In real life, Ishikawa Goemon was the leader of a band of burglars in Kyoto who was caught in the summer of 1594 trying to kill Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the foremost politician of his day, and was duly executed at age 36 along with many members of his family and his gang.

Interestingly, that execution in the Kamo River bed at Sanjo — achieved by throwing the victims into caldrons of boiling oil — was mentioned by Pedro Morejon, a Jesuit priest then heading a monastery in Kyoto, in his footnotes to a book titled "Relacion del Reino de Nippon" by Bernardino de Avila Giron, a Spanish trader who arrived in Japan that year and stayed in Nagasaki for 20 years.

Perhaps in part due to the gruesomely unusual end that Goemon met, in the popular imagination he soon assumed a fearless and dashing character. Indeed, by early in the 1600s and from then through the following century, he was accorded the hero's role in many bunraku and kabuki productions, since in those days popular stages were just about the only outlet for citizens' frustrations at the feudal rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate for which Goemon's intended victim, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had in large part laid the foundations.