There were no ninjas at my wedding in Japan

My waifu and I got married officially in Ireland. Just a small registry office ceremony with my family in attendance.
But we also had a ceremony in Japan a few months later. This allowed her family, friends and colleagues to celebrate and in a lot of cases, meet their friend’s new husband for the first time.

We had the ceremony in Ginza, Tokyo and started with a shinto style ceremony and then went on to the reception which involved lots of fancy food and drink.

We had also decided to put on a slideshow about our lives in Ireland.

We even handed out a short questionnaire for our guests so they could try and answer questions about us.

At the time I had been studying martial arts for about a year and since it happened to be a japanese martial art we thought it would be an interesting bit of info for our guests.
I was in a dojo of a martial art called Bujinkan Budo Taijitsu. This martial art was created by Masaaki Hatsumi Sensei and is a combination of a number of different schools of martial arts of which he is inheritor (soke)
A few of these schools are related to ninjitsu and so as a shorthand for people who probably had no interest in martial arts that’s what I said I was studying. Everybody’s heard of ninjitsu, right?

So we went through our slideshow filled with pictures of Dublin and came to the Ninja question.

Declan is a student of which martial art?
Judo
Karate
Jujitsu
Ninjitsu

We revealed the correct answer to an audible gasp of “eeeehhh?”

Now as far as you and I know, ninjas were highly skilled assassins who wore black and killed people with throwing stars and swords and then escaped into the night.
And they came from Japan. This much seems to be historically accurate.

But in Japan Ninjas are regarded as people of somewhat magical abilites, they are said to be able to run up walls, disappear and no doubt kill people with just the power of thought.

And I just told a room full of people that I was training to be one of them.

I might as well have said I was a professional leprechaun.

This wouldn’t have been a big deal until later in the afternoon when one of our guests asked if they could
“Have a demonstration?”

Of my ninja-ness
ninjatude
ninjality

Made up words cannot express how my testicles shrunk back into my lower body when he asked that.
I waited for the inevitable laugh, the joke. But it didn’t come. He seemed quite serious.

My wife turned and asked me if there was something I could demonstrate. A room full of eyes on me, waiting …

I didn’t feel like I could just brush this off, so I racked my brains for something I could do would at least show that I tried.

This is starting to sound like the lead up to a terrible accident in which tables collapsed and 14 people lost limbs but it’s nothing as serious as that. I merely called out a friend who I knew had studied some Aikido and together we re created some basic move typically taught in a beginners class – escaping from someone restraining your wrists.

Cameras flashed as we stepped through this simple move in my rented suit.

I knew they were completely underwhelmed and was happy to get back to something ( anything ) else but they then asked us to do it again as not everyone had captured the event on camera.

If there was a human organ of embarrassment it would have swollen Akira-style to fill the room at this stage. I really felt quite daft.

For everyone else, it was just a harmless piece of fun or their friend’s new husband being unimpressive at martial arts.

We went through a few more non embarrassing questions and then spoke to different groups of people as they wished us well and chatted about old times.

I briefly thought that I should have surprise-attacked the guy who suggested a demonstration to show him what ninjas were really like.

I was starting to get the feeling that this wasn’t that bad. Everyone was actually very kind and while I had felt really awkward it was hardly something that I needed to worry about.

It wasn’t my fault that a plain ol’ system of martial arts training happens to have the reputation of magical levitating killers from feudal Japan.

What really put things in perspective was a kindly older gent who was one of the last to approach. He was an old colleague of my wife’s and didn’t speak any English at all.

He speak to her briefly and then left.

I assumed it was just the general well wishing we’d heard from all our guests.

It turns out that he had come up to tell us that he came from a ninja family, his ancestors trained as ninjas and he said that it was very interesting to see foreigners training in some of the skills that his forebears were using hundreds of years before.

Feeling better, I walked out of the reception hall smiling at the day’s events.

but quietly, like a ninja.