It's always perked my curiosity as to how much of the Samurai/ninja mythos is actually based on reality, because just like the King Arthur stories, the facts of those times have always been sort of blended with fictitious over-exaggeration and religious embellishment, so a story could be recounting some historical and credible war or personality one moment, and then next thing you know it turns into the attack of the smoke monsters.
Take the idea of what ninjas wore. Here's Stephen Fry on the subject:
And here's another [historian?] Countering his rather rational view with the actual accounts from historial manuscripts of the time:
Obviously Stephen Fry's account is more grounded, more realistic, and more likely to be true, but the other guy is able to back his rather more fantastical ideas up with historical fact, with historical documents that say all this guff totally happened. Are his accounts really too objectively impossible to be considered credible evidence? People are capable of some superhuman feats sometimes. How do you separate fact from fiction?
And there are some people who would say that ninjas never really existed as a proper group, they were just the name given to a collective bunch of unassociated random amateurs who decided for whatever reason to kill a really important bloke, whereas other historians would argue that there is evidence of them being an actual historical order who worked and trained with each other, with special techniques, skills, weapons, etc.
Who do you believe?
In the West we've been rather good at our bookkeeping, and have managed to categorise and organise our history so we're pretty certain about the parts that are true and what's been made up by some bard in a Saxon pub back in 476 A.D.
That hasn't really happened to the same extent with Eastern history, and they've kind of never bothered to separate the historical fact from the clearly made up, leading to a rather fantastical history of unlikely exploits and extraordinary circumstances that all seems a bit too good to be true (probably because it is).
The easiest example of this would be the myths and legends surrounding the Katana, it's just a sword, pretty similar to every other sword, but people will believe that it can cut through anything, and is faster and stronger and lighter and more resilient than any other sword in the history of ever. No, it's just a sword.
