Who was Yasuke?

An unrecorded beginning

Nothing written about Yasuke's birth or childhood survives. Portuguese Mozambique, then a waystation on the route to India, is the most often proposed origin; the historian Thomas Lockley has also suggested the Dinka people of what is now South Sudan. Neither can be proven. The name he was born with is lost too. "Yasuke" is the name Nobunaga gave him.

He appears in the record in the company of Alessandro Valignano, an Italian Jesuit sent to inspect the Church's missions across Asia. The two most likely met in Africa or India in the late 1570s, and Yasuke traveled with Valignano's party through India and China to Japan as an attendant and protector.

What his standing was in Jesuit service is not clear. Portuguese writers of the period used a term for him that was often applied to enslaved Africans in Asia, and some historians describe him as enslaved; others describe him as a servant or bodyguard. Either way, he arrived in Japan with no rank and no name of his own in the record.

A city turns out to see him

Africans were not unknown in Japan; Portuguese ships had carried African sailors and servants into its ports for decades. But few Japanese had seen one up close, and Yasuke drew a crowd wherever he went. He was tall and powerfully built, and when word spread that he was in Kyoto, the crowds trying to see him broke down the gate of the Jesuit residence. People were hurt in the crush.

Word reached Nobunaga, who asked to see him. On 27 March 1581 the Jesuits brought him before the warlord. The Jesuit accounts record that the warlord would not at first believe the color of his skin was natural and had him wash to prove it. Once satisfied, Nobunaga questioned him at length, and found he could already hold a conversation in Japanese.

Into the Oda household

Nobunaga asked for him, and the Jesuits released him. In the warlord's service Yasuke received a residence, a stipend and a short sword of the kind that marked a man's status. One manuscript of Nobunaga's official chronicle records that he was at times trusted to carry his lord's weapons, a post at the daimyō's side. The chronicle judged him to be in his mid-twenties and credited him with the strength of ten men. One modern historian notes he was sometimes allowed to eat at Nobunaga's table, a privilege few vassals had.

Nobunaga, a Jesuit wrote that October, never tired of talking with him. People in Kyoto were saying the warlord might go further still and make him a lord in his own right. There was not time to find out.

In the spring of 1582, Yasuke rode with Nobunaga's train through the provinces after the defeat of the Takeda clan. A retainer of the Tokugawa, Matsudaira Ietada, saw him on that journey and wrote in his diary of a Black man named Yasuke in Nobunaga's company, noting his height at six shaku two bu, about 182 centimeters or just under six feet, well above most men of the time.

Was he a samurai?

Historians disagree, and the disagreement is honest. In Nobunaga's day the samurai were a hereditary class, born to it and trained in arms, letters and custom from childhood. Yasuke was none of those things.

What he did have were the marks of a retainer: a house, a stipend, a sword from his lord's own hand, and a post at his side. Many historians therefore read him as holding samurai standing by his lord's favor rather than by birth, an honorary rank of a kind that was not unknown in a period when the class was far less fixed than it later became. Others hold that the sources show only a trusted attendant. No surviving document settles it, and we don't pretend otherwise.

The last night at Honnō-ji

Before dawn on 21 June 1582, Nobunaga's general Akechi Mitsuhide turned his army on his own lord and surrounded the Honnō-ji temple in Kyoto, where Nobunaga was lodging with a guard of about thirty. Yasuke was among them and fought as the temple was overrun. Nobunaga, trapped and with the buildings burning, took his own life.

Yasuke then made his way to the residence of Nobunaga's heir, Nobutada, and fought on there until that position fell too. Brought before Mitsuhide, he was spared on the reasoning that he was a foreigner and not Japanese, and he was handed back to the Jesuits. Fróis wrote months later, thankful that he had survived.

What became of him

After his return to the Jesuits, Yasuke disappears from the record. A tall African is mentioned in Japan in the 1590s, and some historians think it may have been him, but nothing ties that man to Yasuke by name. Whatever the rest of his life held, fifteen months in Nobunaga's service were enough to make him one of the most talked-about figures of the Sengoku period, four and a half centuries on.

How he came to be remembered

For a long time Yasuke was a footnote known mostly to specialists. In 1968 a Japanese children's book about him, Kurosuke, won a national prize for children's literature, and he has been retold ever since: in novels, in manga, as the inspiration for Afro Samurai, in a 2021 Netflix series, in Takeshi Kitano's film Kubi, and in video games. The retellings take liberties. The man behind them is still the one in the chronicle.

No portrait of Yasuke made from life survives. Two works from his lifetime or just after are sometimes said to show him: the wrestling screen at the top of this page, and a lacquered ink-stone box made in the 1590s, in which an African man in fine Portuguese dress stands apart from the servants around him. Both are possible. Neither is certain.