Other histories of the Jesuits in Japan such as Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du Christianisme dans l’empire du Japon (History of the Establishment, Progress and Decadence of Christianity in the Empire of Japan) by Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, first published in 1715 and in print for over a century, fail to mention Yasuke’s story at all.
Perhaps due to the increased climate of racism against Africans that rose with the Atlantic slave trade, the African samurai ceased to remain of interest to the eighteenth-century European audience.
By Crasset’s day, 1669, there’d been little or no Jesuit activity in Japan for 30 years. There would be no more until the late nineteenth century, with the one exception of a lone priest, Giovanni Battista Sidotti, who, craving martyrdom, attempted to infiltrate the country in 1708. He was captured almost immediately and spent the final seven years of his life in captivity before dying, as he had wished, a martyr’s death of starvation in a prison pit in Edo.
* * *
In Japan, where Yasuke’s story was always destined to be a topic of fascination, Ōta Gyūichi’s laudatory biography, The Chronicle of Nobunaga, was published posthumously in the decade after Ōta died in 1613. Notably for its time, the biography was printed using a movable type printing press—one of the first of its kind in Japan, the first to represent Japanese characters, and also a product of Hideyoshi’s Korean war (the technique and the printers were originally abducted to Japan in 1593). Ōta’s finished work was based on a lifetime of diaries and personal notes he’d kept.
An African man wrestles as Nobunaga and his court look on. This is almost definitely Yasuke, although painted several decades after his time with Nobunaga.
In the chronicle, Yasuke is mentioned specifically in relation to his initial audience with Nobunaga, and in an early draft of Ōta’s work (one which did not make the final edit and was never published, but is held in the archives of the prominent Oda vassal clan, the Maeda), we can today read of Yasuke’s name and his elevation to samurai status: “This black man called Yasuke 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.”
Ōta’s work is considered to be a reliable historical source and is the fount of much information about Nobunaga and his times. Ōta also later wrote lives of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu as well as a record of the wars in Korea.
After Ōta’s The Chronicle of Nobunaga, as far as recorded history in Japan goes, the African samurai’s story seems to have been largely forgotten for some two centuries.
But the fact that word of Yasuke’s legend lived on into at least the seventeenth century in Japan is supported by the picture of a black man sumo wrestling from 1640, Sumo yurakuzu byobu. The picture shows a sumo tournament between an African and a Japanese man. Nobunaga is keenly adjudicating as members of his court look on and other wrestlers await their turn to fight. The location is unclear, but it is probably meant to be Azuchi. Somebody knew Yasuke’s story sixty years later and was able to depict it.
That Yasuke’s story was passed on as a popular legend in Japan is also shown by the 1670s reference, mentioned in the previous chapter, from Tottori, referring to the visit of a black man to the local region nearly one hundred years previously. Why the unknown chronicler was suddenly inspired to write about “Kurobo,” or Yasuke, in 1670, we shall never truly know. But it is clear that some folk memory had remained of an African visitor to a remote corner of Japan.
A final eyewitness source, a line about Yasuke which informs us of his stipend, height and again his name, is from the diary of the senior Tokugawa vassal samurai Matsudaira Ietada, who met Yasuke just after Nobunaga had conquered the Takeda in 1582. Matsudaira’s diary was not published until 1898, nearly three hundred years after the death of its author in battle in 1600. There is no reason to think its description of Yasuke was widely known until then:
Lord Nobunaga gave the black man who the missionaries presented to him, a stipend. His skin was black like ink and he was around 6.2 shaku (over 6'2") tall. He was called Yasuke.
It was Yasuke’s first published mention since the 1670s, and came about as part of the movement to shed a more scholastic light on Japanese history by publishing ancient tracts which had remained in dusty storerooms or family book chests.
Nearly fifty years later, in 1943 and 1944, came the first Japanese translation of the Jesuit letters, Cartas, by the eminent historian Murakami Naojiro. This was not his first translation of an early European account of Japan—he’d been doing it for forty years plus—but it was his masterpiece. Murakami opened up these valuable historical documents to the reading public in Japan for the first time. The few surviving copies of the original Cartas print runs of 1598 had been largely forgotten, and were slowly wasting away in a few European libraries, accessible to only the most dedicated scholars who could read the arcane Portuguese in which they are written. There is still no translation in English.
Yasuke’s story was poised to be rediscovered in all its glory, at least by a Japanese reading audience. But times were not good in Japan. In the early 1940s, the country was at war and in imminent danger of absolute destruction. The Japanese had other things on their minds: survival and then national reconstruction. It would take another twenty years for Yasuke’s story to receive published attention and for a second age of Yasuke to dawn after three hundred years of neglect.
* * *
In 1968, author Kurusu Yoshio, a pioneer of historical fiction for children, wrote a Japanese language children’s book called Kurosuke. The story was illustrated by Mita Genjiro, a famous illustrator whose beautiful book covers are familiar to all Japanese children, even today. This was the first story ever to be dedicated in its entirety to Yasuke and his life.
