In Japan, the presence of a black samurai in a video game provokes strong reactions

LETTER FROM TOKYO

For a long time, geishas, ​​samurai and even ninjas (henchmen from medieval times) have fueled the imagination of millions of young people around the world. But when foreigners take over figures of Japanese national identity, it can cause significant tensions in the land of the rising sun.

This is what happened with video games Assassin’s Creed Shadowsproduced by Ubisoft. The final episode of this series takes place in Japan for the first time. The broadcast of its trailer last May caused a flood of online messages in the Archipelago which has just forced Ubisoft to postpone the release of the game to February 2025, although it was initially planned for November 2024. An online petition, gathering nearly 100,000 signatures, is now calling for its cancellation.

« I’ve been following this series since the beginning and I was happy that it was finally set in Japan, but today I feel very angry.”regrets an Internet user. The game features two characters, Yasuke and Fujibayashi Naoe. The first, presented as a samurai – but whose status is in reality questionable – did indeed exist.

Probably born in Mozambique, he arrived in Japan with the Portuguese Jesuits and was received with them by the most powerful warlord of the time, Nobunaga Oda (1534-1582). First surprised by the African’s build and skin color – he examined it carefully, thinking that it was artificially colored – he ended up offering him a saber.

“I’m fed up with Western political correctness”

It is precisely the fact that this character is black that poses a problem to many Internet users. Some see this as the imposition by Ubisoft of criteria of thought prevalent in the West, a sort of “wokism”. “I’m fed up with Western political correctness. Don’t involve Asia in this »protests another Internet user, reflecting an annoyance that is more widespread in Japan than one might think abroad.

Would this not also be a reflection of xenophobic and racist reactions? Certainly for some of them, which have also been relayed by white supremacists in the United States – swooning over the samurai… But surprisingly, few are those who are shocked by the second character, Naoe, a « nineteen ». In history, there has never been a female ninja.

There is another point that the reactions of Internet users reveal: the ignorance of most Japanese of what ninjas really were. The latter, often called shinobi (“those who hide”), appeared at the time of the civil wars of the 16th^e century. Men of the shadows, mercenaries of the lords, they spied or carried out nocturnal raids on their master’s enemies. During the two centuries of peace of the Edo period (1603-1867), under the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns, there were only a few hundred left.

It was then, in the entertainment literature of the time and on the stage of kabuki, the traditional Japanese theater, that ninjas became villains dressed in black or righters of wrongs. Hagiographic texts sought to make them equivalents of Robin Hood. And their technique of camouflage, of stealthy movements, was assimilated to a kind of martial art (ninjutsu), otherwise a “Way”.

Popular novels, mangas, animated films and video games have finally taken hold of them, giving them an increasingly distant image of what they were, as recounted in a recent work by the historian Pierre -François Souyri (History of the ninjas. Henchmen and spies in samurai JapanTallandier). So much so that, today, ninja schools are flourishing – mainly thanks to the foreigners who attend them. Since 2017, the University of Mie, in the prefecture of the same name, which claims to be the cradle of ninjutsueven opened an International Ninja Research Center.