Ninja's Appearance

The stereotypical ninja that continually wears easily identifiable black outfits comes from the kabuki theater. Prop handlers would dress in black and move props around on the stage. The audience would obviously see the prop handlers, but would pretend they were invisible. Building on suspension of disbelief, ninja characters also came to be portrayed in the theatre as wearing similar all-black suits. This either implied to the audience the ninja were also invisible, or simply made the audience unable to tell a ninja character from many prop handlers until the ninja character distinguished himself from the other stagehands with a scripted attack or assassination.