The Iga Ninja Museum. I think I could end the blog post with that and the video that follows.
But I'll give you a bit more information, in the infinitesimally small chance that you weren't chomping at the bit to get to this place after simply seeing the word 'ninja'.
There is an AMAZINGLY fun demo given by the ninja here (you see some of it in the video). In attending the demo, you will see some crazy ninja moves choreographed with music and sound effects, see some weapons demonstrations, laugh at the comments and reactions from the adorable children watching, and get covered (if you are lucky) in stringy ninja blood.
One of our demonstrators
Apparently, if you go in the summer you may get to see
Tomochan shirtless. Many girls in our group were upset
that it was, alas, February.
NINJA BLOOD
After the demonstration, you can pay a hundred yen or two and throw shuriken at the demo board. If you make a bulls-eye, you get a prize!
Besides the demo, there is a tour of some ninja houses and all the hiding places they contained. You can even try some of those spaces out yourself! The museum part of it is contained in a couple buildings, one of them underground, crammed with weapons and other artifacts, as well as quite a bit of fun trivia and history . (Hm, history is probably a prerequisite for most museums.) Information was in both Japanese and English.
The gift shop was small but had a lot of cute key chains, books, etc, which you can bestow upon those unlucky enough to have not accompanied you to the Museum.
If you need any more convincing to visit, which I doubt, you should now that there you can rent a ninja costume for the day like this kid:
Your dreams CAN come true!
