The 'Yasuke' Disaster - Ubisoft's Nightmare

"Yasuke" (the subject of Ubisofts latest Assassins Creed: Shadows game, has become the subject of controversy after Historian Thomas Lockleys work was called into question over the authenticity of portraying Japans "First African Samurai" as a Legendary Hero.

With the Japanese Government now involved, and a tapestry of shady circumstances on display, the situation is best described as a public relations disaster... for a game franchise that is now at the center of a debate regarding cultural appropriation, and invasion.

#yasuke #assassinscreed #ubisoft

[UpperEchelon]

Ways to support the channel/special deals.

[GenesisAUT]

This whole situation is the complete opposite of Ghost of Tsushima, where the creators were made ambassadors of Tsushima and invited to the island.

[Arcademan]

You left out the reason why the hip-hop soundtrack for Yasuke was ridiculed: hes from Africa, *NOT* African American and these geniuses looked at him and went "well hes black so obviously we need a hip hop track!", he's the only character with a song like that in the game

[arn]

Imagine getting your ass exposed as a fraud by an Ubisoft game.

[MsEldorado]

Another important thing to note is that Thomas Lockley wrote in his book that "owning black slaves was a trend among daimyo (warlords) in feudal Japan" and even implied that Portugal was actually against it at the time. Never seen a more outrageous, baseless historical lie in my whole life.

[projectbrs]

"My source is I made it the fuck up"

[Ceiling_Gato]

A former Ubisoft employee leaked the original concept for Japanese AC game, in which you would play as a Japanese shinto monk turned ninja-assassin uncovering Jesuit conspiracy. It sounded much better than whatever this is.

[CrownHetman]

Outside of Yasuke, there is one thing people keep missing when comparing Shadows to Ghost of Tsusima. Shadows goes to the cliche Sengoku period, while Ghost takes place a few hundred years earlier, when the enemy is an outsider, Mongol Invasion. And your fighting for, essentially your homeland. Not to mention Ghost was made with utmost respect and knowledge, unlike Shadows.

[octorokreviews]

I know I make multi-hour critiques about Zelda games and anime, but IRL I'm a historian myself and so I want to give my two cents on this situation:

Thomas Lockley is honestly a symptom of the larger problem with most historians in the modern day. My time at University was honestly depressing, because I quickly came to realize that the majority of my professors were more interested in weaving narratives then they were about actually relating historical facts to the common man. I remember one book I read during my undergraduate years that irked me in particular; it claimed to be a historical telling of Native American life in northern California during the Gold Rush, but it made so many outlandish claims throughout its entirety without any substantial primary or even reputable secondary sources to back them up. The author's bibliography almost seemed to be deliberately written in such a way so as to make it impossible to fact check her sources. I did anyway, and found that she pulled most of her 'facts' out of thin air. This was an award-winning book, being taught at a UC... and it was completely unsubstantiated by real facts or sources.

Soon enough, I found that writing research papers which weaved social-positive narratives into the history awarded me with better grades than presenting actually useful research. I became so jaded, that I even wrote an entire piece about the historical diversity of our local city which completely contradicted the actual data I had on hand - and I got an A+ for it. Why? Because I weaved a narrative which championed historical diversity in a city that, frankly, was ethnically homogenous until the 1970's - facts be damned. In no way do I wish to disparage the intentions behind such narratives; it's good that people care about the plights of the little peoples of the world (as my favorite Professor would always say), and having Historians focus on telling those stories isn't by any means evil. But the modern University system is dominated by historians who have no qualm about twisting real facts if it means supporting their own socio-political cause.

So look at it from Lockley's point of view: you exist in a world where fact-based historians are labelled as "Imperialists" (real terminology one of my professors used, by the by), and where the only way to actually gain some academic recognition (at least in the west) is by presenting a topical story with a social-positive message. You're studying history in one of the most ethnically homogenous nations on the planet (Japan), so your options are limited. But one night, as you're pouring over a couple primary sources from the Sengoku era... you spot mention of a black man who served Oda Nobunaga as a retainer. No one's ever heard of this guy - and for good reason, as practically nothing was written about him. No one would know if you decided to just... add a couple details - stretch the term "retainer" to automatically mean "Samurai, " throw in a few superfluous fluff pieces, and misrepresent a local's oral history as a reliable source (the oldest trick in the book; Herodotus himself used it all the time). How can anyone fact check you if nobody knows the facts? And to ensure his success: Lockley edits the bare-bones Wikipedia page on Yasuke just months before his first book's release date, completely covering his tracks until some soulless corporation decided to make a game about the guy ten years later.

