nah samurai are just the exception not the rule. Besides them I think there were nothing but Shinobi. If we took random people, why not ask the smaller villages? Villages hidden in the grass, waterfalls, stars etc. it's stupid but it's how it is
80k is low but reasonable. Peak ninja time irl was Sengoku period, there was about 18mil people living in Japan during that time. I think that's probably closer to narutoverse population than irl world's population. We can assume this line of work is fairly rare as we have only 5 major villages (small town to medium city sized, not crowded at all) and a couple minor ones (a few hundred people each at best). There's also plenty of people living there who are not ninjas or can't fight (academy students; old people etc). Let's assume there's 500000 ninja village residents (1/36 of the entire population of these lands is a stretch but Im lowballing everywhere else). Saying 1 in 5 of them is a war ready shinobi makes sense because you need to subtract all olds,all children before graduation and all service/production/crippled people. 100000 - that's how many shinobi Id expect out of an all out war. The show was not that far off imo.
