Nobunigga’s Ambition: To Persuade the World That Shogunate Japan Was Full of Black Gay Samurai

3,560 words

If you hold any interest in the subject of videogames, the big news this week is the Japanese gaming giant Nintendo unveiling its latest new console, the Switch 2. To replicate its predecessor device’s immense success, it will need to have some good exclusives released for it. But of what kind? One of the company’s best-known creatives, Masahiro Sakurai, gave a good hint in a pre-release interview, in which he advised native Japanese designers against the growing trend of “making Americanized works”, and to “keep pursuing the things that Japanese people like” instead. I quite agree with Sakurai-san here, especially as it turns out one of the things Japanese people really, really don’t like in their videogames these days is the pathetically anachronistic idea of black samurai.

On 20 March, a new game from occidental publisher Ubisoft was released onto the global market, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, a sprawling action-adventure set in sixteenth-century Japan, an exciting period full of derring-do and civil strife between feudal warlords … in which the main player-character is a big black samurai called Yasuke. There is a second, alternative, player-character available for users to control of traditional native Japanese stock, for those who objected to Yasuke’s color-swapped presence, though … an equally unlikely female ninja named Naoe. [1] It’s a wonder she wasn’t also lesbian and in a primitive bamboo wheelchair:

In the rough diversity-loving spirit of the above joke meme, players of the new Assassin’s Creed can actually make the queer-friendly choice to make Naoe into a sapphist, whilst Yasuke can also be forced to turn gay. I doubt this is handled in precisely the same spirit of warrior-like homosexual masculinity once hymned by Yukio Mishima, though.

Ubisoft, one of the West’s largest videogame studios, have past form here: their 2024 title Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown equally controversially featured a black man with dreadlocks in the main player-role, even though the titular Prince of Persia is usually just a tiny little bit Persian. The developers tried to get around this ethno-oddity by making the black man a wholly different character who helps the Prince out this time around, but it was pretty obvious they just wanted to slavishly parachute a black man front and center of proceedings. DEI employment practices even now apply to fictional polygonal and pixelated figures in 2D platform games.

Good luck to any players trying to complain about such unwanted trends during web-linked sessions with other gamers, though. In 2023, Ubisoft UK announced a “helpful” partnership between their Customer Relationship Center in the north-east English city of Newcastle and the nearby Northumbria Police Force to monitor players’ verbal interactions online. The UK Speech-Police declared this a “ground-breaking project” meant to “keep the online gaming community safe”. Safe from what, though? All the digital guns and knives onscreen are non-corporeal, unlike those increasingly to be seen and felt penetrating vulnerable British flesh on UK streets for real these days.

Reporting on the initiative, the BBC complained that, in such an environment of stereotypical, Gamergate-style toxic masculinity, anyone who played videogames online was all but certain to have experienced verbal atrocities like “rape jokes” and “racism”. But again, the good people of Newcastle could put down their joypads and experience actual real-world racist rapists in their local area if they liked – last year, a grooming gang led by men with classically English names like Omar and Mohamed Badreddin and Huzaefa Aleboud were sentenced for raping, abusing and torturing an “extremely vulnerable” 13-year-old British kuffar girl in the city after plying her with alcohol and cigarettes, before threatening to kill her or kidnap her abroad to the Middle East where the gang-members originally came from. Just possibly the local police force should be concentrating upon preventing heinous one-girl harems like this from being formed in the region, rather than teaming up with Ubisoft to knock on the doors of local non-PC gamers making forbidden comments whilst pretending to shoot one another in the face over the Internet.

This should all be self-evident, but would anyone pointing such obvious facts out online during a quick session of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six be arrested by Northumbria Police for acts of egregious electronic wrongspeak? And would similar measures be taken against anyone ‘racist’ enough to voice the similarly common-sense opinion they would prefer the Prince of Persia to continue to be Persian, or Japanese samurai to continue to be Japanese, both of which would be slightly odd sentiments for alleged toxic white supremacists to profess when you stop to think about it? When Ubisoft and the cops say they want to “keep the online gaming community safe” what they really mean is they want to keep their precious political worldview safe from all potential acts of rational public criticism or dissent.

“We want to be on the right side of history,” Damien Glorieux, of Ubisoft’s Word-Police Department, told the BBC. If you really cared about history, you’d stop deliberately falsifying it, then.

