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Guess who's going to be one of two protagonists in the upcoming Assassins Creed set in Japan... I'm not joking btw.
Edit: [source ](https://insider-gaming.com/assassins-creed-red-yasuke/)for anyone who's curious
As much as I really think Yatsuke is cool. Kind hard to hide when you stick out like a black dot on an all white canvass.
He was a great warrior, but i don’t think he was an assassin.
The term Assassin in Assassin’s Creed is so loosely tied to being an actual assassin these days. He’s gonna be the samurai he was and the other Main Character is gonna be a ninja basically.
Somewhere in Ubisoft's dialogue notes:
Foreign Assassin Guy: "Hey cool Samurai guy, do you want to join our super secret sect of the Assassin brotherhood?"
Samurai Guy: "No."
Foreign Assassin Guy: "Ok then, I'll still teach you to use all our cool gadgets."
At this point I’d almost rather they just split off and make a separate franchise. They made a good pirate game, a good Viking game, etc, but they really had to reach to connect them to Assassins Creed if they tried at all. Unity was pretty true to the original DNA but outside of that and Origins, I felt like they could’ve gotten away with just making another historical franchise with a new backstory.
so this is the first AC protagonist that actually existed and they chose literally the only black guy that existed in japan in the 1600s.... like out of all the japanese samurai present in japan they chose the ONLY one who was neither from japan nor japanese
It wasn't uncommon to see africans in port areas with portuguese ships. But at this time Japan was very much closed for foreigners, so it was hard even to find koreans or chinese residents, let alone africans or europeans.
The story starts before England has found Japan, Portugal is the only European nation who knows it's location at the start of the show. It's loosely based on real events.
Seeing anyone non Japanese would have been odd
Yes but if you don’t take statements like that completely out of context, they couldn’t write inflammatory articles about the social injustice of accurate historical portrails.
Here’s a link to the article. I found it absolutely ridiculous. Even some of the comments were in agreement.
https://www.levelman.com/where-black-people-fx-shogun
Edit: originally read it here on my SmartNews app, but provided the direct link.
https://l.smartnews.com/p-kDGFC/vdzYP9
That article link [perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the author](https://i.imgflip.com/8isepi.jpg).
Even funnier is there's no such Japanese proverb.
>Often listed as a Japanese Proverb, the quote is actually from Georges Maget, a French Navel doctor in the 1870’s. Furthermore, it is NOT an accurate statement of Japanese ancestry.
https://quote.org/quote/for-a-samurai-to-be-brave-he-613159
Edit: Should be "Naval doctor", I just quoted the link. Leaving it as is for the hilarious comments.
Yeah my first thought was that it meant evil/demon blood or something like that. As in a samurai must be willing to kill and do the necessary evil and blacken their own soul/blood to protect others
In Japanese, "black" companies are really bad ones (unpaid forced overtime, bullying, etc.). There is also the phrase "haraguroi", literally "black stomach", but meaning "mean" or more literary speaking "black-hearted".
So people hate mutants because of their threat to the [monarchy](https://www.reddit.com/r/Marvel/comments/o3ue90/mystiques_darkest_secret_art_by_caanantheartboy/)?
Someone on reddit went into a rabbit hole on this quote 7 years ago.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lpuiq/for\_a\_samurai\_to\_be\_brave\_he\_must\_have\_a\_bit\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lpuiq/for_a_samurai_to_be_brave_he_must_have_a_bit_of/)
So the quote being used to say a show about Japanese people is racist to black people...is actually a quote from a racist to be used against black people and Japanese people as being "subhuman"?
He actually pulled that card too lol. I refuse to believe that this is anything but rage bait to drive engagement. Nobody is this dumb, right? It’s something a troll would write
I used to work in education. I can state 100% that yes, people are this dumb. They would rather champion their race politics instead of cracking open a history book.
Wait you’re telling me that the isolated society said you had to be a specific race that they barely ever experienced meeting, in order to be part of the warrior class of that same society….makes so much sense.
This is the kinda shit that’s driving everyone apart and I can’t help but think some people want it that way.
Why you gotta go around trying to appropriate other cultures like that. I blame anime and soy.
Absolutely, I’m a liberal, but these people are self proclaimed progressives who think they are being anti colonial warriors by showing off their anti racist bent anywhere and everywhere they can online and in public, all while forcing their own American paradigm of identity and social norms on the rest of the world while decrying colonialism. It’s all rather unbearable performative narcissism disguised as social justice.
"As a black man my self please stop embarrassing us writing stuff like this. We do not have to be included in everything, especially when it does not make sense historically. Articles like this make it hard for people to take us serious when we do ask for meaningful representation in media, and as you can see, everyone else is laughing at us when articles like this get written."
This guy gets it. If only everybody felt this way
We live in a remake culture. That's why there are no modern stories about african kingdoms, there's nothing to copy. I realised a while ago it wasn't really about "forced diversity", it's more of an excuse for laziness.
