For full access to all OER Project resources AND our amazing teacher community, 
By Bennett Sherry and Trevor Getz
We all have our ways of turning off work (or schoolwork) and chilling. But when you teach history, you may find that your job intrudes into your downtime—either because you notice historical inaccuracies in the book, TV show, or video game that’s helping you unwind, or you can see how the politics of our world shapes the world of your de-stressor of choice.
Historical video games are as much a cultural battlefield as textbooks, TV, and film. Take the latest offering in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series: Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Set in Japan in the late Sengoku period (fifteenth to early seventeenth century) the game depicts a society increasingly involved in global trade while also facing internal unrest. It features two playable characters. One of them may be familiar to World History Project teachers: Yasuke, a real-life African who lived in Sengoku Japan, and the subject of one of our graphic biographies—and the source of controversy. However, this controversy looks a bit different when historical evidence is used. Let’s take a look.
World History Project’s Graphic Biography: Yasuke. For more details on Yasuke’s story, see this extended biography. By WHP, CC BY 4.0.
The Yasuke controversy
The announcement of Yasuke’s inclusion in Assassin’s Creed immediately drew protests in the United States and Japan. Critics’ objections centered on Yasuke’s African heritage. Some decried what they saw as the intrusion of modern diversity and equity into gamer space. Others claimed that it was ahistorical to include an African in sixteenth-century Japan. They also argued that the real Yasuke was merely a servant, not a samurai. We can’t be certain of the motives of these critics, but it is notable that the recent HBO Japan-themed miniseries Shogun, set in the same period but with a European protagonist, didn’t elicit the same outrage. It should also be noted that both HBO and Ubisoft consulted with cultural practitioners and historians before releasing their respective projects.
In any case, as historians, we won’t spend any more words pondering the motives of either Ubisoft or its critics. Rather, we’ll just play the historian’s role of using evidence from the past to better understand the present. In this case, to demonstrate that:
- It was entirely plausible for an African man to be present in Sengoku Japan.
- There is little doubt Yasuke was indeed a samurai.
The first global age
Let’s start with some context. In 1579—the year of Yasuke’s arrival in Kyoto—the world was in the midst of a great transformation. Europeans—particularly mariners from Iberia and Italy—had forged new connections across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans with transoceanic voyages. But Europeans weren’t the only people moving across oceans. In this period, Jesuit priests, Ottoman navigators, Armenian and Gujarati merchants, millions of enslaved people, diplomats of many nations, and countless others traveled across oceans both willingly and unwillingly in the first global age.
As just one example, several embassies traveled from Japan to Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a result of these voyages, several Japanese samurai remained in the Americas and worked as mercenary caravan guards in the colony of New Spain. Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, a Japanese samurai who converted to Catholicism, traveled through the Spanish Philippines, Mexico City, Cuba, Spain, and France on his diplomatic mission to Pope Paul V in Rome.
A seventeenth-century depiction of a 1585 Japanese embassy to Rome. Public domain.
These embassies helped strengthen ties between Japanese leaders and Catholic Jesuit missionaries as well as Portuguese merchants. Sengoku period Japan is also known as the “Warring States Period.” As different factions sought to gain control of Japan, rulers often sought advantages through engagement with foreigners.
Two Japanese namban folding screens from the late sixteenth century. The first shows a Portuguese ship being loaded with cargo in a port that is likely the Portuguese colony of Goa in India. The second shows the arrival of the Portuguese ship in Japan. Note the Catholic clergy and the many African retainers and crew who took part in the voyage. Public domain. For detail, see: https://artsandculture.google.com/story/JQWB6G7SnDGfKw.
As early as 1415, Portuguese sailors had been sailing the West African coast, establishing trading posts by the end of the century. Given the extraordinary and wide-ranging Portuguese engagement with African states during this period, it’s no surprise that Portuguese-speaking Africans were employed and traveled aboard Portuguese vessels and that some reached Japan in this era, as sources and art from the period demonstrate. Historian Natalia Doan claims that perhaps several hundred Africans lived in Japan during the sixteenth century. Just as one example, the Shinchōkōki Chronicles of Lord Nobunaga record the visit of a “black monk” in 1581, a meeting confirmed by European sources.[1] Similarly, we initially learn about Yasuke’s presentation to Lord Nobunaga through the diary of Matsudaira Ietada.[2]
What makes a samurai?
