Historical ninja kind of spanned the class spectrum, as I understand it. Some were samurai, some were mercenary clans that had regular dealings with samurai, and some were people who lived in autonomous mountain enclaves that were too remote and defensible by the locals for the lords to claim them at the time
Also, the word 'ninja' wasn't contemporary, it was appended after the fact. The common thread with the people and groups who received the label was that they were believed to have used relatively covert and trickster-y methods. There may be an element of internalized orientalism and noble savage mythmaking in the mix, as many popular conventions of the ninja archetype were codified in a pop-culture ninja boom in the 1960s, directly in the wake of the US occupation.
Historical ninja kind of spanned the class spectrum, as I understand it. Some were samurai, some were mercenary clans that had regular dealings with samurai, and some were people who lived in autonomous mountain enclaves that were too remote and defensible by the locals for the lords to claim them at the time
Also, the word 'ninja' wasn't contemporary, it was appended after the fact. The common thread with the people and groups who received the label was that they were believed to have used relatively covert and trickster-y methods. There may be an element of internalized orientalism and noble savage mythmaking in the mix, as many popular conventions of the ninja archetype were codified in a pop-culture ninja boom in the 1960s, directly in the wake of the US occupation.