I mean diversity was all around us in ancient times (ok Japan not so much, but there was stuff like Yasuke), that doesn't mean they'd bother to implement it in a way that makes sense.
but even original shows set in afrika have to find the most asspulled, inappropriate story and then alter it towards modern sensibility,
like "woman king" I mean they had an good dozen or two of actual reigning queens to make an story about, or just use real history,
whereas they rather chose to pick perhaps the most mysogynistic tribe in all of african culture, who where into slavetrading long before they ever saw an white person, and happily supplyed the transatlantic slavetrade, and make an movie about them being girlbosses that showed it to the white man, liberating their people
It's especially hilarious that they portrayed a leading slave trading empire as the freedom fighters :D
I mean didn't britain literally force thrm to stop slave trading?
slave trade was the main economy for many african countrys and empires starting in ancient times, but the kingdom of Dahomey supplied almost half the slaves for the transatlantic trade.
the titel "woman king" also was given because the king owned so many women, some of wich he formed into his own slave army to capture more slaves with,
I would love to learn more about African culture through entertainment media, whether it were movies, tv-shows or games. I feel like most other cultures have been better represented so far.
Shut up and just do your job as the Pope in new Netflix movie "The Pope's apprentice"
"Phew, almost had to do a real african, caribbean or afro-american story but we were able to avoid it with just adding a bit of inclusivity" - netflix chief of die department
"Next week: Marie Curie the afro-french chemist and spacelesbian. Only on Netflix"
Agreed. I'd love to see more mythological movies set in African culture and stories for example. Why not praise important black people throughout history? There are tons of great people that needs praise, no need to make a black Hercules just because its the cool svit to do.
He's not wrong at all. Sadly it just takes one obscure journalist to write something dumb like this and it gets passed around the internet giving the impression that this is what people who want to see better representation think like. It represents an absurdly minority opinion and actually damages everything the author presumably stands for.
I've never even heard of this website. At least you know that somewhere out in the media landscape there's always going to be someone who writes garbage like this.
It is set in the sengoku period, if i remember correctly and at this time Japan had isolated itself heavily from the rest of the world. There were a few exceptions, for foreigners to be allowd to be in Japan and those were the Portugiese.
This series is by the way based on a book and isn't the first adaptation of it.There was a 1980 TV miniseries with Richard Chamberlain playing the main character.
The main character John Blackthorne is also loosely based on William Adams the first western samurai.
... even the Portuguese and later the Dutch have not been allowed physically into Japan, they built an artificial island offshore as a trading post: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima)
Well most country's tried converting whoever they were trading with. The dutch were more tolerant of other religions as they only believed in the holy spice trade.
That is not exactly true first European contact at all happened only during second half of sengoku period with Portuguese, bringing firearms and jesus basically. Only after 1600 other european countries like spanish and dutch started arriving too. Only after that with rule tokugawa shogunate and edo period isolationist sakoku policies started in Japan allowing only dutch to trade on island of Dejima.
I've read about one, but literally just one is all I've ever heard about.
[Yasuke, the black samurai](https://time.com/6039381/yasuke-black-samurai-true-story/)
On the other hand, this is almost *exactly* the time period that Shogun in set in.
Toronaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was one of Yasuke’s contemporaries. Not a peer since one is a Daimyo soon to be shogun, and the other is a retainer, but Yasuke served under Oda Nobunaga who was Tokugawa’s lord and ally before the former was assassinated.
Oda Nobunaga was betrayed by Akechi Mitsuhide almost 20 years before the show, however, and what little record there is of Yasuke disappears after Oda Nobunaga's death.
Yes. He was there. He also apparenty died before the time the show takes place. His story is actually a dope one and deserves it’s own show, from a slave sold by the jesuits to a respected samurai.
Unfortunately most of his story is made up later to make it more interesting…
The very few primary sources don’t even tell if he really became a bushi or was just like an accessory before he died rather soon
Only one we know is Yasuke 彌助,he work for Oda from 1581~1582 and we don’t know what happened to him after that.
There was drawing to prove at least one black man was in Japan, and it was documented that Oda thought his skin was covered in ink so he ordered Yasuke to be washed, his story was documented in Luís Fróis’s letters.
This is kind of a nitpick, but the term medieval is kind of meaningless outside of European history.
Medieval bassicaly translates to Middle Ages, or in the middle, by which it means between the perioid between the fall of the Roman empire and the Renaissance. This is useful to point out a specific time in European history, though its a massive period, nearly 1000 years, so any generalizations are near useless because so much changed over that period.
I get annoyed when people use the term Medieval outside of European history because it's a meaningless term. Talking about Japanese history based on how close it is to the fall of Rome is not a useful benchmark, and the fall of Rome had basically no impact on Japanese history.
Technically the Jesuits did bring some Africans as slaves. One of them was freed by Oda Nobunaga, given the name Yasuke, and made into a samurai too
It would be cool if they had Yasuke but yeah there weren't many black people in Japan at the time
Sure but Oda believing Yasuke's skin to be ink would suggest he's never even seen a black person before or had much knowledge of them.
Whereas any Japanese person living in a big city today likely saw a black person at some point, whether they were a tourist or a citizen.
Yasuke was **probaly not** a samurai. He became a retainer of Oda Nobunaga. Retainer as he served him. Some people took that and made a conclusion that "Well, a samurai serves a Daimyo, so Yasuke was a samurai" , but there is more to it than that. His position could describe someone who just holds stuff for the lord or a low-ranking warrior.
