# Yasuke: What the Sources Actually Say About the „African Samurai“

In early 1581 a Jesuit mission brought an African man to Kyoto, where crowds gathered so thickly to see him that a building collapsed and people were crushed. Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful warlord in Japan, had him stripped to the waist to check whether his skin had been painted black, and, satisfied it had not, took him into service. He was given a name, Yasuke, a stipend, a house, and a short sword. He is recorded at Nobunaga’s side at the Honnō-ji temple in June 1582, when Nobunaga was betrayed and killed there.

That much is documented, in three contemporary sources that Japanese and Western historians alike treat as reliable within their limits. Almost everything else written about Yasuke in the past decade is not.

What the three sources actually record

The Shinchō-kōki, a chronicle compiled by Nobunaga’s retainer Ōta Gyūichi, records Yasuke’s presentation to Nobunaga in early 1581, his evident strength, and, in at least one surviving manuscript copy, that he was given a stipend, a short sword and a house, and was sometimes made to carry Nobunaga’s equipment. The diary of Matsudaira Ietada, a vassal of Tokugawa Ieyasu, has two entries: one from March 1581 describing the astonishment at Yasuke’s skin colour, and one from May 1582 noting he accompanied Nobunaga on an inspection tour. The Jesuit side comes chiefly from letters of Luís Fróis, most notably one dated 14 April 1581, describing the crowds in Kyoto and Sakai, and a later account, sometimes attributed to Lourenço Mexia, noting that Yasuke had picked up some Japanese, that Nobunaga enjoyed talking with him, and that some townspeople speculated Nobunaga might make him a tono, a lord.

That is the entire documented record. No source describes Yasuke leading troops, fighting in a named battle, winning a duel, or holding any formal military rank. What the sources do show, and this is where the historical debate genuinely sits, is that the level of material favour Nobunaga showed him, a stipend, a residence, a weapon, a stipend disbursed through Nobunaga’s own nephew, goes well beyond what a servant or low-status attendant would normally receive. Whether that amounts to „samurai“ status depends on how loosely the term is defined for the late Sengoku period, a question Japanese historians disagree on among themselves, independent of anything written about Yasuke in English.

What Goza Yūichi and other Japanese historians actually argue

The popular framing of the dispute, that Japanese historians deny Yasuke’s existence or his closeness to Nobunaga, misstates their position. Goza Yūichi, of the University of Tokyo, has stated that based on the primary sources, Nobunaga certainly treated Yasuke as something like a samurai, and other historians, Hirayama Yū among them, point to the same passages about the stipend and sword as evidence he was in Nobunaga’s direct service, not menial staff. What Goza objects to is not the claim that Yasuke was close to Nobunaga. It is the leap from a handful of fragmentary references to the confident, detailed narrative built on top of them, and specifically to Thomas Lockley’s description of Yasuke as a „legendary samurai,“ a phrase Goza calls incongruous with what the sources can support. His caution is methodological: do not draw firm conclusions from a single manuscript tradition when other versions of the same chronicle differ, and do not treat silence in the record as license to invent.

Where the invention happens

Lockley’s 2019 English-language book, African Samurai, co-written with the novelist Geoffrey Girard and marketed as narrative nonfiction, is the text at the centre of the dispute, and the criticism of it is more specific than a general complaint about speculation. One frequently cited example: Lockley’s account of Yasuke fighting in an ambush during Nobunaga’s Iga campaign appears to be drawn, at second hand, from a 2003 popular history by Stephen Turnbull, whose own source is the Iranki, a late seventeenth-century chronicle compiled roughly a century after the events it describes, rewritten multiple times before its first printed edition in 1897, and not corroborated by any other chronicle of Nobunaga’s life. From that single, late, uncorroborated source, Lockley constructs a specific scene and the line, quoted directly from the book, that Yasuke had had his first Japanese battle and was now a blooded samurai of the Oda. Nothing in the three primary sources describes Yasuke in any battle at all.

