LUPIN III's GOEMON Descends From a Japanese THIEF Who Was BOILED ALIVE - Video

Lupin the Third works because of its numbers. Lupin is the third of his line, descended from Arsene Lupin, the gentleman thief created by the French novelist Maurice Leblanc in 1905. His swordsman is Goemon Ishikawa the Thirteenth, and that number does the same job, because it points back to Ishikawa Goemon, a thief who was executed in Japan in 1594.

The story usually told about him goes like this. He operated in the late 1500s, robbing the wealthy and distributing what he took, and he was caught after an attempt on Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who had just unified Japan, at Fushimi Castle. In October 1594 he was executed in Kyoto by being boiled alive in a large iron cauldron, and in most versions his young son was in the cauldron with him.

Then there is what the records actually say. The earliest surviving mention, from 1642, nearly fifty years after his death, describes him as a thief and nothing more. No Robin Hood, no ninja training under Hattori Hanzo, no assassination attempt. All of that arrives later, built up across generations of kabuki, where he became a stage hero and eventually got one of the most famous entrances in Japanese theatre, standing on a temple gate admiring the cherry blossom. Historians are not even confident he was a single person rather than several bandits collapsed into one name. What does hold up is that Jesuit missionaries in Japan recorded a thief being boiled in Kyoto around that time.

His name survives in two very different places. In Japanese homes, a goemonburo is a cast iron bathtub heated by a fire underneath, named directly after the pot he supposedly died in. And in entertainment he never left, showing up as Lupin's swordsman since 1967, and as the hero of Konami's Ganbare Goemon games, which Western players know as Mystical Ninja. A thief nobody can verify became a bathtub, a stage legend and an anime samurai.

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