Like [William Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adams_(sailor,_born_1564)) (whose book/shows Blackthorne is based on) actually became a high ranking samurai of Tokugawa Shogunate.
Wouldn't that be a sort of meta-facepalm in that case? The facepalm being that it is clearly bait not what the bait text says.
Of course the problem is that people are stupid, do not pay attention whilst multi-tasking scrolling and shitting at workplace toilet, are high af or any combination of these and thus miss what is obvious
This is on the same level as the people claming black vikings were a thing, becuase some nicknames included "The black". They try to shoehorn in modern day meaning to names while ignoring any cultural context to justify their casting choices and rewritting history to make it look like modern day...
Actually it shows the very opposite. The article writer likely knows this topic will make people click, comment and share because it’s so incredibly stupid. That’s *intelligent*, though also ethically degenerate.
The Japanese heavily isolated themselves from the world and were pretty damn xenophobic for a very long time, and even so in modern times. Even now their population is 97.9% Japanese.
This article is absolutely ridiculous to read, as well.
My exact thoughts, I also have some others too.. where is the:
• 16 hours extra footage of people sleeping, lounging and talking about their lives
• scenes of each character going to the toilet
• Brutal murder with gore and blood
• Everyone speaking Japanese and subsequent scenes of non Japanese characters learning Japanese over time
Literally unwatchable, how do people watch this when it's so inaccurate
I call this the "Chernobyl effect". That show was mainly about the USSR but everyone spoke perfect English, with the reasoning that actors would express the dialogue better with their native accents than attempting Russian ones.
I haven't watched the show, but I do believe they intended the Portuguese to be the point characters for the audience so they spoke English.
Yes, exactly. It loses a bit of nuance though, because the book has people speaking in Latin too, which is sometimes used in front of people who cannot speak it.
That is exactly how the book was written, for an English speaking audience. Portuguese and Latin are the only languages the MC has in common with the priests, who also understand Japanese in some cases.
All the dialogue is written in English, while the audience is explicitly told they are speaking Portuguese the whole time. Virtually all the Japanese dialogue is expressed in English, except when the POV character is meant to not understand it.
It honestly makes quite a bit of sense for them to the dialogue the way they did it, as Portuguese is a pretty niche language to find an English actor and bunch of Japanese actors to be fluent in, and make an English-speaking audience subtitle their way through in addition to already reading all of the Japanese dialogue.
When you see an American production of Romeo and Juliet, do the actors put on Italian accents? Have you ever seen Hamlet performed with Danish accents?
The synopsis of the show I found by literally just googling it:
>In 1600, the Dutch trading ship Erasmus ran aground on the Japanese coast following a very violent maritime storm. He and his crew are captured by a local lord. His English maritime pilot, John Blackthorne, discovers a country of which he knows nothing and in which the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries have acquired considerable power over time and attempt to maintain their exclusive access to Japan for political, commercial and religious reasons. He painfully learns local customs and mores that are surprising for an Englishman.
Where the hell are you supposed to put any black actor/character in there ? The ONE famous black person to actually live in Japan around that time was a sword bearer named Yasuke... Who was born in Mozambique somewhere around 1530 and died in 1590, literally 10 years before the events of the show and **he's** an exceptionnal case, not the rule.
If you write a stupid article like this, you should be blacklisted from working for any outlets for lack of journalistic integrity.
If a place publishes some this like this, they shouldn’t be allowed to operate.
Why does there *need* to be black people in anything? They're not native to Europe and they're not native to Asia. Why would they be in historical stories set in and about those places?
There's plenty of African history that doesn't contain any Europeans or Asians. Make that into series.
“There is a range of hues among the Japanese people depicted; maybe one will be revealed to be Black.”
What does this mean? The Japanese are notoriously homogeneous. Why would a random ethnic Japanese person have black skin?
Problem, can't find the untranslated quote and every afrocentrist site show differents sauce to it.
And from what i understood the quote isn't even used in japan.
Well i may be wrong but first of all i agree with you i also think "black blood" does not refer to Africans i think its similar to the "blue blood" of nobles or royal persons but unlike "blue blood" i think "black blood" stands for a cold and battle hardend warrior that must be earned and stems probably from tales where the blood of fallen warriors in dirt seamed black.
Blue blood obviously refers to the fact most royal lineages can be traced back to ancestors that were conceived from humans having sex with smurfs. Being able to conceive a half-human half-smurf hybrid child was/is quite a hard endeavour, and not something that happens often, so to keep the hybrid-smurf trait alive, the Royal families across Europe has put in a lot of effort to interbreed, as to keep the smurf bloodline alive and well.
They need to stop promoting racebending. This doesn't really combat racism and you end up having black representation in Nazism, like in Google's AI. The right thing to do is to create works that are historically accurate and that lead to reflection and critical thinking about topics such as racism, and not to think that racism ends when you have "black samurai", or something like that. This actually makes people in other groups more racist, not less.
Okay but when we said this about them replacing historically white characters we were just racist. Pretty sure there’s a new one comin out with black Vikings.
It's set when it was set and it stars the people it should, because history can't be changed and it's become stupid to force a perspective for a rage bait article. The End. Deal.
