What shall I learn in this second lockdown? Shall I learn about ninjas, for example? Are they still around? Is it possible to become one? Is it possible to interview one? I did skim wikipedia and okay, they're from history, but unlike the samurai and the knight, no medieval western equivalent seems to exist. Unless it's Robin Hood? Look I haven't read the whole entry yet, but there's a two and a half minute youtube animation called "Ninja Facts For Kids" from which I learnt that "Japan's last ninja alive today" is a sixty-three year-old engineer called Jinichi Kawakami. So I did a search for him, to see if there were any interviews, and it turns out that in 2013 he gave a TED talk.
It's not a tight twenty minutes. I fell asleep twice. It was late when I found it though, and it does have soothing musical intervals, but also there were visible walk-outs at the time. Jinichi Kawakami looks good for a man in his fifities, but he is not as impressive as, say, the cartoons. There's a surprising amount of faff when he draws his sword for example, and some of the needles he throws at the big red door don't stay in, also he never really convinces as a rock. Maybe it's nerves. Maybe ninjas aren't that used to giving talks. I can see it would be a different skill set. And I get how being a critic works: if you're not planning on writing more than a paragraph and pushed for time, it's easier to express disappointment over curiosity. So Ninjas give bad TED talks. So what. I own a lot of navy blue. Here is the last ninja's TED talk:
