Current Events > There's a Wild Scandal Going On with Historian Who Wrote Book About Yasuke

(+) Yeah! (+)

I like how everyone forgets about the Japanese female ninja protagonist. People acting like you're only playing as Yasuke lol

Ivynn posted...

I like how everyone forgets about the Japanese female ninja protagonist. People acting like you're only playing as Yasuke lol

I like how people think this is about Yasuke being black and not the lies about slavery pushed by thomas lockely the white law professor who took a few lines of text and turned it into a 400 page book, used wikipedia to make him self look like the defacto expert.

From what I understand this book pushes the narrative that in the 1500s white people were somehow trying to stop slavery in japan. We all know that is laughable.

again it is sad that grummz has hijacked this topic into about nothing but yasuke. The real problems the people of japan have are being completely ignored. Several posters already hand waved this entire thing because of that sack of shit.

So this guy wrote a novel and then used it as a source for the wikipedia article he wrote? Lol I gotta admit, the audacity is impressive.

Ivynn posted...

I like how everyone forgets about the Japanese female ninja protagonist. People acting like you're only playing as Yasuke lol

she is an amazing ninja she hides so well people forget she exist

Solar_Crimson posted...

Yasuke existed, but it sounds like Lockley heavily embellished some details about him in his book.

Isn't that a crime?

Barber102 posted...

grummz is a fuck head, but so is thomas lockley a white law professor whom fraudulently acted as an expert on the subject, tried to force white slaverly practices on japan in his book and push it as historically accurate. He used wikipedia to make it look like he was the defacto expert.

grummz is a grifter and so is ubisofts expert thomas lockley. It blows that grummz hijacked this shit and the real issue is being buried by identity politics.

this is not about yasukes existence to the japanese whom are upset.

This. Couldn't summarize it better. Lockley made up a bunch of shit then tried to change the wiki to make it seem like what he says was true. Nothing of what he said was fact. Its just people were fact checking him and realized that he was talking out of his ass to spread a racist agenda against the Japanese and tried to make it historical fact. Worse off is instead of being the better person and owning up to his bull, he threw ubisoft under the bus like a coward. Safe to say his career is over. What a horrible person.

I have a cousin in Japan and from what he's telling me that a lot of the Japanese concern is the way Ubisoft marketed the game, as an accurate historical piece of Japanese culture when many Japanese are tearing apart a lot of things the game gets wrong like how the the characters are planting rice while cherry blossoms are in full bloom, which is the wrong season to do so.

I wanted to make sure this wasn't anti-sjw westerners just posing as Japanese people who are making this complaint, but there's two good videos about this from Japanese people themselves who have no history of making anti-sjw content or anything political in general. They both say about the same thing, this game is not historically accurate and marketing shouldn't be advertising it that way.

https://youtu.be/JZ5_gjUWfTE?si=R0bqGDV22KqHdqjJ

https://youtu.be/FnYyYDpC00Y?si=QBlk6usn1oJYeYlu

This really looks like a case of bad PR from the Ubisoft team in general.

Prestoff posted...

They both say about the same thing, this game is not historically accurate and marketing shouldn't be advertising it that way.

Not that the Japanese don't have a right to be upset about an inaccurate or insufficient portrayal of their culture, especially if the game ends up insinuating that Japan inspired American slavery, but is the marketing any different from previous entries? Because despite being based on historical events and featuring historical figures none of the games are accurate. Like, at all. I could understand the outrage a little better if Ubisoft went into meticulous detail for every other entry up til now but that hasn't been the case. Is the tipping point really that there's a shrine gate in front of a village, or that the seasons wrong, or the floor mats and doors are wrong?

Barber102 posted...

I like how people think this is about Yasuke being black and not the lies about slavery pushed by thomas lockely the white law professor who took a few lines of text and turned it into a 400 page book, used wikipedia to make him self look like the defacto expert.

Because these same people have literally been complaining about Yasuke. But you can't say anything mean to all grummz around here.

Prestoff posted...

They both say about the same thing, this game is not historically accurate and marketing shouldn't be advertising it that way.

In one of these games you fist fight the Pope. No one said shit about that. But now there is an issue.

cjsdowg posted...

In one of these games you fist fight the Pope. No one said shit about that. But now there is an issue.

Well yeah but at least in that game the Pope was a person who actually was the Pope irl

Board_hunter567 posted...

Not that the Japanese don't have a right to be upset about an inaccurate or insufficient portrayal of their culture, especially if the game ends up insinuating that Japan inspired American slavery, but is the marketing any different from previous entries? Because despite being based on historical events and featuring historical figures none of the games are accurate. Like, at all. I could understand the outrage a little better if Ubisoft went into meticulous detail for every other entry up til now but that hasn't been the case. Is the tipping point really that there's a shrine gate in front of a village, or that the seasons wrong, or the floor mats and doors are wrong?

