Hello friends! If you’ve read this site for any amount of time, it’s pretty obvious I’m a champion of Japanese ninja movies of the increasingly far past. Often I find myself having to explain that this genre even exists, it is so often lazily lumped into general samurai cinema or dismissed as simply the black-and-white roots of a branch of general chop-socky whose best days were the 1980s.
But shinobi-cinema is its own entity, with a separate mission, a separate aesthetic, different unique tropes and concise boom periods throughout the 20th century. It’s a great genre, and every genre needs a book (or three) as ambassadors on the shelf.
The past few years I’ve been getting gigs doing disc commentary, and that aspect of physical media is more important than ever. At the same time, we’re witnessing AI killing the useful internet, search engines become increasingly worthless and audience behavior is nowhere near what it was when I started VintageNinja in 2009. So how best to continue the crusade?
Being a refugee from the book industry by profession, I got the itch to design some good old print, too, and earlier this year just starting working on some sort of VN book. It took the form of movie and TV recommendations, the core of my enthusiasm for the idiom, and by the time I looked up I had upwards of 100 titles logged.
I settled on doing volumes of 50 entries at a time, with supplemental intro essays on general ninja-eiga and pop culture. I also got fixated on making this series in an identical format to the ninja books I was buying during the 80s ninja craze — the 6×9 black-and-white martial arts guides, historical fiction and sensationalized editorials from the likes of Ohara Publications. The idea of sliding a Vintage Ninja book onto the same shelf as my Stephen K. Hayes and Ashida Kim relics tickled me, and I think a lot of you will embrace that inside joke of sorts, too.
So coming in December, you’ll be able to order 50 VINTAGE NINJA MOVIES & TV SHOWS VOL 1: JAPAN 1950s-1980s by yours truly on Amazon exclusively. There’s a lot in there for everyone, from the most familiar shinobi-philes to the newly curious. I cover the noir-ish classics of the 60s, the obscure TV of the 70s, Sonny Chiba and Hiroyuki Sanada’s work from the 80s and anime of all decades. A lot of the genre’s best are in this first volume, but I held some essentials back for future books too.
I hope you all get as much enjoyment out of it as I had putting it together.
Sales link and additional preview materials will be coming soon. Some shareable images can be found below for now.
Thanks all!
Keith J. Rainville — November 2026
Press / reviewer / interview inquiries — email luchavsninja@gmail.com