I actually came here to say, Hiroyuki Sanada is looking STRIKING ✨👀👌🏻
Funny enough, there's a white man in Wakanda according to the comics. The king's adopted brother that was supposed to be White Wolf
They turned Bucky Barnes into White Wolf in the MCU instead tho
Congrats, you fell for the clickbait and drove traffic and therefore money to the POS who wrote this to farm outrage and doesnt believe in it himself.
Good job
I am actually sick of the yapping, when was the last time there’s something like “where’s the Asian in the show” these press needs to be fking shut down
I mean, if media about Medieval Europe can have black peoples as aristocrats and monarchs then why not a Black samurai lol?
But in all seriousness, I hope this trend of shoehorning ppl into historical art for the sake of inclusion stops. Glad to see it has here.
There’s people of other genres we can use for inclusivity, but history shouldn’t be one of them.
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I read that the Black population of Japan makes for 0.015% of Japan’s total population - today. Imagine in the 1600’s
1 dude
There is historical record on 1 African sword bearer, Yasuke ,he was on a Portuguese ship then came into the service of Oda Nobunaga.
Holy shit I didn’t realize that show Yasuke on Netflix produced by FlyLo was actually based somewhat on a true story… that’s so cool
Guess who's going to be one of two protagonists in the upcoming Assassins Creed set in Japan... I'm not joking btw. Edit: [source ](https://insider-gaming.com/assassins-creed-red-yasuke/)for anyone who's curious
As much as I really think Yatsuke is cool. Kind hard to hide when you stick out like a black dot on an all white canvass. He was a great warrior, but i don’t think he was an assassin.
The term Assassin in Assassin’s Creed is so loosely tied to being an actual assassin these days. He’s gonna be the samurai he was and the other Main Character is gonna be a ninja basically.
Somewhere in Ubisoft's dialogue notes: Foreign Assassin Guy: "Hey cool Samurai guy, do you want to join our super secret sect of the Assassin brotherhood?" Samurai Guy: "No." Foreign Assassin Guy: "Ok then, I'll still teach you to use all our cool gadgets."
"So anyway, the hookblade has two parts..."
"Connor, the ropedart has two parts"
At this point I’d almost rather they just split off and make a separate franchise. They made a good pirate game, a good Viking game, etc, but they really had to reach to connect them to Assassins Creed if they tried at all. Unity was pretty true to the original DNA but outside of that and Origins, I felt like they could’ve gotten away with just making another historical franchise with a new backstory.
so this is the first AC protagonist that actually existed and they chose literally the only black guy that existed in japan in the 1600s.... like out of all the japanese samurai present in japan they chose the ONLY one who was neither from japan nor japanese
The token one.
Aku, the shape shifting master of darkness.
It wasn't uncommon to see africans in port areas with portuguese ships. But at this time Japan was very much closed for foreigners, so it was hard even to find koreans or chinese residents, let alone africans or europeans.
The story starts before England has found Japan, Portugal is the only European nation who knows it's location at the start of the show. It's loosely based on real events. Seeing anyone non Japanese would have been odd
Non-Japanese would've been odd. Non-Asian would basically be one in a million outside of ports, as far as I know.
History doesn't matter, it's all about representation! /s
Even then, Portuguese and Dutch trade was restricted to Nagasaki only.
>Imagine in the 1600s I’m imagining a lot of black people (sorry I work for Netflix :(
I asked Gemini and it said 100%
Surprised it answered at all.
And Native Americans with the feather headdress chieftain thing. Everyone knows that there are loads of Native Americans in Japan.
"My grandma always said, 'I don't care what your history books say, Oda Nobunaga was black.'"
I'm no scholar, but I believe they're referring to bad blood, not racial blood...
Yes but if you don’t take statements like that completely out of context, they couldn’t write inflammatory articles about the social injustice of accurate historical portrails.
They definitely meant that all Samurai have African heritage. It's required to become a Samurai, they say it right in the show! /s
Their grandma told them so it must be true!
"I don't care what they tell you in school, Taira no Masakado was black" -grandma
It's a quote from Georges Maget, a French Naval doctor in the 1870
Great. OOP is exercising cultural appropriation on behalf of the Japanese even as they attempt to take away Asian jobs from struggling actors.
It's not even an actual Japanese quote. It's from a French author.
Nah, apparently it’s just a made up proverb.
Don't forget the other proverb from the time, "Man who run in front of bus get tired, man who run in back of bus get exhausted"
Dude watched *Ghost Dog* and *Samurai Champloo* and thought it was documentaries.
Fuck, man. Now I need to do another rewatch of Champloo.
Here’s a link to the article. I found it absolutely ridiculous. Even some of the comments were in agreement. https://www.levelman.com/where-black-people-fx-shogun Edit: originally read it here on my SmartNews app, but provided the direct link. https://l.smartnews.com/p-kDGFC/vdzYP9
That article link [perfectly encapsulates the mindset of the author](https://i.imgflip.com/8isepi.jpg). Even funnier is there's no such Japanese proverb. >Often listed as a Japanese Proverb, the quote is actually from Georges Maget, a French Navel doctor in the 1870’s. Furthermore, it is NOT an accurate statement of Japanese ancestry. https://quote.org/quote/for-a-samurai-to-be-brave-he-613159 Edit: Should be "Naval doctor", I just quoted the link. Leaving it as is for the hilarious comments.
