The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

[BulletMagnet]

Pretty sure I blew up Yasuke in Vasara 2

You did, he's one of the mid-bosses (and the only one I recall sporting shades off the cuff). That game is actually the first time I ever encountered his name; when I happened upon an article about the real-life person years later it was definitely one of my more memorable "...wait, that was based on an actual dude?" moments.

[BIL]

You did, he's one of the mid-bosses (and the only one I recall sporting shades off the cuff). That game is actually the first time I ever encountered his name; when I happened upon an article about the real-life person years later it was definitely one of my more memorable "...wait, that was based on an actual dude?" moments.

Pretty memorable pedagogy, in hindsight. Lots of similarly colourful nods in action/fighting coinops - Genpei Toumaden, Takeda Shingen, and Bakumatsu Roman's names alone yield generous reading lists - but STGs' sheer pace and bodycount seem especially flashcard-friendly.

EDIT: This appears a marginally more interesting pratfall on *rustle rustle* Ubisoft's part than I'd assumed!

In fact, the explosive Sushi-on-Baguette Backlash may be the nearest we get to the cornucopian friendly fire of my dearest dream... Buck Breaking The Video.

[Blinge]

Apparently he shows up as some badass (optional?) boss in the Nioh series.
Don't think anyone would have a problem with that

The grand Irony is this brit historian who has since scarpered.. didn't seem to care a jot about Japan's history, or respect it.
How could you if you're (again, allegedly) making stuff up?
"listen here you little nihongo fucks. I, the white man, will tell you what your history was, and you will like it. Otherwise you are a racist colonialist, or something"


OH and the other thing i forgot to mention is that Ubi's chosen JP historian consultant is some crazy liberal university chick in the usa who specialises... who is obsessed with the idea of BOY LOVE between grown men and minors in japan.
you couldn't make this stuff up.
https://thatparkplace.com/assassins-cre ... e%20Davies.

[Sengoku Strider]

~ Most articles you find all lead back to one source. One Historian
Thomas Lockley, British, works at Tokyo University (i think?)

Nihon University. Yasuke certainly existed, but his blackness has made him a projection screen for 21st century racial discourse and all its attendant anxieties as played out through media representation. The problem is Lockley's a language guy who got into history, got caught up in himself and started building Yasuke up into a major historical figure through lots of "it's possible that" type reasoning, and it sure looks a lot like clout chasing.

All we have are a dozen-odd random sentences about Yasuke, he is very much a minor background character of history. He arrived as a sailor on a Portugese ship, was shown as a sideshow in the capital, Nobunaga heard about him, came to see him, saw he was big, made him part of his entourage, some others complained about the foreigner. And that's about it. We don't have a single word from Yasuke about anything, what he thought, felt, knew, believed, nothing. We don't have a single record of him doing anything. No images or descriptions beyond "big and dark." No objects associated with him. He hangs out in Japan for 18 months on Nobunaga's payroll, when Nobunaga commits suicide at Honnoji Yasuke appears to have been sent home because "he's not one of us." And that's it.

He's interesting as an outsider who finds himself at the centre of power in the country during a time when it was closed off to foreigners (though in practice they still needed scholars and others with relevant skills from mainland Asia). Like, just the "showed up and got to hang out with Nobunaga" part of his story is interesting in and of itself. This does make for a valid point of launching discussion about how racist people we/weren't in the past, but historians have been doing that for decades on far meatier subjects (again, this guy is just a couple of sentences, there's only so much to actually say about him). But people who want to make him into a superhero are missing a ton of facts like, this guy has no organized military experience that we are aware of (sailors often knew how to fight and duel to some degree), and was in the country when the only language learning resources were from Japanese to Chinese. We don't even know if he spoke much Portugese. Making him a fluent meditating zen swordmaster is just fantasy based on a samurai identity that largely took form in later centuries.

Which is why the debate is silly from every side.

All these same people pissed of about the desecration of history love stuff like One Piece. There was limited outrage about Ghost of Tsushima, which is just wall to wall fantasy couched in throughly modern conceptions of self filtered through nationalism (which I'm sure is why it got left alone by the rightoids). So yes, no small part of the Yasuke debate is racists getting triggered about a black guy in their anime-based fantasy racial tier list.

