Achievement Unlocked: Nightingale Ninjas

While in Nijo Castle in Kyoto, got to experience the (infamous) ninja detection device known as the Nightingale Floors for myself to see if they were all that and a bag of bush warblers.

You aren't allowed to take photos within the palace building though so all of these pics are poached from the internets.

Observations:

The floors are called uguisubari in Japanese, the "nightingale" in the English version refers to the Japanese bush warbler, or uguisu.

Dry wooden boards often creak under pressure, but nightingale floors are deliberately designed to have wooden joints that create a bird like chirp when walked on to ensure no one could walk the corridors of the palace without everyone knowing about it.

This was particularly important in the palaces of the shoguns, since they created the Ninja as a profession to assassinate each other. Nightingale floors aren't really a tourist trap, they are a ninja detection system. This is also why the Ninja had to learn how to be light of foot - enough to run across the water, fly up walls and dance on bamboo leaves...

Nijo Castle in Kyoto was built by the Tokugawa clan, who produced the longest line of super-popular shoguns. By super-popular I mean powerful. By powerful I mean the other clans were frequently annoyed at them for being the coolest kids in the yard. They would frequently hire ninjas in order to teach them a bit of humility by assassinating anyone who was giving them particular grief.

In a pretty ballsy move, the Tokugawa forced the other clans to all contribute to the construction of Nijo Castle, including an extensive network of ninja detecting nightingale floors.

As a result, the Ninomaru Palace within Nijo Castle is now a good example of nightingale floors, partly because there is so many of them - they are all over the joint (literally and figuratively).

The fall of the Tokugawa shoguns and the reestablishment of the Emperor with the Meiji Restoration resulted in the Imperial Palace claiming all former Tokugawa property, which they had a recurring tendency to turn into national parks and/or museums. So in a somewhat ironic twist of fate, the extensive nightingale floors of the former high-security Nijo Castle are now also the most accessible former palaces in Japan.

So are they any good?

Well it's also a bit difficult to test your light-footed ninja skills on the floors when you are just one of a constant stream of heavy-footed tourists all trampling along the designated route, but I'd say they are indeed pretty sensitive.

The sound they make is definitely distinctive and chirpy bird-like. While it is better than creaking wood planks, I would think it would get kinda annoying after a while. On the other hand, if the alternative is death by ninja, I'm thinking any aspiring shogun would rather listen to the nightingale floors.Read more