Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Tokugawa Ieyasu: Nobunaga’s key ally. Following Hideyoshi’s death, Tokugawa Ieyasu usurped power through acting as chief regent for Hideyoshi’s infant son Hideyori (a similar ploy Hideyoshi had used when assuming Nobunaga’s power). Tokugawa’s ascent, however, was not without dissent, and resulted in a series of battles. The final conflict was one of the largest battles, globally, of the whole seventeenth century. The Battle of Sekigahara, in which approximately one hundred seventy thousand warriors took part (on the day itself; tens of thousands of others were delayed or fighting on related battlefields), was a decisive victory and decided Japanese politics for nearly three hundred years. Tokugawa’s ancestors would rule in peace, with virtually no challenge, until the 1860s. Ieyasu himself, described as one of the richest men in the world by an English merchant, founded Tokyo and left a legacy of laws and guidance that shapes Japanese society to this day. He is considered by some to be one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived.

  Takayama Ukon: Takayama’s support was crucial for Hideyoshi’s usurpation of the national leadership of the Oda clan, but that did not mean he was invulnerable. In 1587, Hideyoshi ordered all Christian lords to renounce their faith. Takayama declined and was banished. He received a measure of forgiveness through being permitted to enter the service of the powerful Maeda clan but still refused to renounce Catholicism. After the definitive and final Jesuit expulsion edict in 1614, which included prominent Japanese Christians, he went into foreign exile, along with three hundred of his followers, in Manila. The colonial government of the Spanish Philippines saw an opportunity and offered to invade Japan to protect the Japanese Christians. Takayama refused to give his support and shortly afterward, in February 1615, breathed his last. The Spanish honored him with the funeral of a great lord and he is commemorated with a statue in the center of the old Japanese quarter of Manila, Plaza Dilao. With the support of Pope Francis in Rome, Takayama was beatified in his home town of Osaka in 2017, and became the Blessed Justo Takayama Ukon, only one step from sainthood.

  Arima Harunobu: Arima Harunobu, who’d first welcomed Yasuke to Japan, regained some measure of autonomy after the Battle of Okitanawate, but remained in the shadow of his Satsuma clan allies. His people knew peace for the first time in decades. When the Shimazu were humbled by Hideyoshi, Arima bent the knee to him and subsequently was dispatched with two thousand troops to Korea in 1592. His run of picking the victors continued when he supported Tokugawa Ieyasu after Hideyoshi’s death but his luck ran out when he failed in a mission to invade Taiwan and some sailors on one of his ships ran amok in Macao and were executed by the Portuguese authorities in 1608. The following year, he seized the Portuguese trading ship in Nagasaki in revenge and after a long battle, Captain Major André Pessoa blew up the whole ship rather than surrender. Although Ieyasu rewarded Arima for this, the “reward” was a marriage between Arima’s son and Ieyasu’s adoptive daughter, a problem because Arima’s son was already married. The son capitulated and divorced his Catholic wife, apostatized and poisoned Ieyasu’s mind against his own father, and in 1612, the senior Arima, already exiled, was ordered to perform seppuku. As a Christian, Arima could not commit suicide, so instead he accepted the death of a common criminal, beheading.

  Katō Kiyomasa: The warlord who employed “Kurobo,” and wrought havoc in Korea. After Hideyoshi’s death, Katō chose to support Tokugawa Ieyasu, and was rewarded richly by becoming one of the most powerful lords in the land. He also remained loyal, however, to Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori, whom Ieyasu had usurped, and attempted to act as a mediator between them. He died in 1611.

  Ōtomo Sōrin: Ōtomo Sōrin became a vassal of the great conqueror, Hideyoshi, in 1587. He died of old age the same year. We know nothing more of his estranged wife “Jezebel,” except that she also died in 1587.