It's actually genius - if I also had no conscious, I'm sure I could try to pull off a similar trick with Russian history (since that's my area of expertise, and the current War in Ukraine has made that topical enough to sell a few books). Alas - I chose to anonymously publish overly long Zelda reviews during my free time instead.

Good video, man: it was a really level-headed take and you presented the facts respectfully. That's hard to pull off when the subject matter is this topical.

[TheAdarkerglow]

I recall one comment that Ubisoft made. "We knew when we found Yasuke, we'd found *our* Samurai." And it was from that that I knew, they were not inspired by the story of Yasuke, but by his color, a perfect opportunity to inject diversity, and really nothing more than that. But yeah, I was never going to buy it anyway. I hate Ubisoft games.

[gamerkingdom]

You know a AAA gaming company really screwed up when you make a country call out your game! It’s like NETFLIX got sued by EGYPT because of their portrayal of CLEOPATRA.

[kamikaze]

It actually even more horrible. Japanese people are finding out stuff after digging, and one of those was the fact that Lockley's fictional "historic facts" are actually being taught and referenced as facts in Japanese school books for grades 5 or something (I forgot). And his "teachings" aren't even limited to just Yasuke. He has stuff like "The Pillow Book" of Sei Shonagon when the actual title is "Introductory Chapter" (from the Japanese words for Introductory Chapter which is "Makura Kotoba", which can also be translated to "Pillow" and "Word/Language"). Lockley has been using his connections to teach his version of history unto unsuspecting Japanese future generations, while the English version of his writings are portraying a different context and meaning which is blatantly Historical Revisionism and gaslighting using a two-faced manner via language barriers. It is not at all surprising that his defender is an actual Communist Party member in Japan, whose specialization is apparently related to historic revisionism.

[Dreadjaws]

The funniest part of this stupid controversy is defenders going from "Yasuke _was_ a samurai, learn your history!" to "It's historical fiction, not reality" the moment the validity of the claims was put in doubt.

It's the same every time. Nobody cares either way about truth. It's all about owning the opposition. They will move the goalposts at every chance.

[TourFaint]

The thing that was always well researched was the environment. Venice was almost museum worthy. In shadows, we see blooming cherries, green growing rice, and baskets of persimmons on the same screenshot. This is like 3 seasons at once. It's like someone just put anything japanese-y he could think, not caring that one grows in spring and the other in fraking fall. They just didn't care at all.

[ane]

Its kinda funny, in the mid to late 90s we had this phase in american pop-culture where suits would inject hip-hop culture into pretty much EVERYTHING in order to make it cool and appealing to kids, by the early 2000s this had become a cliche and was generally mocked and satirized mercilessly.

Seems its making a comeback now under the guise of "diversity".

[thetaleteller]

When James Clavell wrote Shogun he deliberately used different names to create a fictional parable to historical events while trying to stay cultural accurate. When Ghosts of Tsushima was made, they used fictional character and clans of a true historical event while staying cultural accurate. When Ubisoft created Shadows they declared a fictional samurai to be historical accurate and smashed random stuff together for the cultural part.

[KharaChmiel]

Sakura trees blooming next to farmers planting rice next to persimmon baskets (seasons are very important to the Japanese and these three things do not belong together), bamboo despawning, Yasuke LIFTING A SAMURAI ON HIS SWORD (would dull the blade and is wholly unrealistic), really badly choreographed katana fighting, samurai saying "I am Justice!", when Naoe assassinates the guy from out of the water, his body has to glitch into the correct position for the assassination animation to work, torii gates used as doorways to villages lel (extremely disrespectful), Chinese architecture, wrong Kanji used on promotional materials, buying a sword from One Piece and passing it off as Yasuke's sword at an in-person event, wrong flags in the backgrounds, stealing real world flags from real world reenactment groups, Yasuke having one sword when traditionally, samurai had two, the longer katana and the shorter wakizashi, wearing full samurai armor when in town (easily fixable, just have you hitch your horse upon entering a town, and take off the armor), Naoe openly carrying a sword (this is a no-go as 1. a shinobi and 2. as a woman who is not a onna-musha, i.e. a warrior woman of a clan; again, easily fixable, have you pick up your weapons hitman-style before you infiltrate somewhere and have all of her stuff happen at night), AND the preorder "bonuses" being Chinese in nature and definitively NOT Japanese (no dragons on heraldry in Japan and that horse armor is 100% Chinese).

We don't even need to talk about Yasuke anymore. THESE are the problems with this game.

[mikkelnpetersen]

Assassins Creed should NOT star a historical character, it should star a LOCAL that "works in the background like a shadow".

[boxtears]

It's honestly better that this was all brought to light so spectacularly, otherwise who knows how long this historical revisionism would've continued.

[yaqbulyakkerbat]

So this entire thing was sparked by someones fanfiction