Koka Ninja House, Japan’s Only Historic Ninja House!
A good number of visitors to Japan are very interested in ninja and may even hope to do some ninja related activities in Japan. Koka is home to the only surviving historic ninja house. Built in the Edo Period, the Koka Ninja House not only provides accurate information about ninja, but also lets visitors explore an actual ninja clan house, filled with traps, hidden passages and secret doors.
Koka Ninja House
This house was owned by the Mochizuki ninja clan, the head clan of all 53 Koka ninja clans. The Mochizuki built this current house in the late 17th century, which miraculously remains more or less completely unaltered! It is the only full-fledged ninja house that exist in Japan today.
During the Sengoku Period, ninja essentially became super spies, working for hire to gather information for their patrons. The Koka ninja didn’t dress like what we imagine ninja today. Rather, they often looked more like regular people (it would be rather suspicious if some random person was skulking around after all).
For example, they often dressed like medicine sellers. Disguising themselves as medicine sellers was in fact quite clever. Most medicine men of the time were from remote Toyama but traveled far and wide throughout the country, so meeting one you’d never met before was not strange.
The house gives you a complete free guide of the house once every hour for thirty minutes.
Until the guide starts you can walk around the house, learn about ninja and discover some of the unusual features about this house.
Explore the Ninja house
The entrance to the second floor is behind a hidden wall, so you might have to feel around for it. The secret stairs will lead you to the second floor.
The second floor is quite narrow. Basically you cannot stand up, and that is the point. The reasoning here is that an intruder cannot use their sword because samurai typically use long, big swords, while ninja usually use much smaller ones.
It is noted here that the main purpose of the house is to befuddle and delay any intruders, so the ninja of the house can quickly escape. After all, a ninja’s main purpose was to kill someone (let alone in close combat) but to escape capture so they can deliver information successfully to their patrons.
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