Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1255374-20150613052057/@comment-995426-20150725020712

I generally don't make quick assumptions about people's ethnicity based on facial characteristics alone, since I grew up in an ethnically diverse locale where there were lots of multi-ethnic people as it was. And I also know that both Han Chinese and Yamato Japanese ethnicities run a large gamut of differences in appearance, with occasional overlap between them, reinforced by sporadic cross-settlement and assimilation over many centuries all around the East China Sea region. Ethnic groups generally don't live in a complete vacuum from their neighbors.

My suggestion is not just that Tang Shen was Chinese (with the unassimilated Mandarin Chinese name 唐慎 Tángshèn, phoneticized in Japanese-translated TMNT works as タンシェン Tanshen), but that Oroku Saki may have some recent Chinese ancestry that might allow him to be related to Hun. There's certainly a Chinese minority/diaspora living in Japan, and diaspora communities that settled in the 19th and 20th centuries often have relatives living in multiple countries. It's not far-fetched for a Chinese person living in Japan to have relatives living in the United States, or Australia, or wherever.

It's made that much more likely when ethnic minorities often face social discrimination in Japan, but find greater acceptance in outcast organizations, like the yakuza. If they were to exist, ninja clans in modern Japan (which were an anachronistic stretch to begin with :P), would similarly necessarily have to live outside of mainstream society, especially if they were fighting what amounted to an illegal gang war between themselves. It's a group's nature as an outcast organization that makes it a magnet for social outcasts. I imagine this would have been true of both the Hamato Clan and the original Foot Clan.