Apparently there's a lot they got alot more details wrong (like the hilt on Yasuke's sword), but yeah I'm the wrong person for this because I barely know anything about the series in general. I'm just personally seeing that it does look like Japanese are getting mad primarily at Ubisoft, not necessarily the devs themselves. With that said, a lot of Japanese players love Yasuke as a character, he's been getting a lot more prevalence in Japanese media in general.

cjsdowg posted...

Because these same people have literally been complaining about Yasuke. But you can't say anything mean to all grummz around here.

I called him a fuck head what are you talking about? Stop being apart of the problem and ignoring the complaints from japanese. Why does it not matter how they feel when a game is marketed as historically accurate and it isnt?

Maybe you should start blaming the Japanese for slavery instead of white people then since you think thomas lockleys lies are okay.

Humble_Novice posted...

https://twitter.com/dainihon35/status/1813394523076329597
https://twitter.com/dino_swift/status/1812652526409576525
https://twitter.com/koryaponn/status/1812879118217994389
https://twitter.com/Matthew08856346/status/1812205084966613182
https://twitter.com/Min_Maximi/status/1811812090480591062
https://twitter.com/NotManjiRSlime/status/1813470321992945736
https://twitter.com/Sorel_C/status/1813502024811704716
https://twitter.com/TarYosh_J/status/1813157759711649943
https://twitter.com/ueyamakzk/status/1812020653064880567

Were retweeting Grummz now?

McMarbles posted...

Were retweeting Grummz now?

No, only the user that's been responding to them.

ITT a bunch of racists mad because they found out that the Japanese helped start the slave trade.

Also the "no records" point. Lets trust the country that denies the rape of nanking.

memukus9684 posted...

ITT a bunch of racists mad because they found out that the Japanese helped start the slave trade.

Also the "no records" point. Lets trust the country that denies the rape of nanking.

Thats nowhere near what the issue is about lol

Ragtag28 posted...

Thats nowhere near what the issue is about lol

Ya, nobody's fishing for excuses to be racists over a fictional game. Sure.

MeltraT posted...

It is a different argument.

No matter how many people vandalized the Wikipedia page after the Assassins Creed trailer claiming "Yasuke was just a slave", it doesn't change the work of Lockley years before that.

https://note.com/just_eel601/n/n34331acc074f

Oh, I'm aware. It's just this whole shit opened up more than people expected is what happened here.

It shows there's an ass load of horrible people around. And I reiterate, it happened all because people didn't want to acknowledge that a black samurai existed.

Prestoff posted...

Apparently there's a lot they got alot more details wrong (like the hilt on Yasuke's sword), but yeah I'm the wrong person for this because I barely know anything about the series in general. I'm just personally seeing that it does look like Japanese are getting mad primarily at Ubisoft, not necessarily the devs themselves. With that said, a lot of Japanese players love Yasuke as a character, he's been getting a lot more prevalence in Japanese media in general.

I don't know if AC is just one of those series that has never had popularity in Japan or what, but in the 15 years and 15 or so games it's been going, it's never pretended to be historically accurate. It pulls characters from history and places them in a generally correct time period and place, but it casts them all as characters in a shadow illuminati war over artifacts from an ancient aliens type civilization taking place over millennia and has been about that since the very first game. I suppose the marketing of that original title probably would have mentioned it being historically "accurate," but that was because they were trying to hide the sci-fi twist, and most of what I remember being hyped at the time was the revolutionary parkour tech they were showing off.

So outside of the first title, they've never tried to market the series as being historically accurate. About the only time they do is when some historian or something plays the game and mentions that the architecture or details of a city are really accurate, but that's about it.

Ivynn posted...

I like how everyone forgets about the Japanese female ninja protagonist. People acting like you're only playing as Yasuke lol

It's pretty easy to tell why people forget and only focus on Yasuke.

People being so triggered about a black character being in a video game that they begin furiously studying multiple accounts of real history is one of the most mind-blowing concepts I've ever encountered.

Barber102 posted...

I called him a fuck head what are you talking about? Stop being apart of the problem and ignoring the complaints from japanese. Why does it not matter how they feel when a game is marketed as historically accurate and it isnt?

Maybe you should start blaming the Japanese for slavery instead of white people then since you think thomas lockleys lies are okay.

There have been tons of videos of Japanese people saying the opposite i guess we don't care about them

codey posted...

