OFH Throwback- Episode #171- Who Was the African Samurai? (Part I)

Our Fake History

PodcastOne

Education, Talk Radio, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2024

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this throwback episode Sebastian was inspired by a recent controversy around the Assassin's Creed videogame series to revisit his series on Yasuke, the African Samurai. Near the end of Japan’s “Warring States” period a remarkable visitor arrived in the country with a group of European Jesuit missionaries. He was a soldier originally from East Africa acting as a bodyguard for the ranking Jesuit in Japan. The Japanese would come to know this man as Yasuke and through a surprising series of events he would go on to become the first non-Japanese person to be recognized as a Samurai. Unfortunately, sources concerning the life of Yasuke are few. With only a handful of primary sources and a few colorful legends how much can we know for sure about the African Samurai? Tune-in and find out how Indian slave-soldiers, brawling saints, and the Wu-Tang Clan all play a role in the story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to a very special throwback episode of our fake history. This week I'm not throwing you back
0:15.8	very far at all. We're headed back to season 8 to revisit episodes 171 and 172.
0:25.0	That was the series entitled
0:27.4	Who Was the African Samurai?
0:31.1	This week I am re-releasing part one and next week I will drop part two along with a
0:37.3	brand new introduction like the one you're hearing right now. So why have I chosen to re-release something from
0:45.2	season 8? Usually I pull from a little deeper in the catalog when I do these
0:50.6	throwback episodes. Well as some of you might know, Yaskay, the so-called
0:57.1	African samurai from the late 16th century, has been back in the news lately.
1:04.0	If you are a gamer, then you might know that the latest installment of the wildly popular
1:10.0	Assassin's Creed video game franchise is going to be set in 16th century Japan and
1:16.6	notably one of the playable characters is Yaski.
1:22.2	Now when the first trailer for this new game dropped,
1:26.0	some of the franchise's fans reacted angrily
1:30.0	when they discovered that a game that was set in feudal Japan was going to
1:35.8	feature a playable character who was a black man. From their perspective it
1:41.5	seemed like Ubisoft, the company that makes the Assassin's Creed games,
1:46.0	were misrepresenting history to shoehorn more diversity into their video game.
1:52.0	Or, you know, so goes the argument.
1:55.0	Now I'm not really a gamer so I don't really follow video game controversies all that closely
2:01.0	but the podcaster Alexander Rader von Sternberg the host all that
2:05.0	closely but the podcaster Rader von Sternberg, the host of the podcast History Impossible,
	...

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