@Contempt, I finished the Smithsonian article angrypikachu linked. My bad, Lockley IS mentioned, but not by me, he's mentioned in the article that your boy angrypikachu posted lmao:
asuke in pop culture
Despite the lack of concrete information about Yasuke, the samurai’s life has inspired a range of adaptations. In 1968, Japanese author
Kurusu Yoshio published
Kuro-suke, a children’s book that dramatizes Yasuke’s story. More recent titles about the warrior include Lockley’s 2019 book, co-written with
Geoffrey Girard, and Jamal Turner’s 2020 children’s book
Yasuke: The Legend of the African Samurai. Yasuke also shows up in the 2017 video game “
Nioh,” which is set during the Sengoku period.
Possible depiction of Yasuke (left side) on a Rinpa-style ink-stone box dated to the 1590s
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
In 2019,
Chadwick Boseman, perhaps best known for portraying the eponymous superhero in Marvel’s
Black Panther,
signed on to play Yasuke in an upcoming film. “The legend of Yasuke is one of history’s best kept secrets, the only person of non-Asian origin to become a samurai,” the actor told
Deadline. “That’s not just an action movie, that’s a cultural event, an exchange, and I am excited to be part of it.” Boseman
died of colon cancer in August 2020, leaving the project’s future uncertain.
Production on the live-action film may be stalled, but that hasn’t stopped other creatives from offering their
own takes on Yasuke. The six-episode anime “
Yasuke,” released on Netflix in April 2021, follows a heavily fictionalized version of the warrior 20 years after the Honnoji Incident as he battles giant robots, ancient demons and other evil creatures.
LaKeith Stanfield of
Judas and the Black Messiah fame voices Yasuke, who spends the series protecting Saki, a young girl with magical powers, from dark forces as they journey north together.
“Since Yasuke doesn’t have an owned estate, no one owns his character—his story was up for interpretation,” animation director LeSean Thomas told
Den of Geek last year. “I knew I wanted to tell a story that was removed from history so that we can create a new action hero and celebrate him through this adventure story.”
Yoshiko Okuyama, an expert on Japanese studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, praises “Yasuke” for featuring a Black hero as its lead character. Referencing the
lack of racial diversity in anime, the scholar points out that
portrayals of Black people in early animated titles were often demeaning, showing these individuals with exaggerated facial features.
“Although [‘Yasuke’] is a fantasy, the story is drawn from a documented history about a real-life dark-skinned samurai in 16th-century Japan, which not so many Japanese themselves knew,” Okuyama says. “In the past, Japan’s anime, as well as American animation works, grossly misrepresented [Black characters] for decades. It is overdue that they are put in central roles with positive traits, as movers and shakers of the story, not as sidekicks or villains.”
Doan, meanwhile, notes that Yasuke’s voice is conspicuously absent from adaptations of his life. No documents produced by the samurai himself are known to survive today. But, she says, “Even without a large number of surviving historical sources for us to understand the full extent of Yasuke’s activity or personal experiences, Yasuke’s story is an example of the kind of exciting and unexpected transnational encounters occurring within Black and Japanese history.”