as invisible ink, approved by Captain Sir Mansfield George Smith-Cumming of the Secret Service Bureau, under the motto "Every man his own stylo". Apparently some agents didn't use, erm, fresh ink, but previously produced reserves (despite Captain Cummings's decree that "fresh operation was necessary for each letter") and subsequently the practice was discontinued because of the smell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Smith-Cumming

What I find more mindboggling is the fact that there is something as a Ninja History Student.

It's a single class. Most colleges have slightly whimsical gen ed / liberal arts electives.

Greendale College in Colorado has a seminar "Nicholas Cage: Good or Bad?".

Lenin, while been in prison used to write in milk on shoulders of the books that his family was bringing in for him to read. When books were returned to family they would heat pages which made letters to appear.

the story also goes that, since he was only given milk and bread while in solitary confinement, he would make inkwells out of bread, in order to write with said milk. I can't remember off the top of my head what he used as a writing utensil.

I can't remember off the top of my head what he used as a writing utensil.

The hair, from his back.

"The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove."

Heating super-thin paper over the stove? Wasn't the student taking a big chance her homework would go up in flames?

It's not that hard (after a low number of tries). You can try yourself, write something with milk and hold it over a candle after drying.

Truly high marks should only go to a student, previously unknown by the Department, who surreptitiously adds a graded report card into the midst of their peers.

> Ms Haga has been interested in ninjas - covert agents and assassins in medieval Japan - since watching an animated TV show as a child.

Translation: Naruto.

International accolades and acclaim is a nice prize in addition to the respect of the professor.

now that's one way to prevent your classmates from copying your work.

Works with plain old lemon juice too, the soybean process sounds over engineered.

Did they use any antiplagarism system?

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