Now, let’s address the question of whether Yasuke was a samurai. The question rests on two related issues. The first, of course, is what is a samurai? We tend to think of a samurai in Western terms, as a sort of knight—someone who is officially knighted. But in this period, a samurai was probably a less formal rank indicating anyone who was an armed and trained warrior who could support himself or was paid a stipend by his lord. Samurai were not particularly glorious or even elite, as they are often depicted, but they were generally in the service of a lord and held rank through that service.[3]
Second, then, we have to ask whether Yasuke meets these criteria. We know that Yasuke became a retainer of Lord Nobunaga, and “was given a stipend, a private residence, etc., and was given a short sword with a decorative sheath. He is sometimes seen in the role of weapon bearer.”[4] He then fought in a battle at Nijō Castle, and possibly at Honnōji, as well as serving in the Takeda campaign of 1582. So, he was a warrior. But is the stipend he was granted sufficient evidence that he was a samurai, and not just a mercenary?
The answer to that question is contained in the Japanese word for stipend (扶持) used in the sentence quoted above. Historians have searched for every other use of this word in the pages of the Chronicles of Lord Nobunaga, and each other use clearly refers to a samurai. For example, there is Lord Buei the Younger, who was stipended “sufficient to maintain a retinue of two hundred men.” Then there are Kuki Uma no Jō and Takikawa Sakon, who were given stipends “adequate to maintaining a thousand men each.” There’s also Lord Nobunaga’s closest companions, who in 1575 all “had their stipend increased.”[5] There are at least five other similar uses of the word, each referring to a samurai.
It's clear that Lord Nobunaga, at least, considered Yasuke a samurai. And as one of the three Great Unifiers of Japan—a man known for defeating several stronger enemies, and who was called the “Demon King of the Sixth Heaven” by friend and foe alike—who better to judge the bona fides of a samurai? But also, there’s the careful evidence gathered by historians.
The Yasuke story points to the ability of historians to intervene in contemporary debates about the past by mobilizing evidence to explain the past in its own terms. Beneath the surface, the current debate about Yasuke centers around contemporary moral and cultural issues—whether diversity efforts have gone too far, or whether racism is boiling over in gamer communities. People have always interpreted and reinterpreted the past, but beyond these issues there is, in fact, some historical truth; and it matters. In this case, it matters that Lord Nobunaga, one of the great figures of Japanese history, recognized Yasuke as a samurai, a man of rank. It matters that all of this was happening in an era where our contemporary racial issues were not codified, and where people from many regions might be found traveling and trading and serving in other parts of the world. It also matters that some gaming companies, like Ubisoft, bother to do their research properly. They should be encouraged to continue to do so.
Yasuke was a samurai. Let’s give him the respect he is due.
[1] This is the translation given in Thomas Lockley and Geoffrey Girard, African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, A Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan, Hanover Square Press, 2019. This is generally regarded as the most accurate translation in a published, peer-reviewed text.
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/flgpph/comment/fl05vfp/ .
[3] For example, G. Ota, S. Elisonas, and J.P. Lamers, Book XIV Ōta Izumi No Kami. Tenshō 9 [1581], “The Year of Metal Junior and the Serpent,” in The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, Brill, 383-420.
[4] Morimoto, Masahiro. Matsudaira letada niki (Matsudaira Ietada’s Diary). Kadokawa Sensho, 1999. See also https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/772514/1/54
[5] See Karl F. Friday, Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan, Routledge, 2004. Credit also to u/parallelpain, a graduate student of history at a Japanese university, who asked that the authors not reveal his name.
About the authors
Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes
Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century and is one of the historians working on the OER Project courses.
Cover image: Detail from World History Project’s Graphic Biography: Yasuke. By WHP, CC BY 4.0.