The book is highly sympathetic to Yasuke’s character and tells the African samurai’s tale loosely based on the Jesuit sources. It seems neither of the Japanese sources, Ōta nor Matsudaira, were consulted. Perhaps Kurusu was unaware of them. Though the author does not say how she found out about Yasuke, in her afterword, Kurusu talks of being fascinated by a map of Africa which was on the wall of her elementary school when she was a child in the mid-1920s. She talks in scornful words about “European empires, fat merchants and bearded generals” who “chewed up” the African continent. Then links Yasuke with the optimistic new Africa that in 1968 was only then emerging, the independent Africa of nations. In doing so she was the first of many people to draw inspiration from his story as opposed to simply recording his existence.
In the decades following WWII, European nations could no longer justify colonialism, morally or economically. In 1950, only four African countries—Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia and South Africa—were independent self-governing states. By 1968, however, the tide of independence had swept the continent and it was this optimistic spirit of liberty and change which inspired Kurusu’s writing. It is clear her message in Kurosuke is that Yasuke is a story of hope for Africa’s future, and Yasuke’s story was being liberated at last even as Africa itself seemed to be on the verge of freedom from centuries of domination and plunder by outsiders. Kurosuke is a work of fiction aimed at a young reader, so does not dwell on the bloody wars, but looks at geographical variations between Africa and Japan, exotic animals and cultural differences such as meat-eating and weaponry. The mind and emotions of a young man in a foreign country far from home is one of its most poignant themes.
Yasuke is painted as a hero, an affable and cooperative guy, who makes friends with Nobunaga’s pages and entertains his women, as well as being scrubbed to check the veracity of his skin pigment. The climax is the battle at Honnō-ji Temple, where Yasuke fights to the end before escaping. He is not present at Nobunaga’s death in this story, but escapes with another page to fight with the Oda heir, Nobutada, playing a key part in the final Oda stand before being wrestled to the ground an
d taken before Akechi.
Having been escorted back to the Jesuit church, Yasuke is exhausted and demoralized and the last chapter is called “A Dream of Africa,” in which he dreams forlornly of his family and childhood in Africa and cries silently.
For its revolutionary contribution to the, at the time, new genre of children’s historical fiction, Kurosuke won the prestigious Japanese Association of Writers for Children Prize in 1969.
Yasuke and Nobunaga as portrayed in Kurosuke, 1968.
Image courtesy of Iwasaki Shoten, Tokyo
But the times were not exclusively sympathetic to Yasuke.
The next time he appears as a fictional protagonist is in Endō Shūsaku’s 1971 novel Kuronbo. Endō was one of the best-known writers in postwar Japan, often tackling deep subjects, especially to do with spirituality; he was a practicing Catholic. The title of the novel is the same “Black Man” that Katō’s African retainer was known by, the difference in spelling is due to Endō writing his title in Nagasaki dialect which changes the sound of the word slightly.
Yasuke as portrayed on the cover of Kurosuke, 1968.
Image courtesy of Iwasaki Shoten, Tokyo
However, while “Kurobo” was a common name to call an African person in the sixteenth century, in the modern age, the word has taken on an offensive and discriminatory meaning for black people, making it a rather unfortunate book title. Endōmay have intended it provocatively. Further, in Endō’s novel, Yasuke is portrayed in a very different light from the positive African freedom icon in Kurusu’s book Kurosuke. In Kuronbo, Yasuke becomes a buffoon, perhaps even a simpleton, an object of fun for Nobunaga’s inner crowd, and indeed the wider public entertaining his audiences with obscene shows such as farting in time to drum beats. Worryingly for some of the male Japanese characters, Yasuke is also an object of sexual interest to the ladies. He attaches himself to a girl called Yuki who looks after him like a mother while he performs tricks to make ends meet. They go through hard times, but also happy times, together, living in a hut.
The story seems, at least superficially, to be somewhat reminiscent of the belittling 1930s representations of Africans in European comic strip books like Tintin but can be read in several lights. Firstly, as a product of the racist times in which it was written; although ways of describing race were in the process of change in 1971, the contemporary Japanese dictionary Daigenkai simply gives the modern definition of Kurobo as “Indian, or African American,” and does not mention that it is derogatory. Judging by the contemporary definition, the Japanese public still saw no problem with this word which, although it had originally had no disparaging connotations, being the word for the inhabitant of a respected fellow Buddhist kingdom (Colombo in Sri Lanka), had come by the twentieth century to infer something similar to the English words “black boy.” The modern word for people of African descent in Japanese is “kokujin”—literally “black person.”
Second, Kuronbo can be seen as a story about the trials of living and the difficulties of mere survival in a strange and foreign land. Yasuke struggles with everything, depends on Yuki as if he were a child, and has to do humiliating tasks to earn money. The subject of alienation was a subject which Endō was himself familiar with as he spent his childhood in China and many years in France as a student. He visited this theme in numerous other works also. Finally, in Kuronbo, Yasuke’s character can also perhaps be seen as an allegory for Africa, or the general plight of black people around the world in 1971. Endō had spent several months in the United States in 1969 and saw the American Civil Rights movement firsthand. He also attended the first Afro–Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent in 1958, a gathering held to denounce imperialism and to establish better cultural contacts among delegates’ countries. Yasuke, in Kuronbo, has his ups and downs, but the general theme of infantilization could be read as a further political comment, less optimistic than Kurusu’s, on decolonization, the global treatment of people of African descent and the inevitable difficulties and humiliations that were emerging in the fight for civil rights and independence in 1971.
