I also love how some Gamers pretend to care and say stuff like “it must suck to be Japanese and instead of getting a main character that looks like you, you get a black guy”, when it seems Japanese people who care about the game are actually like “Yasuke? Fuck yeah!”
I mean there are Japanese g*mers being racist about it too, and western chuds online have made sure to cherry pick their tweets
“Nooo miura anjin is the only legit non-asian samurai why won’t you let us have the cool thing?”Did I miss the point at the end of the show (never read the book) but wasn’t he only kept around because he was a clown or a big joke? Toranaga says it before seconding the goofy samurai that betrayed him. Like “I only kept him around because he made laugh.” The whole show you get this mixed thing of it seeming like he’s sort of earning the respect of everyone, and he does to an extent, but Toranaga is kinda like “meh. He’s just my dancing clown.” lops off head
On a side note, can we bring back seppuku or at least the Roman tradition of failed leaders falling on their swords (literally)?
I need a world where Blinken honorably seconds Biden after Biden publicly admits he’s a fuckup and piece of shit.
Hats off to Cato for literally pulling his own guts out after his bodyguards found him stabbing himself after losing a battle during the Roman civil war.
I think you managed to read my mind.
I was trying to remember who famously (to nerds, maybe) got embarrassed and later nonchalantly left dinner to kill himself privately. Hey, you know what, I respect a person who not only admits their mistakes but holds themselves highly accountable. Bring it back!
Have also not read the book but my understanding of it is it definitely puts more emphasis on blackthorn and his perspective. Personally I don’t totally buy the idea that Toranaga only keeps him around out of amusement and I think if it was that simple he’d have actually let him gut himself and had a chuckle about it on the way to dinner. That said I do think that monologue was to reemphasize the point that while he may have bumbled into being useful once or twice: Anjin is ultimately a mostly passive player in the history playing out around him and despite all his suffering and ambitions he is destined to be little more than a footnote.
“Find someone who makes you laugh and never let them go.”
What exactly is a retainer in this context?
It’s a high level position in feudal society, usually referring to a lord’s bodyguard or someone who handles bureaucratic/military affairs in the lord’s place.
In Japan’s case the word is used to simplify a bunch of different ranks. Yasuke was Oda Nobunaga’s servant, bodyguard, advisor, and seemed to be a close friend as well.
It was also common for Japanese aristocrats to get intimate with their retainers. It’s very likely Nobunaga and Yasuke were sleeping together, since it’s well known Nobunaga preferred men.
The idea that Nobunaga “Preferred men” isn’t really well known. He maybe had a gay relationship with a person who held a similar post to Yasuke (Mori Ranmaru), but he also had multiple children with a concubine.
Now its entirely possible that he preferred having sex with his retainer to his concubine, who the heck knows. I certainly don’t. But I don’t think there’s much support for the idea.
But let’s accept that. Let’s even assume Nobunaga was gay as hell and any sexual encounter with a woman he had were out of duty or something. That still doesn’t mean we can just assume that Yasuke was a sex partner to Nobunaga. We don’t have any evidence for any kind of relationship like that between Oda Nobunaga and Yasuke as far as I’m aware, and I think we would if it was well known.
The relationship between a personal attendant like Yasuke or Mori Ranmaru with their lord would likely take the form of Shudo, a sort of formalized typically pederastic homsexual coupling. Shudo was expected to be at least somewhat exclusive, and Nobunaga was already supposedly with Mori Ranmaru.yeah you’re right. Honestly it’s a stretch and I was exaggerating. I forgot about Ranmaru entirely
Wait…G*mers think retainers aren’t “real” samurai??? LMAO.
Someone dumb this down for me please
Yasuke was a black man, from Africa, brought to Japan by Dutch traders (maybe as a slave, maybe not, I don’t remember). The traders met with Oda Nobunaga, one of the premier warlords of the sengoku era in Japan, and Nobunaga was fascinated with this strange person he’d never seen the like of before. He took on Yasuke (as a servant IIRC?), and over the years Yasuke earned Nobunaga’s trust to the point that he was made a full retainer (presumably with some qualifications).
Racist Gamers (
)are upset that Yasuke is the protagonist in a new/upcoming video game (I can’t be asked to know which) where he’s one of the two playable protagonists. In a fit of racism, they are claiming that he’s not a real samurai because he is too black.I remember the last time there was drama about Yasuke I was corrected by some people about the history, so I sat down to read some stuff about samurai. So I do want to point out that “who is a samurai” was of course a much looser thing than what we think of today. Technically each clan made their own decision about who was a samurai and who was a higher ranking samurai than anyone else. But one common and legal definition of the era is that only samurai could wear daisho, and we know for a fact that Yasuke was allowed a wakizashi. Also this wasn’t Europe, plenty of samurai were “retainers”. A kuramaitori got a salary, he was still directly answerable to the shogun himself. While the highest echelons of power were decided by income and therefore land ownership, there were like hundreds of steps below where you didn’t need to own land. You could argue that since the highest rank we know he had was kosho calling him “Samurai” is a bit like calling a squire a knight, but again he wore daisho and served as personal attendant to Oda Nobunaga. There were hatamoto (Well, gokenin I suppose) with land holdings who would kill a couple of family members for that job.
However we also know that he faced discrimination and was exiled from Japan by Oda Nobutada with the words that as a black slave he was basically an animal.
Yasuke not being considered a smaurai is weird to me because he is so often used in Japanese games as the black samurai that it almost feels like a trope. He was there in Nioh (either 1 or 2) and Team Ninja are super chud.
He’s in both Nioh games, yeah. Don’t really know enough to say anything about Team Ninja other than the
character designs.
“Samurai” mostly just means retainer. Gamers arguing that Yosuke wasn’t a samurai because he was “merely” a retainer would be like arguing that some medieval dude wasn’t really an knight, but merely a vassal of the sovereign monarch, i.e. it’s saying the same shit with different words.
You can wear a retainer after getting your braces off and still be a samurai. No gatekeeping.