  Ōmura Sumitada: The lord who gifted the Jesuits Nagasaki. Despite Ōmura’s questionable adherence to Catholicism at first (to obtain arms and outside support), he made strenuous efforts to understand the creed and remained a Christian until his death from tuberculosis, on June 23, 1587. There is no record of what happened to his daughter, who’d refused to marry Arima. His son Yoshiaki, however, made the politically astute move (in the climate of the early seventeenth century) to ban the Jesuits and Christianity from the Ōmura domain.

  Hattori Hanzō: Nobunaga destroyed the autonomy of the Iga ninja once and for all. However, their leader, Hattori Hanzō, took them into the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu, and a large corps, around three hundred, formed a part of the guard at Ieyasu’s new Edo Castle. Hattori has gone down in history and legend as the best known of the ninja, and as such has enjoyed a huge showing in popular culture, video games, movies, television, manga and books in Japan and overseas. Most famously the Kage no Gundan (Shadow Warriors) movie and TV series which depict him and his (semifictional) descendants. Hattori and his descendants of each generation, also named Hanzō, were played by Sonny Chiba in the series, and when Quentin Tarantino needed a Hattori Hanzō for the movie Kill Bill, he commissioned Chiba to play a fictional Hattori Hanzō XIV. The gate that Hattori guarded in Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace, was named after him, and in turn the Hanzōmon metro line, is named after the castle gate.

  The Places

  Japan: Japan was reunified as a political unit by Hideyoshi in 1590 bringing an uneasy end to The Age of the Country at War. It turned out to be only a pause in the fighting. When Hideyoshi died in 1598, the struggle to succeed him led to the massive conflagration of the Battle of Sekigahara where the forces loyal to Hideyoshi’s seven-year-old son, Hideyori, squared off against Tokugawa Ieyasu. On the battlefield, one hundred seventy thousand samurai fought. In the numerous sideshows, many tens of thousands more were involved. Ieyasu won a crushing victory, and shortly afterward founded a new shogunal dynasty which would rule until the modern age. The final conflict to secure Tokugawa’s rule came in 1614–1615 when the last remaining supporters of Hideyori defiantly gathered at Osaka Castle. In a series of battles, Tokugawa Ieyasu again came out on top and this time it was definitive. There would be no real challenge to Tokugawa rule until the 1860s.

  Unfortunately for the Jesuits, they’d backed the wrong side. Crosses and Catholic banners had been held high in battle at Osaka. The punishment was permanent expulsion. Over the next two decades, Catholics—or, according to Tokugawa law, criminals and purveyors of pernicious teachings—were given the chance to recant their faith or face death. The majority apostatized sometimes under heavy torture. At the same time, the large Japanese diaspora around Asia, estimated to have perhaps been as high as one hundred thousand, were not always on their best behavior. Piracy and mercenary activity were rife, a great embarrassment for the shogunate which wished to look respectable in the eyes of the world. By the 1630s, the government had had enough, and promulgated a series of laws prohibiting Japanese citizens from travel abroad (and denying repatriation to those who did not come home quickly). All Catholic nations were forbidden to enter Japanese waters and the Dutch were the only non-Asian foreigners allowed to trade at all. They were restricted to a small man-made island called Dejima in Nagasaki bay. Chinese (and other Asian trade which was often conducted on Chinese ships), Korean, Ryukuan (modern-day Okinawa Prefecture, but then an independent nation) and Ainu (the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido and the islands further north) trade continued and formal diplomatic relations were maintained with Korea, Ryukyu and the Dutch East India Company. Yasuke could not have flourished in this world; he would not have even been able to travel farther than the Nagasaki dockside.

  In the 1670s and ’80s, economic issues, mainly to do with declining output from the silver mines that had funded Japanese imports for so long, forced a rethink and it was decided to further limit the amount of foreign trade each year to retain bullion as far as possible for domestic use. This, coupled with a drive to improve domestic industry to make up for reduced imports, had the effect of boosting the national economy. Production of
products like silk, sugar and tea boomed and the quality rivaled that of the old Chinese imports for the first time as techniques were perfected, often with the help of Chinese experts.