* * *
Japanese views of Africans since Yasuke’s time have changed over the centuries and decades. During the long period of isolation from most non-Asian nations, the 1630s to the 1850s, there were few Africans in Japan to have any opinion of, and hence views became necessarily filtered through European lenses. That perspective, alas, was not positive and by the 1850s, any knowledge of Africa, minimal as it was, was bigoted and deleterious. It should be remembered that Japanese attitudes toward Europeans during this period were also overwhelmingly negative. (There were even rumors in Japan that the Dutch merchants wore high heels to accommodate a horn in their heels, somewhat akin to the paws of a dog.)
The international imperial power politics of the late nineteenth century changed Japanese people’s view of Europeans and Americans, but did little to improve their view of people of African descent. On the contrary, the vast majority of blacks that the Japanese came into contact with were slaves or servants, and this clouded their views.
Times changed with the coming of the twentieth century, and Japan became only the second non-European nation to defeat a serious European military in war since the Middle Ages during the 1904/1905 Russo-Japanese War. People of color around the world celebrated, and Europeans and Americans took stock of this revolutionary threat. The recently coined term Yellow Peril became a buzzword and the United States started to restrict immigration from Japan to its west coast states. This conflict eventually led to the Russian Revolution and also became one of the “warm-up” wars for World War I.
However, the first non-European nation to defeat a modern European army in the field was Ethiopia at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, ironically with some support from Russia. The Italian invaders were soundly thrashed and beaten back to their colony in Eritrea to the north. This caught widespread global attention too, and cemented Ethiopia’s independence until a more successful decade-long Italian fascist occupation in the 1930s and ’40s.
The Ethiopian royal party in Japan dressed in kimonos.
Japan was no exception to the rise in esteem for Ethiopia in the early twentieth century; in fact it was seen as a potential ally to the extent that in 1931 it was proposed that an Ethiopian prince, Lij Araya, marry a suitably aristocratic Japanese wife to cement strategic and commercial ties. A candidate was found, Kuroda Masako, a distant descendant of a samurai who fought for Nobunaga and undoubtedly knew Yasuke. However, the wedding never took place. The Italians put huge diplomatic pressure on both Japan and Ethiopia to cancel the plan, and other Western powers, highly uncomfortable with Japanese influence further expanding worldwide, agreed with the Italians.
In the early twentieth century, many African American intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois lauded Japan for its role in supporting other non-white peoples in their struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Others were not so convinced, pointing out that Japanese imperialism was equally subjugating the Koreans and Chinese. Although writer and social activist Langston Hughes was warmly welcomed in 1933, he nonetheless went out of his way to condemn Japanese hypocrisy in extensively supporting colonial independence movements while fiercely maintaining its own right to colonies in Korea, Taiwan and the Pacific. Hughes stated that the Koreans and Chinese “were in somewhat the same position as Negroes in the United States.” After these statements, he was promptly deported.
Then came 1945. The Japanese defeat in WWII brought a huge occupation force of American GIs (and a few thousand representatives from the other Allied nations), including many African American servicemen. The first major instance of black people on Japanese soil since the early seventeenth century. Of course there were far fewer black GIs than white, and the old prejudices from home were imported along with all the other baggage the US Army brought with it. Segregated communities of whites and blacks formed outside the newly established US milita
ry bases all around the country. And any local Japanese person could easily see where the power resided. Perceptions of people of color suffered greatly and took decades to repair.
Among Japanese intellectuals, the 1960s brought the dawn of a new world of social activism, revolution from below, and an age of peace and love. Japan and its views of black people, largely those of African Americans who were often portrayed, fallaciously, as cannon fodder for the US forces in Vietnam, became more pitying. These black men, although stationed in Japan on their way to Vietnam, were no longer imperialist occupiers to be reviled, but comrades in a larger war against the ruling and warring classes.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century and tens of thousands of black people reside in, or are citizens of, Japan. Racism? Yes, Japan does have major issues with accepting those who have originally come from elsewhere or are mixed heritage as normal citizens, but that does not mean that a foreigner cannot make their way. Someone who commands the language, marries into a local family and plays a full community role is respected for that, and becomes a kokumin, a member of the community. Their mixed heritage offspring are Japanese citizens.
In the past decade people of mixed black/Japanese heritage have played an increasingly prominent role in society. The best known is probably Miyamoto Ariana, born to a Japanese mother and an African American father, who in 2015 won the Miss Universe Japan pageant (achieving top ten in the global tournament) and subsequently decided to use her fame to help combat racial prejudice at home. Miyamoto said, “I want to start a revolution. I can’t change things overnight but in one hundred to two hundred years there will be very few pure Japanese left, so we have to start changing the way we think.” Other famous black Japanese people include the international sprinter Asuka Cambridge, and comedian and television presenter Ike Nwala who appears almost daily on children’s TV shows as well as on more adult-orientated content.
Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai Page 33