Diet of Propaganda

It is difficult to think of a more laughable cod-historical lie than that pre-modern Japan was full of kick-ass Africans. As such, Ubisoft had to devise a spurious pseudo-justification for Yasuke’s presence in their latest game: that he was based upon a real person. This is technically true, but also rather misleading, like saying the moon was full of Americans in the 1960s because of Neil Armstrong. Yasuke first appears in the historical record in 1579, when he arrived in Japan with a white European Jesuit missionary, probably acting as his African-born bodyguard or servant. Taken under his wing as a powerful warrior by the leading feudal warlord Oda Nobunaga, [2] it is debatable indeed if Yasuke ever genuinely earned the full title of samurai, as he is depicted as doing in the new game, or was just a hired warrior with an excellent in-built genetic aptitude for knife-crime.

What is certain, though, is that Yasuke was hardly a typical sixteenth-century samurai, swanning around overpowering and sodomizing the weedy locals in an ultra-diverse Japan filled with female girlboss ninjas, as Ubisoft clearly wanted ill-informed players to presume. We can tell this for sure because, when Nobunaga first set eyes on the man, he was so astonished he ordered the painted foreign devil to be stripped naked and scrubbed down to remove all the black ink from his body. In countries where large numbers of black people are a common everyday sight, like Nigeria, Kenya, or Sweden, things like this tend not to happen. Having a black samurai as the main character in what purports to be a realistic historical depiction of Sengoko Period Japan is every bit as obvious a bit of institutionalized negro-worship as it would be to … well, to do precisely the same thing with a game set in ancient, pre-Islamic Persia. At least Yasuke doesn’t have an Afro for a helmet, I suppose.

Whenever this kind of thing happens with media franchises over here in the West, and unwilling and uninterested viewers get lumbered with a Muslim Beauty and the Beast, or a Hispanic Snow White, there is precious little dissent voiced from most mainstream politicians, terrified as they are of being accused of ‘racism’. In the much more ethnically homogenous Japan, public officials are made of sterner stuff. None other than Japan’s actual Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, stood up in the Japanese Parliament building, the Diet, just prior to the game’s release, and openly condemned the new Assassin’s Creed for racially raping his nation’s past, something Ishiba threatened (albeit emptily) to take legal action over. “I think it is important to send out the message that we will not tolerate any behavior that does not respect the culture and religion of the country,” he chided.

This was in response to a question from his fellow politician Hiroyuki Kada, who complained about a scene in which Yasuke rampages through a famous real-life Shinto shrine, vandalizing its sacred objects. Seeing a black man smashing up a public building for no good reason suddenly makes the game sound rather true-to-life after all, but Kada felt such “violent mayhem” was disrespectful, and had the potential to be imitated by shrine-visiting thugs off-screen. Although the destruction of the shrine was purely virtual, Ishiba called it “an insult to the country” nonetheless, recalling how Japanese peacekeeping troops deployed to Iraq during the War On Terror era had been careful to respect local Islamic customs, the presumable unspoken implication being “You wouldn’t make a game where a big black man smashes up a mosque, would you, Ubisoft?” Considering that Ubisoft is based in France, [3] probably not: their offices would end up being Charlie Hebdo’d in about five minutes, Game Over for the virtue-signaling programmers forever.

Once the shocking news of a man actually standing up for his own culture in the face of magic black people for once hit the news, certain gaming news outlets in the West (which are overwhelmingly left-leaning in output, just like many of the game publishers) tried to argue this isn’t really what had happened at all. Leading US gaming site IGN claimed the row was in fact all about tourism, not race. Following reopening of the borders to visitors after the Covid-19 pandemic, Japan has enjoyed or endured record numbers of foreign tourists, some of whom have engaged in acts of public vandalism of areas of historical importance. Kada and Ishiba, said IGN, were just responding to fears some players of Assassin’s Creed might be similarly cretinous and seek to copy the scene in which Yasuke smashes up the shrine, in a spirit of monkey-see, monkey-do; such a thing has actually happened in relation to a real-life shrine featured in another Japan-set videogame, leading to a recent ban on foreign tourists attending the relevant site.

So, there is something to this argument, yet it seems to be being used by the lefty gaming press in the West as an excuse to imply there were no rational race-based objections to Yasuke’s blackness in Japan at all, something which simply isn’t true; another Japanese politician had already called Yasuke’s inky avatar a form of “cultural invasion”.

A petition objecting to the game had previously been released in Japan, gaining over 100,000 signatures, bemoaning its “lack of historical accuracy and cultural respect”, calling the whole thing “a serious insult to Japan’s culture and history” and an expression of “[anti-]Asian racism”. This petition began last May, following the first advertising trailers for Assassin’s Creed dropping online, when there was no specific knowledge the game even did involve destroying shrines. Instead, it seems far more likely many Japanese signatories (and numerous non-woke Western ones, acting on the Japs’ behalf) objected to the title for the obvious reason: its distinctly non-Japanese main character.