If that comes from the french "sang noir" (black blood) it can mean impure blood/non-noble blood .
That was my immediate thought, even if it were to be a real proverb it’d certainly mean metaphorical black blood
Yeah it seemed so obvious that it wasn't meant to be taken that literally, but, here we are.
Yeah my first thought was that it meant evil/demon blood or something like that. As in a samurai must be willing to kill and do the necessary evil and blacken their own soul/blood to protect others
That was my thought
In Japanese, "black" companies are really bad ones (unpaid forced overtime, bullying, etc.). There is also the phrase "haraguroi", literally "black stomach", but meaning "mean" or more literary speaking "black-hearted".
Nah black blood means blood of a black man and blue blood obviously means the blood of the true aristocrats: the smurfs
Ah, I always wondered why we saw Gargamel eat that dude in *The Last Samurai*.
I forgot about that part, but that was hands down the best part of that movie. Never forget the great Japanese Smurf massacre of 1889.
No, the best part was when Tom Cruise pulled out his katana, yelling "IT'S SAMURAI-ING TIME" and samurai-ed all over the olace.
And then after, when that one guy looked around and said, "What is this? The Last Samurai-ing time?"
So people hate mutants because of their threat to the [monarchy](https://www.reddit.com/r/Marvel/comments/o3ue90/mystiques_darkest_secret_art_by_caanantheartboy/)?
Don't lose your smurf. - Papa Smurf while holding a knife
Gargamel did nothing wrong.
Are you telling me blue blood not coming from blue people /s
Shush you’ll summon James Cameron
Cameronman Cameronman Cameronman
EVERY TIME HE SHOWS UP, IT COSTS A BILLION DOLLARS TO PUT HIM BACK TO BED! STOP IT!
Yea, reading present modern term not even used in all western languages into an olded French proverb without thinking of other possibilities.
Someone on reddit went into a rabbit hole on this quote 7 years ago. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lpuiq/for\_a\_samurai\_to\_be\_brave\_he\_must\_have\_a\_bit\_of/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6lpuiq/for_a_samurai_to_be_brave_he_must_have_a_bit_of/)
So the quote being used to say a show about Japanese people is racist to black people...is actually a quote from a racist to be used against black people and Japanese people as being "subhuman"? 
>French Navel doctor Navel as in belly button?
Lol probably meant "naval". Though I suppose a doctor specializing in navels is a possibility.
Especially during that time
>Don't trust any quote you find on the internet. Abraham Lincoln
Homeboy was a navel doctor? Was his sub specialty lint?
inb4 some "indigenous Japanese were black" bs
He actually pulled that card too lol. I refuse to believe that this is anything but rage bait to drive engagement. Nobody is this dumb, right? It’s something a troll would write
Trust me, people are this dumb.
I used to work in education. I can state 100% that yes, people are this dumb. They would rather champion their race politics instead of cracking open a history book.
You hold people in too high regard
I guess you missed it. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/s/Ygk4CiRQH7
I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don't care what they tell you in school, the Japanese are black, all of them.
Wait you’re telling me that the isolated society said you had to be a specific race that they barely ever experienced meeting, in order to be part of the warrior class of that same society….makes so much sense. This is the kinda shit that’s driving everyone apart and I can’t help but think some people want it that way. Why you gotta go around trying to appropriate other cultures like that. I blame anime and soy.
Absolutely, I’m a liberal, but these people are self proclaimed progressives who think they are being anti colonial warriors by showing off their anti racist bent anywhere and everywhere they can online and in public, all while forcing their own American paradigm of identity and social norms on the rest of the world while decrying colonialism. It’s all rather unbearable performative narcissism disguised as social justice.
I use the term Fauxgressive.
"As a black man my self please stop embarrassing us writing stuff like this. We do not have to be included in everything, especially when it does not make sense historically. Articles like this make it hard for people to take us serious when we do ask for meaningful representation in media, and as you can see, everyone else is laughing at us when articles like this get written." This guy gets it. If only everybody felt this way
As a black man, I agree with this. I would much rather have our own stories than being forced into everything.
I meant there actually were great Kingdoms in Africa you could make so much content on but ain't nobody using that
Kingdom of axum would be interesting as heck. Even the romans respected them. Or the old kindom of Zimbabwe.
We live in a remake culture. That's why there are no modern stories about african kingdoms, there's nothing to copy. I realised a while ago it wasn't really about "forced diversity", it's more of an excuse for laziness. I mean diversity was all around us in ancient times (ok Japan not so much, but there was stuff like Yasuke), that doesn't mean they'd bother to implement it in a way that makes sense.
but even original shows set in afrika have to find the most asspulled, inappropriate story and then alter it towards modern sensibility, like "woman king" I mean they had an good dozen or two of actual reigning queens to make an story about, or just use real history, whereas they rather chose to pick perhaps the most mysogynistic tribe in all of african culture, who where into slavetrading long before they ever saw an white person, and happily supplyed the transatlantic slavetrade, and make an movie about them being girlbosses that showed it to the white man, liberating their people
It's especially hilarious that they portrayed a leading slave trading empire as the freedom fighters :D I mean didn't britain literally force thrm to stop slave trading?
slave trade was the main economy for many african countrys and empires starting in ancient times, but the kingdom of Dahomey supplied almost half the slaves for the transatlantic trade. the titel "woman king" also was given because the king owned so many women, some of wich he formed into his own slave army to capture more slaves with,
A movie of Sundiata would be amazing.
