Oh, come ON. With all due respect, that's specious logic. Everyone knows about ninjas, too, and did back then as well, and nobody concluded that THEY were rubbish. Besides, the Freemasons are not, to the best of my knowledge, deadly martial arts assassins. They may have secrets up the wazoo, but I'm fairly certain that none of them concern a type of martial art devoted to throwing blades. If you keep something like THAT a jealously guarded secret, it's because you don't want just any old person learning your techniques, and if THAT'S the case, it stands to reason that it is because those techniques give you the edge in battle. Also, we're not talking about 'a small amount of padding' here. Have you ever seen a picture of a Samurai suited up for battle? They may have been thinly protected compared to, say, a medieval knight, but by most other standards, those guys were wearing a pretty damn effective battlesuit. They wore several layers of padding, with lacquered armor over that, a big ol' helmet, a protective mask - I mean, a sword might have pierced it just fine, or an arrow, but your average shuriken would have a tough time piercing. I can think of at least a dozen places on the body where being pierced by a throwing blade would be a serious problem. There is, of course, the neck, then we have the shoulder, where there are some large arteries and muscle groups involved, various places on the abdomen, such as the lungs and, of course, the heart, not to mention a gutshot which would bleed freely, the legs, which are full of large arteries, the wrists, of course, the ankles... Basically, while none of these things would kill you immediately, any one of them could well lead to a slow, agonizing death by blood loss, and it is important to note that, to a ninja, shuriken are like potato chips - ya can't have just one. If a ninja throws a handful of shuriken in rapid succession, and all hit near or even close to their marks, it is going to lead to an agonizing death unless the person they're targeting is near to a hospital. And yes, that story was listed under 'mythology' on the site where I found it. However, if you check out the rest of that site, you will find that it is a serious resource on shuriken-throwing, listing various techniques and giving detailed instructions. The story may be 'something I heard from someone else', but I don't think it's the kind of site which would spread specious rumors (especially considering that none of the other entries in the 'mythology' section include stuff about bands of ninjas wiping out small armies or anything.)