So outside of the first title, they've never tried to market the series as being historically accurate. About the only time they do is when some historian or something plays the game and mentions that the architecture or details of a city are really accurate, but that's about it.

this i don't know why the japaness fanbase thinks AC is fully accurate when the storyline is just as out there as a typical sengoku anime is like the series has aliens in it and it's a video game to boot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GxrDR1tQUY
i don't know why people who can enjoy this nitpick this series to hell like just see how it is and enjoy the game

Barber102 posted...

I called him a fuck head what are you talking about? Stop being apart of the problem and ignoring the complaints from japanese. Why does it not matter how they feel when a game is marketed as historically accurate and it isnt?

Maybe you should start blaming the Japanese for slavery instead of white people then since you think thomas lockleys lies are okay.

By "Japanese" do you mean "white guys pretending to be Japanese using Google Translate?"

So have anything here complaining about. Complained about the historical changes in these games?

This is reminding me of the 'expert' that Paramount hired to advise them about Native Meso-American practices for Chakotay in Star Trek: Voyager, only for it later to be found the guy was totally and completely full of shit and had made up basically everything he wrote about.

Barber102 posted...

remove your head from your ass and read the topic next time.

when the first Twitter post is from Grummz you cant fault people for jumping to certain conclusions.

Pikachuchupika posted...

lol they sure did

no they didnt. They are just making a video game. They did not force anyone to act the way they do over it.

Admittedly I fell for it and believed it to be a true story, because when I first googled it it shared teh same story over and over again, the first black Samurai, even showing a scultpure made of him.

But I also feel like since most people have been told the story it should be forgiven and just accepted because it raised the spirits of a lot of young black boys who idolize Japanese culture, don't let something silly take that away from them

Ajiri posted...

Admittedly I fell for it and believed it to be a true story, because when I first googled it it shared teh same story over and over again, the first black Samurai, even showing a scultpure made of him.

But I also feel like since most people have been told the story it should be forgiven and just accepted because it raised the spirits of a lot of young black boys who idolize Japanese culture, don't let something silly take that away from them

Yasuke did exist. The issue is that a lot of stories about him turned out to be embellished. Real historical sources only have a few mentions at best and almost no details.

It's funny how this is all coming out because of the AC game. It's like, if it never happened, we'd all continue on with embellished stuff. It's like Lockley can say "I would've gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you racist gamers who didn't want to play a black samurai!" >_>

I might actually buy a Ubishit game now

Ivynn posted...

Yasuke did exist. The issue is that a lot of stories about him turned out to be embellished. Real historical sources only have a few mentions at best and almost no details.

It's funny how this is all coming out because of the AC game. It's like, if it never happened, we'd all continue on with embellished stuff. It's like Lockley can say "I would've gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you racist gamers who didn't want to play a black samurai!" >_>

And that's literally why I've been saying what I said earlier. Like, I seriously don't understand what the deal is with these people is. Like many other historical figures, there are myths and legends surrounding them, I don't see why Yasuke would be some sort of stunning exception to this.

And people will continue to do it like so many other figures in history. This whole thing is a non issue.

Ajiri posted...

Admittedly I fell for it and believed it to be a true story, because when I first googled it it shared teh same story over and over again, the first black Samurai, even showing a scultpure made of him.

But I also feel like since most people have been told the story it should be forgiven and just accepted because it raised the spirits of a lot of young black boys who idolize Japanese culture, don't let something silly take that away from them

I don't really have a horse in this AC race, but I don't know that "we should intentionally fabricate history so that young boys have someone to look up to in other cultures" (when there are still SO MANY untold stories in other cultures) is a good angle to take on all this. "Just forgive and accept" also gets a bit problematic when we're talking about injecting pro-slavery views into a culture that didn't have them. Like... "Sorry, you have a history of slavery now because a young boy on the other side of the world looks up to a fictionalized version of someone who existed and looked like him" is an unbelievably shitty thing to push on a people.

ToteAll posted...

Is the female ninja inaccurate?

Female ninja have some documentation of existing, but not of having engaged in combat (ninja were primarily spies and saboteurs). So definitely less accurate than Yasuke. Ninja in general are very detached from their actual history though.

Can someone give me a bullet point so I don't have to read a bunch of disjointed tweets, starting out with a garbage rightwing piece of shit who only cares about this because he doesn't like black people?

And can that explanation include why people are acting like Thomas Lockley is the only source on Yasuke history?

DodogamaRayBrst posted...

Can someone give me a bullet point so I don't have to read a bunch of disjointed tweets, starting out with a garbage rightwing piece of shit who only cares about this because he doesn't like black people?

And can that explanation include why people are acting like Thomas Lockley is the only source on Yasuke history?