On the other hand, the whole thing's a racket. There are multiple books out there now about a guy in Yasuke who as far as we know did little but show up. Lupe Fiasco arrived to cash in within two days with a track conveniently titled Samurai, the lyrical content of which has nothing to do with Yasuke:



Is the finger saying Lupe's #1 because of Yasuke? That the new Assassin's Creed is a divine revelation from God? I dunno, but he timed it right to hit the algorithm because YouTube threw it at me a lot. There are a bunch of other products out there too.

But that's just the 21st century internet, everything's a self-promotional scam. Where I got annoyed was self-proclaimed online historians rallying around the notion that "no serious historian doubts that Yasuke was a samurai" and instantly shutting down debate as a 'settled topic' because some guy on Reddit said Yasuke got a stipend and that proved he was a samurai. And I'm reading all this like, I'm someone who at least tries to be a serious historian who mainly ends up working in Japan's medieval era, and I don't see where anything got settled. All kinds of people who were sponsored by the regime got stipends, from actors to monks to painters to poets. It just means the boss liked you enough to keep you associated with his regime for the sake of cultural capital. Maybe they did consider Yasuke a samurai, maybe they didn't and he was just a big mascot, we have no record either way. He didn't have the lineage, there's no evidence he earned it on the battlefield. Moreover, the records we do have include Nobunaga's general Akechi Mitsuhide objecting to him. So calling it a "settled issue" without any actual evidence to settle it is just shitty historiography, and the way the discussion went down annoyed the hell out of me because it was people virtue signalling and fighting contemporary cultural battles based on documents they cannot read, and context on the ground they do not actually know.

Which in itself would also just be the internet being the internet, and with the issue up in the air whatever, but the Yasuke discourse has reached a point where it's one step away from ancient aliens. Here's a contributing writer at Smithsonian.com who I can tell doesn't work in the field, declaring Yasuke as Japan's first(?) black samurai:



Really. A painting of sumo wrestlers from 20+ years after he left the country from two regimes later is about a guy who wasn't a sumo wrestler with only 15 sentences scattered across a couple of random documents. It surely couldn't be a Japanese guy with a tan or any other darker skinned person who found their way to Japan through the busy spice trade routes from Southeast Asia. Mythologizing historical figures is what books and movies and games have always done, it's fun and if it's not then hey, just ignore it. Historical institutions broadcasting it as some sort of academic understanding is an actual problem, because this 21st century media character has overwritten and displaced genuine history. There is absolutely no reason for me to need know this much about this construct that's essentially just a fictional character, except that now I have to.

Screw the anime nazis, but I'm not sorry Ubi wound up apologizing. Everybody on either side of this thing needed a check.

c
OH and the other thing i forgot to mention is that Ubi's chosen JP historian consultant is some crazy liberal university chick in the usa who specialises... who is obsessed with the idea of BOY LOVE between grown men and minors in japan.
you couldn't make this stuff up.
https://thatparkplace.com/assassins-cre ... e%20Davies.

So here's the thing - Nobunaga was into little boys, and made it trendy (he wasn't the only one). There was a thing where the catamites were treated differently from regular boys, and some gender historians treat this as inspirational trans representation, or a cultural counter-example to gender binaries. That this was a point in Japanese society with more highly rigid prescribed gender roles than prior centuries where these boys were expected to grow up, be men and get wives or that the whole thing probably fucked these kids up are minor quibbles.

Which is where it's worth raising the possibility that Yasuke found himself immediately in Nobunaga's circle as another of his lovers. When he sees Yasuke for the first time, the very first thing he does is order him stripped him down. There are more reasonable dots to connect that this big guy he immediately brought to his side rather than pressed into his front lines held personal rather than military interest for him (though sure, his physical size would make him an intimidating bodyguard). I wonder how quickly Lupe's showing up to point his finger in the air if that was the story?

TL;DR - Yasuke was real, nobody knows much about him because there are only a few mentions of him, he was only in the country a short time, there are no images or depictions of him, no records of a single word he said, he's never called a samurai anywhere and got sent home as "not one of us." But also who knows, if you're in the upper click of a bunch of samurai, maybe they did consider him one. THERE IS NO RECORD.

[BIL]

^ Quality post!

I wonder how quickly Lupe's showing up to point his finger in the air if that was the story?

It's these rich fault lines that keep me tuning back in.