Ninjas: those silent, stealthy spies and assassins of Japan’s Sengoku era have captured the minds of people all over the globe. So much of them has been romanticized and idealized, but one mustn’t forget that ninjas once truly did exist. Due to the rather secretive nature of ninjas, very few official records of them were kept, and a lot of them are steeped in myth and legend (we’ve told you about those myths before). Although this is a list of “real life” ninjas, it is very much debatable whether or not some of them truly were ninjas and, in some cases, whether they actually existed at all.