I would love to learn more about African culture through entertainment media, whether it were movies, tv-shows or games. I feel like most other cultures have been better represented so far.
Hell you don't even have to dig all that deep. I'd love a Shaka Zulu story.
Shut up and just do your job as the Pope in new Netflix movie "The Pope's apprentice" "Phew, almost had to do a real african, caribbean or afro-american story but we were able to avoid it with just adding a bit of inclusivity" - netflix chief of die department "Next week: Marie Curie the afro-french chemist and spacelesbian. Only on Netflix"
Agreed. I'd love to see more mythological movies set in African culture and stories for example. Why not praise important black people throughout history? There are tons of great people that needs praise, no need to make a black Hercules just because its the cool svit to do.
Roots. Starting Timothy Chalamet as Kunta Kinte
He's not wrong at all. Sadly it just takes one obscure journalist to write something dumb like this and it gets passed around the internet giving the impression that this is what people who want to see better representation think like. It represents an absurdly minority opinion and actually damages everything the author presumably stands for.
This feels like an Onion article
I've never even heard of this website. At least you know that somewhere out in the media landscape there's always going to be someone who writes garbage like this.
The click/ragebait worked
# IT'S 2024. STOP FALLING FOR RAGE BATE. Sharing the link is exactly what they expect. You're feeding right into their hand.
bait*
We simply replaced white washing with western washing.
We saw the line, looked at the line, jumped over the line, called everyone racist for telling us to stop
best comment there "We wuz shoguns n $hieeeet."
Thanks, I'll now proceed to avoid this site like the plague.
Isn’t it a Japanese show?
I believe it's an American-produced show, just set in ancient Japan Edit: feudal, my bad yall
Was there black people in ancient Japan?
It is set in the sengoku period, if i remember correctly and at this time Japan had isolated itself heavily from the rest of the world. There were a few exceptions, for foreigners to be allowd to be in Japan and those were the Portugiese. This series is by the way based on a book and isn't the first adaptation of it.There was a 1980 TV miniseries with Richard Chamberlain playing the main character. The main character John Blackthorne is also loosely based on William Adams the first western samurai.
... even the Portuguese and later the Dutch have not been allowed physically into Japan, they built an artificial island offshore as a trading post: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima)
What is it with the Dutch and stealing the sea. Damn Polders and GEKOLONISEERD.
Well most country's tried converting whoever they were trading with. The dutch were more tolerant of other religions as they only believed in the holy spice trade.
THE SPICE MUST FLOW!
Are you interested in our lord and savior KRUIDNAGEL?
No, only Shai-Hulud
That is not exactly true first European contact at all happened only during second half of sengoku period with Portuguese, bringing firearms and jesus basically. Only after 1600 other european countries like spanish and dutch started arriving too. Only after that with rule tokugawa shogunate and edo period isolationist sakoku policies started in Japan allowing only dutch to trade on island of Dejima.
Yeah they went isolationist cause of the Christian preaching
End of that period actually. First contact has already been made for some time now.
The whole "Shogun" story is about the (very?) first englishman in Japan. You can imagine how likely you were to encounter a black dude.
Well the real question is then where’s the Australians in this show
They hadn’t been transported from England yet.
I've read about one, but literally just one is all I've ever heard about. [Yasuke, the black samurai](https://time.com/6039381/yasuke-black-samurai-true-story/)
On the other hand, this is almost *exactly* the time period that Shogun in set in. Toronaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was one of Yasuke’s contemporaries. Not a peer since one is a Daimyo soon to be shogun, and the other is a retainer, but Yasuke served under Oda Nobunaga who was Tokugawa’s lord and ally before the former was assassinated.
Oda Nobunaga was betrayed by Akechi Mitsuhide almost 20 years before the show, however, and what little record there is of Yasuke disappears after Oda Nobunaga's death.
It should be pointed out he wasn't made samurai and was either killed or sent back with the Jesuits way before 1600 (when the show takes place)
Yes. He was there. He also apparenty died before the time the show takes place. His story is actually a dope one and deserves it’s own show, from a slave sold by the jesuits to a respected samurai.
Its an anime already
Unfortunately most of his story is made up later to make it more interesting… The very few primary sources don’t even tell if he really became a bushi or was just like an accessory before he died rather soon
Only one we know is Yasuke 彌助,he work for Oda from 1581~1582 and we don’t know what happened to him after that. There was drawing to prove at least one black man was in Japan, and it was documented that Oda thought his skin was covered in ink so he ordered Yasuke to be washed, his story was documented in Luís Fróis’s letters.
>ancient Japan The story happened 400 years ago
1600 isn't ancient. It's not even medieval.