Doubting Thomas

The exaggerated idea Yasuke was a full-on black samurai owes much of its current popularity to a British-born author, Thomas Lockley, an Associate Professor at a Japanese university, whose co-authored 2019 book African Samurai: The True Sory of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan, was likely to have provided Ubisoft with their inspiration in the first place (albeit Lockley denies this, even though Ubisoft staff specifically interviewed him about his work).

Interestingly, Lockley’s co-author on the text, Geoffrey Girard, is better known as an author of historical fiction. Some critics would say Lockley should be, too. The English-language edition is written substantially as historical fiction, filled with purple prose; to get an idea for yourself, a lengthy free extract is available here. From the action-packed first page alone, it seems very much as if a previously ultra-obscure minor figure of microscopic importance upon the grand stage of Japanese history has suddenly morphed into Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian – only somewhat less unacceptably Aryan, naturally. There are but a few short and scattered genuine paragraphs about Yasuke in the whole historical record, leaving Lockley with plenty of leeway to add his own novelistic “intuitions” to the heroic African’s biography, like so:

Yasuke grinned at the idea of Japan and looked back toward its land. The prospect of fresh food, fresh air, physical freedom and solid earth for the first time in three weeks was quite appealing. As was the prospect of a new place. Many enemies awaited here too, yes, but he was still curious to see what this mysterious country offered.

How do Lockley and Girard know Yasuke did or felt any of this? They don’t. They just made it up. They also appear to have clairvoyantly divined Yasuke was a walking embodiment of the not-at-all anachronistic concepts of endless racial tolerance and multiculturalism:

In the face of such dangers and discomforts at sea, the voyage had not been all bad for Yasuke. He’d gotten on well with the sailors and would miss their company. It was a mixed crew: Portuguese, Indians, Chinese and even several other Africans. Portuguese was the default language of the maritime world and Yasuke, having spent two years traveling mostly by sea, now spoke enough to share in their gripes and jests. As a likable fellow with an easy smile, he would have garnered the camaraderie of all the working men from the first moment he d stepped onboard with the Jesuits.

Ah, a “likable fellow with an easy smile”. Aren’t all black people in works of fiction these days? Let’s just say it seems as if the authors may have had some form of slight agenda here. But why?

Slaves to an Idea

Lockley was born in 1978, later studying languages at the University of Bradford – French and German, surprisingly, not Urdu or Arabic as are increasingly spoken in the ultra-Muslim town in question. Following graduation, Thomas travelled to Japan to teach English to the locals (why not just stay and do the same thing in Bradford?), marrying an ethnic Japanese woman in 2003. The couple then moved to the UK and had mixed-race children but, Lockley says, he became increasingly concerned at growing anti-immigration rhetoric and “the legalized discrimination against my family”, even though there was none.

However, on the same very night of the Brexit vote in 2016, Lockley made an immediate decision to follow in Yasuke’s footsteps and escape with his family to Japan, convinced anti-Oriental internment camps were just around the corner. He has since specifically admitted to identifying with Yasuke because of this. Having part-Jewish ancestors, some of whom fled Nazi Germany to Britain in 1938 following Kristallnacht, Lockley seems to have developed rather paranoid notions about the potential for racial persecution of his kin: maybe so in places like Bradford, but the anti-Jewish sentiment there is much more likely to come from the Muslim immigrants than the progressively displaced white natives.

In a 2020 interview with the Japanese Refugee Assistance Association (JAR), Lockley revealed the clear political agenda behind his text. He turned up at JAR’s offices bearing essential sustenance for the nation’s refugees: food packages and free copies of his book, hoping both would be swallowed by them wholesale. Lockley explained his motivations for rewriting history like this:

In Japan, the history of national isolation is emphasized, and it is often thought that there is a closed soil for foreigners, but if you examine the history of Japan broadly, I think that it was rather open internationally. In addition to English education, I am also researching the international orientation of the Japanese people, and I believe that changing the perception of history will increase international orientation.

This is laughable, as for a substantial portion of its history, during the era of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), Japan was essentially a closed society to foreigners, a period of near-complete isolationism which only ended in 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry, of the US Navy, arrived upon its shores to threaten the country’s rulers at cannon-point that, if they didn’t expose their land to international trade in the name of boosting American profit-margins, he would blast them to kingdom come. Perry opened up Japan to foreign commerce by sheer force of military power; Lockley aims to open it up to foreign immigration by sheer force of narrative power instead. “I think it’s good for everybody to feel cross-border relationships, cross-international feelings, of connection with other people, places,” Lockley has said, and Yasuke is an excellent vehicle for ensuring this.

