Fuma Kotaro was the fifth and the best known of the Fūma clan leaders. The Fuma clan was based in Kanagawa Prefecture, specializing in horseback guerrilla warfare and naval espionage.In Time Vs Ninja, Fuma Kotaro can transform into a large Oni that is more powerful in all respects, until he leaves the current Space TimeBorn in Sagami Province (modern Kanagawa Prefecture) Fuma Kotaro became notorious as the leader of a band of 200 Rappa "battle disrupters", divided into four groups: brigands, pirates, burglars and thieves. Kotarō served under Hōjō Ujimasa and Hōjō Ujinao. His biggest achievement came in 1580, when the Fūma ninja covertly infiltrated and attacked a camp of the Takeda clan forces under Takeda Katsuyori at night, succeeding in causing severe chaos in the camp, which resulted in mass fratricide among the disoriented enemies. When the Tokugawa shogunate came to power, the remnants of Fūma-ryū were reduced to a band of brigands operating in and around Edo. A popular but fictional story says that in 1596, Kotarō was responsible for the death of Hattori Hanzō, a famous ninja in the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had tracked him down in the Inland Sea, but Kotarō has succeeded in luring him into a small channel, where a tide trapped the Tokugawa gunboats and his men then set fire to the channel with oil. Kotarō was eventually caught by the shogunate's special law-enforcement force, guided by his rival and a former Takeda ninja Kōsaka Jinnai (高坂甚内), and executed through beheading by an order of Ieyasu in 1603.
In a folk legend, he is often an inhuman figure: a supposedly part-oni monstrous giant (over 2 meters tall) with inverted eyes. In fiction portrayals, Fūma Kotarō is often depicted as Hattori Hanzō's arch-rival. As the name Fūma literally means "wind demon", Fūma Kotarō's depiction is frequently more flamboyant, fantastical, and sometimes even demonic. |
