The African Samurai Who Watched Japan Burn | The True Story of Yasuke

The true story of Yasuke — the African slave who became the first Black samurai in Japanese history, bodyguard to Oda Nobunaga, and witness to the Honno-ji betrayal of 1582. In 1579, a young African man stepped off a Portuguese ship onto a Japanese beach — the first person of his color anyone in Japan had ever seen. Within two years, he was a samurai in the personal retinue of Oda Nobunaga, the most powerful warlord of the Sengoku period. Three years after that, he stood beside Nobunaga in a burning temple as the lord of Japan died at his own hand. Then he vanished from the historical record. For four hundred years he was almost completely forgotten. What survives of him is eleven sentences across three primary documents: the Shincho Koki chronicle, the letters of the Jesuit missionary Luis Frois, and the correspondence of Lourenco Mexia. This is the full story those eleven sentences can tell. Born in a Yao village on the coast of Mozambique in the mid-1550s, sold into slavery, shipped to Portuguese Goa, chosen as bodyguard by the Jesuit Visitor of Asia, transported to Japan, presented to Nobunaga, granted the two swords of a samurai — Yasuke's life crosses three continents and two oceans before ending in a place no scholar has ever found. Yasuke has recently appeared in games and anime — Assassin's Creed Shadows, Netflix's Yasuke — but the documented history is stranger than any adaptation. This is who he really was, what he saw at Honno-ji on the night of June 21, 1582, and the five theories of what happened to him afterward. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ PRIMARY SOURCES CITED ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ • Shincho Koki (信長公記) — Ota Gyuichi, c. 1610 — the official chronicle of Oda Nobunaga's life • Annual Letter of Japan, 1582 — Luis Frois, S.J. (Vatican Archives; Society of Jesus archives, Rome) • Letter of Lourenco Mexia, S.J. — October 1581 • Historia de Japam — Luis Frois (16th-century Jesuit history of Japan) • African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke — Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard, Hanover Square Press, 2019 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ UNTOLD WORLD HISTORY tells the stories of the people history almost forgot. Previous episodes: La Buse, the pirate who threw an unsolved treasure cipher to the crowd at his own hanging — and Zheng Yi Sao, the pirate queen who commanded 70,000 men and retired rich. If this story was worth your time, subscribe — and share it with someone who would want to hear it. #yasuke #africansamurai #truehistory