Yet this time, unlike in the days of Commodore Perry, the troublesome natives rebelled against their would-be Western colonizer. Hoping to exploit the publicity occasioned by the new Assassin’s Creed release, Lockley had organized a public lecture on Yasuke to take place this January, but it had to be cancelled after receiving so many complaints from the Japanese public that he was just giving clueless foreigners a completely false view of their history in the name of so-called ‘Social Justice’. A documentary about Yasuke put out by Japanese national broadcaster NHK, and featuring Thomas as a talking head, drew similar ire. Things got so bad, Lockley had to delete all his social media accounts.

One particular problem with Lockley’s book is that it appears to claim that Yasuke’s appearance in Nobunaga’s court started off a whole trend amongst rival Japanese warlords of enlisting imported black Africans as their forced servants and warriors as a status symbol. This, of course, can easily be read as “There was even black slavery in Japan now!” with skeptical Japanese historians calling the very idea a “malicious hoax”. The fear arose that the stage was being set for random black people to begin claiming reparations compensation from the Japanese government for things that had never even happened to them, much as in the West today.

“I want that book to be read by people who know nothing about Japan,” Lockley has said of his fable. Yes, that’s certainly the ideal, because the average historically ignorant gaijin Westerner, whose awareness of men named Matthew Perry extends no further beyond that guy who used to be in Friends, will have no prior knowledge available to them to refute its many highly debatable claims, will they? [4] According to Lockley, for instance, as Japan had a history of rendering its many Shinto gods and goddesses in ebony statue form, when they first set eyes upon the equally jet-black Yasuke, many persons at the time would have immediately presumed him to have been some kind of awe-inspiring deity, just like George Floyd has now become in the eyes of the racially gullible here in the West. Well, maybe … but how does Lockley know this? He doesn’t, it’s just a projection of his own apparent idealized feelings towards people of other races out onto Yasuke’s own no doubt highly sculpted figure, being passed off as a ‘fact’ of history when it is really just pure speculation.

Although Yasuke was essentially just a freak one-off, Lockley thinks it would be “really inspiring to have his story [become] representative of the 99 percent” of Japanese people of absolutely no note whatsoever whose stories consequently went unrecorded by history. In such a disingenuous fashion can the highly unrepresentative be manipulated into becoming an artificial representative of a non-existent social “norm”, as with the wholly excessive number of black people presently seen populating contemporary US and European TV ads.

Yasuke is depicted in Assassin’s Creed as a free warrior, not a slave, but his presence on-screen still acts as a prominent advertisement for the totally misleading notion that blacks were present in medieval Japan in any meaningful numbers, and thus the likely victims of yellow supremacist abuse and exploitation, softening the outside world up to place diplomatic and moral pressure upon Japan to open its borders to such people’s modern-day African descendants as a kind of demographic reparations policy.

The risible idea there were black samurai is even due to appear on Broadway some time soon, in terms of a forthcoming musical, and a Hollywood movie is likewise in the works. Evidently, the world is being primed to accept the idea of a multicultural Japan, whether the actual Japanese people want to inhabit such a place or not. Immigration into the country to help fill labor shortages is currently increasing, though as yet largely limited to other South-East Asians, often on temporary visas. If the globalists like Lockley and Ubisoft get their way, Kyushu will be looking more like Mogadishu in no time.

Thankfully, however, following the intervention of Japan’s PM in the Diet, in this particular case Ubisoft partially capitulated, committed ideological seppuku and rolled out a day-one downloadable update patch for their title which rendered various items located within in-game Shinto shrines indestructible, whilst also greatly reducing the opportunity for acts of exciting interracial bloodshed to take place inside them. Quite when a second patch will become available, rendering Yasuke Japanese like he should be, is not yet known.

Notes

[1] The whole idea of female ninjas, or kunoichi, would appear to largely be a modern media myth, in case you were wondering.

[2] Nobunaga is himself the subject of a long-running series of Japanese strategy games, Nobunaga’s Ambition, hence the rather obscure title of this present article – no idea if that series features a large black man as a playable character too, but probably not, as they were developed in the East, not in the West.

[3] Albeit Assassin’s Creed: Shadows was developed by a Canadian subsidiary studio.

[4] Tellingly, the Japanese edition of the book is reportedly rather more toned down in its content, making fewer wild claims that the natives could be presumed to see through more easily.