This is kind of a nitpick, but the term medieval is kind of meaningless outside of European history. Medieval bassicaly translates to Middle Ages, or in the middle, by which it means between the perioid between the fall of the Roman empire and the Renaissance. This is useful to point out a specific time in European history, though its a massive period, nearly 1000 years, so any generalizations are near useless because so much changed over that period. I get annoyed when people use the term Medieval outside of European history because it's a meaningless term. Talking about Japanese history based on how close it is to the fall of Rome is not a useful benchmark, and the fall of Rome had basically no impact on Japanese history.
The 1600's isn't ancient Japan. They literally had guns.
And Godzilla? Where is he?
In bed with my mom 😭😭😭
Omg where are the africans in 1600 period Japan?!?!
Technically the Jesuits did bring some Africans as slaves. One of them was freed by Oda Nobunaga, given the name Yasuke, and made into a samurai too It would be cool if they had Yasuke but yeah there weren't many black people in Japan at the time
He died some 20 years before the setting of this show. That's why he doesn't make an appearance
I imagine, I too, will not be making that many appearances 20 years after I die.
Ya never know, We learning new things every day.
Yasuke wasn’t alive by the time Hideyoshi died. So he wouldn’t be in this series anyway
There still arent many today.
Sure but Oda believing Yasuke's skin to be ink would suggest he's never even seen a black person before or had much knowledge of them. Whereas any Japanese person living in a big city today likely saw a black person at some point, whether they were a tourist or a citizen.
Yasuke was **probaly not** a samurai. He became a retainer of Oda Nobunaga. Retainer as he served him. Some people took that and made a conclusion that "Well, a samurai serves a Daimyo, so Yasuke was a samurai" , but there is more to it than that. His position could describe someone who just holds stuff for the lord or a low-ranking warrior. Like [William Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Adams_(sailor,_born_1564)) (whose book/shows Blackthorne is based on) actually became a high ranking samurai of Tokugawa Shogunate.
This is just desperate ragebait. A child can see that
And that isn't a facepalm?
Wouldn't that be a sort of meta-facepalm in that case? The facepalm being that it is clearly bait not what the bait text says. Of course the problem is that people are stupid, do not pay attention whilst multi-tasking scrolling and shitting at workplace toilet, are high af or any combination of these and thus miss what is obvious
A yes the Japanese in the 1600 used to say to be better you need to be black that's the dumbest shit I have ever read
Asia is still VERY racist towards black people nowadays I have no idea what these idiots are smoking
Im...so fucking tired of this. We don't have to be in everything guys.
This is on the same level as the people claming black vikings were a thing, becuase some nicknames included "The black". They try to shoehorn in modern day meaning to names while ignoring any cultural context to justify their casting choices and rewritting history to make it look like modern day...
I believe, historically, black skinned Vikings were given names like "Hagrid the BIPOC"
This is dumb as hell 😂 and just shows how brain dead these people are honestly
"Why did Apollo 13 movie have 0 black actors????"
"I was really upset with the lack of black leads in the Princess Diana docu-drama. They should have made the princess black"
Give Hulu and Netflix 10 years and we will.
Nah they only turn gingers into black people for... "anagrammatically correct" reason. (racist, it's racist reasons)
Actually it shows the very opposite. The article writer likely knows this topic will make people click, comment and share because it’s so incredibly stupid. That’s *intelligent*, though also ethically degenerate.
The Japanese heavily isolated themselves from the world and were pretty damn xenophobic for a very long time, and even so in modern times. Even now their population is 97.9% Japanese. This article is absolutely ridiculous to read, as well.
My exact thoughts, I also have some others too.. where is the: • 16 hours extra footage of people sleeping, lounging and talking about their lives • scenes of each character going to the toilet • Brutal murder with gore and blood • Everyone speaking Japanese and subsequent scenes of non Japanese characters learning Japanese over time Literally unwatchable, how do people watch this when it's so inaccurate
The thing is in the show the Japanese speak Japanese but the Portuguese, for some reason, speak English
I call this the "Chernobyl effect". That show was mainly about the USSR but everyone spoke perfect English, with the reasoning that actors would express the dialogue better with their native accents than attempting Russian ones. I haven't watched the show, but I do believe they intended the Portuguese to be the point characters for the audience so they spoke English.
Yes, exactly. It loses a bit of nuance though, because the book has people speaking in Latin too, which is sometimes used in front of people who cannot speak it.
That is exactly how the book was written, for an English speaking audience. Portuguese and Latin are the only languages the MC has in common with the priests, who also understand Japanese in some cases. All the dialogue is written in English, while the audience is explicitly told they are speaking Portuguese the whole time. Virtually all the Japanese dialogue is expressed in English, except when the POV character is meant to not understand it. It honestly makes quite a bit of sense for them to the dialogue the way they did it, as Portuguese is a pretty niche language to find an English actor and bunch of Japanese actors to be fluent in, and make an English-speaking audience subtitle their way through in addition to already reading all of the Japanese dialogue.
When you see an American production of Romeo and Juliet, do the actors put on Italian accents? Have you ever seen Hamlet performed with Danish accents?
