[Spareribs]

They dress in black and they are cool.

 

[SomeWiseGuy]

I remember in shows, ninjas will throw smoke bombs and "teleport" or escape.

 

[Spareribs]

Kids or young boys seem to appreciate ninjas the most. I have never seen 50 year old guy expressing his fascination with ninjas or wanting to dress like one.

 

[WraithApe]

They dress in black and they are cool.

 
There are also silver and purple ninjas:
 

 
Keep in mind you must always be a good ninja.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

They dress in black and they are cool.

 

They didn't. The last thing a ninja would want is to walk around in an outfit that screams "Ninja" - that would basically be like having CIA agents or UC's who walked around like beat cops. They walked around wearing normal clothes to look like merchants, monks, or heck, peasants, which is what many of them were, apart from the Hattori clan that were in a socio-economic sense samurai but due to their smaller numbers and lack of wealth of the province (lower rice yield, land locked, no mines) toon on ninjutsu more than any of the samurai martial arts (apart from basic training with the bow and sword). There was one documented case where a Ninja counted how many soldiers (including how many are samurai and how many are ashigaru) are pouring into and out of a castle by dropping pebbles into two bags all the while pretending to be a Monk deep in prayer with a begging bowl in front of him. I think he used the alms to buy food after he passed on the info to another ninja/apprentice.

 

Even when out on a mission that calls for infiltration of a fortified location, black wouldn't be the color of their suit since if there is a reasonable amount of moonlight black won't hide you in an otherwise featureless shadow (like a wall with the moon behind it) as it will make your silhouette stick out. That's a bad idea when you're up against people trained to use a long bow since the age of nine (and from horseback a few years later) and by the 16th C were already trained sharpshooters compared to the ashigaru who only fired in massed volleys. The consensus nowadays is that they actually wore midnight blue or grey.

 

What we think of as the ninja outfit didn't come from Iga province archives (apart from their training uniforms, which are black, but the color holds deep meaning of conviction in the East, so it's not unusual for samurai to train in the same color at some point; the most popular application is in the belt color) or from what a dead ninja actually looked like after trying to assassinate Tokugawa Ieyasu, but from Kabuki. The stage hands used black suits so they won't be visible against the black rear wall and dim lighting, pulling off special effects tricks, and then when they had to portray ninjas, this outfit was conveniently in place. They would pop out from the dark background area to the surprise of the audience and then fade back out screened by smoke (basically to hide how they side stepped back into the darkness, but he's basically just a meter or two away from where he was), and that's where we get the idea that they disappear in a puff of smoke or suddenly appear out of nowhere. Of course, the latter has more truth in it - I mean if you're going to ambush somebody you'd lie in wait in a prepared position to do so (much like camouflaged snipers now), but of course with the smoke bombs it's not like they just evaporate - the smoke is a distraction and what we don't see is how they run the hell away or parkour (basically) down from the nearest window.

 

By the 19th Century most of the ninjutsu arts mostly faded away for a number of reasons. First, the Tokugawa Shogunate was very friendly to the Hattori clan as they served as Ieyasu's elite bodyguards (he was known more for using counter-ninja ninjas than actually sending them out to kill off opposition), and second, that was a period of stability so there wasn't a need to have thousands of peasants ready to ambush samurai and ashigaru invading Iga, much less profit. Some likely remained in service but again, mostly in limited numbers and only to the Shogunate. One evidence of the limited number of ninja by that period is how Samurai were the ones carrying out assassinations outside of samurai convention (ie, in one example during the coup vs the Hojo Clan in the 14th C, a samurai in full battle gear barged into a house and challenged the man and his wife to fight) by ambushing people at night - basically, what you see on the anime/manga Rurouni Kenshin/Samurai X just short of climbing castle walls.

 

[getclikinagas]

Kinjaz are cool too