  Following the disaster of Hideyoshi’s Korean war, the Tokugawa declined any serious foreign military activity and imposed a national peace. The energy that the samurai had once expended in war was spent on the arts and scholarship. Drama, printing, pornography, writing, painting, pottery, in fact just about any form of art you can think of, flourished. Philosophy and ethical studies took over from military strategy as the learning of preference, although the martial arts were never forgotten and were assiduously practiced and perfected. Not everything was rosy, however. Natural disasters and famine were never far away from the growing population. The strict caste system—samurai, peasants, artisans and merchants, in that order—implemented by Hideyoshi and continued by his successors meant that social mobility was difficult.

  By the nineteenth century, social pressures were mounting, pressures that would lead to a very different future for Japan. But that is another story.

  Macao: Macao continued to thrive on trade with Japan until the Japanese government definitively expelled all Portuguese residents and their Japanese families in 1638 due to perceived Portuguese support for a rebellion in the Shimabara peninsula, Arima’s old lands. The Macanese were devastated; the Nagasaki trade was the cornerstone of their economy. And so they sent four of their leading citizens to beg for the restoration of trading rights in 1640. The shogunate was not amused with the “worm-like barbarians of Macao,” and executed sixty-one of the ship’s complement. A skeleton crew of thirteen was left alive to sail back to Macao with the message that if they ever darkened Japanese waters again, no one would be spared. Macao made do with other inter-Asian trade, especially with Manila, but was never as important an outpost of Portugal as it had been during the early days. By 1999, when it was reunited with mainland China, it had become the last European colony in Asia.

  Nagasaki: Nagasaki grew and grew. It blossomed on trade and Christian faith until the Tokugawa government banned that religion. Most of the good burghers of Nagasaki quickly recanted Catholicism; the rest died by execution or torture. In the 1630s, it became the sole port authorized to trade with Europeans, and after 1641, the Dutch became the sole Europeans to be permitted trade there. The trade with China and Southeast Asia continued at a regular pace, around one hundred to two hundred Asian ships per year and one, sometimes two, Dutch ships. It remained the most multicultural city in Japan until the modern age. For the next two hundred years, around 10 percent of the population were Chinese.

  August 9, 1945—the city of Kokura was half-covered in smoke from fires started by a firebombing raid of more than two hundred United States B-29s on nearby Yahata the previous day. With such low visibility over Kokura, another B-29, Bockscar, decided on its backup target and dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, ultimately killing as many as two hundred thousand people.

  Tottori Castle: Tottori Castle remained a formidable fortress and center of local government until the modern age. In 1943, it was badly damaged in a massive earthquake, and the old noble family which had been in residence since 1600, the Ikedas, donated what was left to the people of the city. Today, the walls have been restored and you can attempt to climb the sheer slopes to the mountain summit. Beware of bears.

  Azuchi: Azuchi was Nobunaga’s city. There was little there before him and little left after him. Today it is a sleepy town of around ten thousand. The castle ruins are well preserved and can be visited; there is even a reconstruction of the top two floors of Nobunaga’s glorious seven-floor donjon. Sadly nothing of the original building remains.

  Sakai: Sakai lost its international verve and vibe when Japan restricted foreign trade to designated ports, of which it was not one. It continued, however, to be a major center of national shipping and trade, particularly known for its weapon and knife manufacture. Today, it has been all but swallowed up by its larger and louder neighbor, Osaka.

  Kyoto: Kyoto remains the spiritual capital of Japan, even if it gave up the title of Imperial Capital in 1868 when the emperor moved to his current home in Tokyo. It is one of the world’s great cities, bursting with energy both ancient and modern and tourists from around the world flock there. Temples and shrines neighbor markets and department stores. It boasts the second most Michelin stars of any city in the world. Number one is Tokyo.