Sure. If I understand it correctly: Thomas Lockley wrote a book on Yasuke and made a bunch of shit up. He then updated wikipedia and used his book as a source to get the changes approved. He then further updated the wikipedia when he would go on TV to talk about it with people who believed his story because it agreed with wikipedia. So he invented a history, used his own made up stories to justify updating other sources, and created a self-reinforcing feedback loop of "evidence" that it was all true. People are acting like he's the only source because when you remove everything he made up, what's left is basically "Yasuke existed, was a retainer for Nobunaga, and vanished one day" with little else to go on.

I wouldn't trust Grummz or a piece of shit with a literal swastika on their X profile name if I were you.

What sort of things did Lockley claim was known about Yasuke? Because my understand was that
s0nicfan posted...

"Yasuke existed, was a retainer for Nobunaga, and vanished one day"

was basically the only thing known about him.

I think the only other thing I heard is that after Nobunaga died, Yasuke joined the army of Nobunaga's brother. Was that a Lockley invention?

Edit: Also something about Nobunaga trying to give Yasuke a bath to make his skin colour "normal".

Is there any article or youtube video that goes through Lockley's sourcing methodically to see if he was making shit up rather than ragebait videos and tweets?

epik_fail1 posted...

Assassins creed is borderline a jrpg at time with Pope casting magic. Who cares about historical accuracy?

Look, George Washington trying to take over the world with a magic apple is one thing, but black people in Japan is just too hard to believe.

/s because we're at the point where I have to make it clear.

DodogamaRayBrst posted...

What sort of things did Lockley claim was known about Yasuke? Because my understand was that

was basically the only thing known about him.

I think the only other thing I heard is that after Nobunaga died, Yasuke joined the army of Nobunaga's brother. Was that a Lockley invention?

Edit: Also something about Nobunaga trying to give Yasuke a bath to make his skin colour "normal".

Is there any article or youtube video that goes through Lockley's sourcing methodically to see if he was making shit up rather than ragebait videos and tweets?

You can find plenty of point by point criticisms online, but the ones that I found weren't tied back to a professor or someone with sufficient academic knowledge. Stuff like this:
https://japanese-with-naoto.com/2024/05/29/disappointment-in-thomas-lockley/

One of the more common threads I see is that he took a very loose interpretation of some things in his story. For example, this is what he himself had to say in a Time interview around why he calls him a samurai:
https://time.com/6039381/yasuke-black-samurai-true-story/

Lockley also explained that in Yasukes time, the idea of a samurai was a very fluid concept. You dont have to possess any particular killing skills to be a samurai, the author said. Anybody who took up weapons on behalf of a lord could technically call themself a samurai, or could be called a samurai.

So basically, yasuke carried nobunaga's sword, therefore he was a samurai. Apparently there are a lot of logical leaps like this.

Or here, where he points out that there's no record of yasuke beheading nobunaga, but since that's what tradition would dictate he just wrote that that's what happened:

A kaishakunin, usually a friend, would then cut off the head. Lockley said its traditionally held that Mori Ranmaru, an attendant to Nobunaga who was considered to be the feudal lords lover, acted as his kaishakunin.

Yasuke was in the temple with Nobunaga when he performed seppuku. Theres no record, but tradition holds it that [Yasuke] was the one who took Nobunagas head to save it from the enemy, Lockley said. If Akechi, the enemy, had gotten the head and hed been able to hold up the head, he would have had a powerful symbol of legitimacy. Lockley explained that an act like that would have given Akechi credibility as a ruler. After the attack on Nobunaga, Akechi did not get much support and was soon defeated in battle. Yasuke, therefore, by escaping with the head, could have been seen and has been seen as changing Japanese history, Lockley said.

s0nicfan posted...

Or here, where he points out that there's no record of yasuke beheading nobunaga, but since that's what tradition would dictate he just wrote that that's what happened:

That's the article I was talking about earlier, and is probably the biggest red flag here, because the question "what happened to Nobunaga's corpse, and why wasn't it found?" is something that multiple historians tried to answer, but simply could not come to any sure conclusion.

The "safest" way out would be to burn the body/head until it was impossible to identify him. It's known that there was a fire with corpses, but it isn't even confirmed who burned the hall down in the first place.

Of course it is possible that a "trusted aid" would take the head away or bury it somewhere near, but there was no lack of trusted aids at Honno-Ji either (even if he got betrayed by another one).

If he actually wrote that Yasuke was the one who concluded Nobunaga's seppuku I'm shocked that wasn't caught out earlier because while I'm by no means an expert, I've read a fuckbucket of stuff about Nobunaga, including academic texts and I've never heard that before. My impression was always that there was not enough source material on Yasuke to make much of any definitive claims about him, much less something that significant. Considering how quick wikipedia editors are to smell bullshit, I can't believe that didn't raise an eyebrow.

While this might be shady, at the end of the day I don't think anyone cares for any reason other than that there's a black dude in the new samurai game.