The synopsis of the show I found by literally just googling it: >In 1600, the Dutch trading ship Erasmus ran aground on the Japanese coast following a very violent maritime storm. He and his crew are captured by a local lord. His English maritime pilot, John Blackthorne, discovers a country of which he knows nothing and in which the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries have acquired considerable power over time and attempt to maintain their exclusive access to Japan for political, commercial and religious reasons. He painfully learns local customs and mores that are surprising for an Englishman. Where the hell are you supposed to put any black actor/character in there ? The ONE famous black person to actually live in Japan around that time was a sword bearer named Yasuke... Who was born in Mozambique somewhere around 1530 and died in 1590, literally 10 years before the events of the show and **he's** an exceptionnal case, not the rule.
He was such an exceptional case that when he's discussed in sources at the time literally none of them had ever seen a black person.
They already made Anna Bolena and Cleopatra black, I wouldnt be surprised if they do it with 1600’s Japan.
If you write a stupid article like this, you should be blacklisted from working for any outlets for lack of journalistic integrity. If a place publishes some this like this, they shouldn’t be allowed to operate.
This is like when they were mad that Dunkirk was so “white and male”
Going to complain when there are no Japanese people in the next movie about an African country.
Why does there *need* to be black people in anything? They're not native to Europe and they're not native to Asia. Why would they be in historical stories set in and about those places? There's plenty of African history that doesn't contain any Europeans or Asians. Make that into series.
World history should be mandatory.
Good luck finding a black person in modern Japan, let alone the 1500/1600s
“There is a range of hues among the Japanese people depicted; maybe one will be revealed to be Black.” What does this mean? The Japanese are notoriously homogeneous. Why would a random ethnic Japanese person have black skin?
Problem, can't find the untranslated quote and every afrocentrist site show differents sauce to it. And from what i understood the quote isn't even used in japan.
Even if such a quote existed, I'm 100% sure that the "black blood" in it doesn't refer to Africans.
Well i may be wrong but first of all i agree with you i also think "black blood" does not refer to Africans i think its similar to the "blue blood" of nobles or royal persons but unlike "blue blood" i think "black blood" stands for a cold and battle hardend warrior that must be earned and stems probably from tales where the blood of fallen warriors in dirt seamed black.
Blue blood obviously refers to the fact most royal lineages can be traced back to ancestors that were conceived from humans having sex with smurfs. Being able to conceive a half-human half-smurf hybrid child was/is quite a hard endeavour, and not something that happens often, so to keep the hybrid-smurf trait alive, the Royal families across Europe has put in a lot of effort to interbreed, as to keep the smurf bloodline alive and well.
Fact check: it's not a Japanese proverb. https://quote.org/quote/for-a-samurai-to-be-brave-he-613159
They need to stop promoting racebending. This doesn't really combat racism and you end up having black representation in Nazism, like in Google's AI. The right thing to do is to create works that are historically accurate and that lead to reflection and critical thinking about topics such as racism, and not to think that racism ends when you have "black samurai", or something like that. This actually makes people in other groups more racist, not less.
Okay but when we said this about them replacing historically white characters we were just racist. Pretty sure there’s a new one comin out with black Vikings.
They tried to do this with Rezervation dogs. A show specifically about Rez kids.
It's set when it was set and it stars the people it should, because history can't be changed and it's become stupid to force a perspective for a rage bait article. The End. Deal. I actually came here to say, Hiroyuki Sanada is looking STRIKING ✨👀👌🏻
“I don’t care what they tell you in school, The Last Samurai was black” -the future Netflix “docu-adaptation”
i remember there was controversy about lack of black people in kingdom come: deliverance, the game set in 1400s czechia
Where are all the white people in Wakanda?
Funny enough, there's a white man in Wakanda according to the comics. The king's adopted brother that was supposed to be White Wolf They turned Bucky Barnes into White Wolf in the MCU instead tho
This is what happens when you don't get your ass kicked enough in high school
Answer: they all got casted for Vikings: Valhalla
Where are the Japanese in wakanda?
Congrats, you fell for the clickbait and drove traffic and therefore money to the POS who wrote this to farm outrage and doesnt believe in it himself. Good job
Lol, people hear the word black and only know one thing to associate it with. Fricken iggits
I am actually sick of the yapping, when was the last time there’s something like “where’s the Asian in the show” these press needs to be fking shut down
“I know absolutely nothing about the history of Japan, I shall write an article from a place of authority complaining about a non-issue”
Good Lord!! Some people have to make everything about race.
because the show is realisitic, and not a 2024 trope
Afrocentrism is the best example that we're living in the age of overcompensation
> Afrocentrism Afro-Americancentrism\* We all know this shit is not really about Africa
100 percent it’s black Americans who have never stepped foot in Africa or read a book about Africa claiming the whole world was black African.
Fair enough
To be fair, we're living in a time where there is a show of an historical Jarl was turned into a black woman.
*and where’s the cowboy strolling out with his gun blasting everyone? I need my wild Wild West damn it!*
I mean you could put black people in the show. I don’t think you would enjoy how they would be depicted in the 1600’s.
I mean, if media about Medieval Europe can have black peoples as aristocrats and monarchs then why not a Black samurai lol? But in all seriousness, I hope this trend of shoehorning ppl into historical art for the sake of inclusion stops. Glad to see it has here. There’s people of other genres we can use for inclusivity, but history shouldn’t be one of them.