  The Satsuma and Mori clans: Although these two hugely powerful clans bent the knee to Hideyoshi, they were never destroyed in the way that Nobunaga had destroyed the Takeda. Both fought against Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara, but again were allowed to survive as coherent entities. The Satsuma clan were even permitted to carry out an invasion of the Ryukyu Kingdom (modern Okinawa) in 1609 and rule those islands as a colony for the next two centuries. This gave them direct access to the hugely lucrative trade with China, something that no other clan other than the ruling Tokugawa enjoyed.

  Both clans were mortal enemies of the other, but when they combined forces in 1866, they were powerful enough to remove the Tokugawa from power and usher in a new era for Japan known as the Meiji Era; they founded modern Japan.

  The Mori were cannier than the Satsuma, and slowly edged them out of power in the late nineteenth century. To this day, a large number of prime ministers, including the current incumbent (in 2018) Abe Shinzo, are from what was Mori clan territory, the modern Yamaguchi Prefecture.

  Author Note

  In 2009, quite by chance, I first happened upon the extraordinary, and little-known (especially then), historical character of Yasuke.

  I’d moved to Japan a decade before from Britain for a teaching opportunity. Like Yasuke, I was a stranger in a strange land but learning every day: the Japanese language, patience and staying quiet, Japanese cookery, the beauty of onsen (hot springs), what snow really is, the true value of central heating and how to teach and to deal with personal relationships cross-culturally. These first years in Japan, coincidentally in the tiny town of Shikano in Tottori Prefecture (where Yasuke may have visited), changed my life. I grew up, learned a fascinating language (my favorite), determined the shape of my future.

  When I stumbled upon the Yasuke story online, I instantly became fascinated by this man who’d traveled so far from his homeland to appear directly beside the dominant warlord in Japan and be granted another culture’s highest opportunity and honor. Although I’d initially assumed, blithely, that men and women like Yasuke were all slaves, in grave conditions, I came to see there was actually a far more complex and inspiring story to tell. Here was a slave soldier from Africa who’d most likely worked for royalty in India, then for one of the most prominent Jesuits in Christendom and ultimately for a mighty Japanese warlord. It was remarkable, epic even. A true-life tale of great adventure.

  Migrants like Yasuke, however, have generally managed to slip through the cracks of historical research and I soon decided to find out more and begin the study necessary to write a book based on his story.

  Over the next six years, I investigated primary sources (diaries, letters, histories written more than three hundred years ago) for any mention of Yasuke or men and women like him. The internet provided new means to access highly obscure European accounts of sixteenth-century Japan, old Japanese chronicles, and dusty volumes about ancient African kingdoms which could not have been easily obtained by one person without a great deal of travel only a decade ago. I also found relevant material in university libraries.

  Here, he’s mentioned escaping death at the hands of a curious crowd who perhaps craved a piece of clothing as some form of celebrity trophy. Here, a diary entry where Yasuke was witnessed performing feats of strength and chatting convivially alongside the sons of Japan’s most powerful warlord. It was not long before I could imagine Yasuke walking the wide boulevards of Kyoto, dressed in exotic garb from China, India and Europe, an intimidatin
g spear in one hand, a gently curved Japanese sword thrust through a sash at his waist. I also began seeing links between Yasuke’s story and others, both in Japan and around the world. A new remarkable world of international exploration, soldiery and trade opened up to me, beyond the notion of the only pioneers being western Europeans searching for glory and “new worlds,” but, rather, a far more nuanced story of all those moving around the contracting globe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those whose talents, the vicissitudes of fate, and perhaps a guardian angel or two, determined where and how far they could, and would, go.

  All this detective work merged to paint a picture of Yasuke’s life. But the picture had yet to become a complete narrative where all the gaps were filled. Fortunately, I was able to directly contact many researchers and historians around the world who generously answered my requests appealing for otherwise unobtainable research leads, informed opinions and material. Even the first secretary of the Embassy of the Republic of Mozambique in Tokyo granted me an interview to assist in crossing the Ts and dotting the Is on some outstanding questions on a country about which it is still difficult to find much historical information.