A separate and more serious controversy followed in 2024, when critics identified passages in Lockley’s academic writing, distinct from the popular book, describing enslaved Africans in sixteenth-century Japan in terms that reviewers said were not supported by the cited sources; Lockley’s academic affiliation listing and an NHK programme tied to his work were subsequently removed, though accounts of exactly what prompted each removal vary. Lockley has disputed some of the specific characterisations of his conduct made in this controversy.

The video game did not create the dispute, it inherited it

Ubisoft’s 2024 game Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which features Yasuke as one of two protagonists and credits Lockley as a consultant, triggered a wave of public argument in Japan and internationally over whether Yasuke was accurately a samurai. Much of that argument, the two-part essay in The Sundial (ACMRS) by Robert Tuck argues, conflated two separate questions that deserve separate answers: whether the primary sources support calling Yasuke something like a samurai, on which serious Japanese historians are cautiously open, and whether Lockley’s specific popular narrative is reliable history, on which the same historians, Goza included, are far more skeptical. Some of the backlash against the game’s casting decision, Tuck’s essay also argues, was shaped by currents unrelated to either question. Separating the two disputes, sourcing accuracy on one side and casting politics on the other, is not something most of the coverage generated by the game’s release managed to do.

What doesn’t add up

**A three-source, two-page historical record has been expanded into a four-hundred-page narrative marketed as rigorously researched nonfiction.** The primary sources describe a matter of weeks of documented interactions across roughly a year and a half. Lockley’s book supplies specific battles, specific emotional states, and specific dialogue for a figure who appears in the actual record only in fragments. Goza’s caution against drawing firm conclusions from a single source applies with even more force to a narrative built by filling the gaps between three thin sources with material drawn from unrelated, uncorroborated, or centuries-later chronicles. What would resolve this for a general reader: an edition of Lockley’s book, or a companion guide to it, that marks every claim beyond the three primary sources as reconstruction rather than presenting the whole as equally sourced narrative history.

**A dispute about sourcing became a dispute about representation, and the two got treated as the same argument.** Whether Yasuke functioned as something like a samurai is a real, still-open historiographical question that Japanese academics are actively debating on its merits. Whether a specific commercial book took liberties with thin sources is a separate, also legitimate question about one author’s method. Neither question is a referendum on whether an African samurai in feudal Japan is historically plausible, which the primary sources already answer, cautiously, yes. What would help: coverage of the game and the book controversies that cites Goza’s actual, qualified position rather than reducing „Japanese historians“ to a single verdict on either question.

What stays open

Yasuke’s birthplace, exact age, and life before 1579 are unknown; even his likely region of origin, whether Mozambique or further inland, rests on inference from physical descriptions rather than direct testimony. What happened to him after Nobunaga’s death at Honnō-ji in June 1582 is not recorded in any source used for this piece. The documented Yasuke is a man present at a remarkable moment, treated with unusual favour by the most powerful man in Japan, for about a year and a half. The rest is reconstruction, some of it careful, much of it not, and the difference matters.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

More from KardiKassin

Made in Germany: How Your Picture of Africa Was Manufactured

Two pages of sources, filled out into four hundred pages of unmarked invention. The free 12-page ebook traces that same kind of gap-filling across a whole continent’s worth of image-making.

Get the free ebook

Sources

• Tuck, Robert: We Need to Talk About Yasuke: Fact, Fiction, and History with the „African Samurai,“ Parts 1 and 2. The Sundial (ACMRS), January 2025. https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/we-need-to-talk-about-yasuke-fact-fiction-and-history-with-the-african-samurai-part-1-528a75dcc5ae and https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/we-need-to-talk-about-yasuke-fact-fiction-and-history-with-the-african-samurai-part-2-4d470e3d3574
• Goza Yūichi and other historians, as quoted and summarised in the PMJS (Premodern Japanese Studies) discussion list. https://groups.google.com/g/pmjs/c/mrXyZacOqdY
• Fróis, Luís: letters of 14 April 1581 and the 1582 Annual Report of the Jesuit Mission in Japan, published in Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Japão e China II, 1598
• Ōta Gyūichi: Shinchō-kōki (Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga), Sonkeikaku Bunko manuscript
• Matsudaira Ietada: Matsudaira Ietada Nikki (diary), entries of March 1581 and May 1582