First off, shuriken are THROWING KNIVES. They are POINTY AND MADE OF METAL. They are a good deal more deadly than your average pencil. The point of a shuriken is not going to break off if you press it down on the page too hard, it is going to SLICE THROUGH THE PAGE. A talented ninja could probably kill his victim with a pencil, too - hell, so could I, provided they stayed still long enough - but he'd do it much quicker with some shuriken. Second - come on, man, be serious. You're off into wackyland here. Of COURSE I am not saying that ninjas used cranes and sashimi as weapons, or clog danced their victims to death. You're carrying things to the absurd. What I AM saying is this - despite the fact that ninjas have a lot of myths surrounding them, we DO know a fair amount about them. We know what they wore, we know something about how ninjas came to be, we know bits about ninjitsu itself and the training methods involved, and we know some of the traditional weapons they used - swords and nunchaku, for instance; those are beyond dispute. Now, we know that shuriken were a weapon of feudal Japan, the period in which ninjas were most common - we know that ninjas primarily relied on stealth, so a quiet, portable weapon like shuriken would have made perfect sense for them to use - and there are countless portrayals of ninja wielding shuriken in just such a manner. Now, it's one thing to argue that shuriken were not as lethal a weapon as commonly perceived, but that they weren't used at all is another matter entirely. What weapon is more strongly identified with a ninja than shuriken, besides the sword? Just how many portrayals of ninja have you seen that DIDN'T involve shuriken at some point? There aren't many, I'll bet you that. Nothing comes from nowhere - if ninjas DIDN'T use shuriken, then why are they so strongly identified with them? If you're going to say that ninjas didn't use them, I challenge you to produce conclusive evidence proving as much.