Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Neither option would work. A third remedy became clear enough.

  Yasuke, who routinely walked in attendance beside Valignano, would need to mount up so the procession could continue and penetrate the throng. That was, at least, the easiest solution. Crowds tended to move out of the way of horses. Yasuke climbed into the saddle of a horse commandeered from a local guard with glee. It had been many years since he’d ridden. Then too it had been to escape, but in much different circumstances. On horseback now again, he was able to better forge his way through the crowd.

  As they left Sakai and its masses behind, the line formed up again and the Catholic party and their attendants processed through the Japanese countryside.

  Throughout the ensuing journey of several days, the experience in Sakai repeated itself. They encountered crowds on foot and horseback, all clearly eager to witness the amazing procession but primarily to gaze upon its most impressive figure, Yasuke. They openly gaped at the African colossus. His presence possibly spoiled the effect of religious awe Valignano had hoped to promote. (Or again, perhaps, Valignano knew exactly what he was doing.) Each village and town they traversed brought more and more spectators, after all. And, if they’d only come to gaze upon Yasuke’s person in awe, Valignano would at least make sure they left having heard Christian hymns and something of the Good Word.

  * * *

  The holy week of Easter coincided with their last days on the road to Kyoto. They celebrated in the castle of the most truly dedicated of central Japan’s Catholics, Lord Takayama Ukon, a powerful general and close senior retainer of Oda Nobunaga. Takayama was a man sincere and secure in his faith, unlike the lords of Kyushu who often seemed more interested in guns than God. He already had plenty of guns and easy access to even more Sakai-manufactured firearms, which Nobunaga had long since, in theory at least, commandeered for his men alone.

  Takayama’s castle of Takatsuki was a good-sized but unassuming fortification, only one day’s walk from Kyoto, on the flat plain that stretched south from the seas up to the mountains north of the capital city. Its central keep was surrounded by moats from which the walls rose steeply above the water. Its other enclosures, where the warriors lived, were defended by a series of exterior walls and waterways. Attackers would have to break through three or more fortifications to enter and take the central defensive bastion.

  The seminary students from Azuchi, the capital of Nobunaga’s domain and the latest of Valignano’s seminary schools (he’d not yet been there himself and had trusted the Jesuits in Kyoto to establish it), as well as many Catholics from Kyoto and nearby missions, joined them for the holy rites that week.

  The festivities included a flagellation procession of penance on Holy Thursday, scores of believers scourging their backs with thick woven and knotted hemp whips until they were a bloody pulp, reveling in the pain and religious euphoria it brought. On Good Friday, a young man who had missed the previous day’s bloodletting while drinking and cavorting with courtesans in Kyoto, performed a public self-scourging alone in penance and gave generous alms to the poor. Such piety made the Jesuits feel like they’d somehow been transported back to Rome.

  On Easter Sunday, an enormous crowd gathered around Takatsuki castle. Locals, eighteen thousand of whom had been converted by this time, mingled with Christian pilgrims from elsewhere and a large number of Takayama’s warriors, all giving thanks for Christ’s resurrection. Thousands more non-Catholics also came to see the great event, in awe at the exotic rituals and strange goings-on.

  The Easter Sunday festivities themselves started predawn with a lantern-lit procession around the castle accompanied by the novel sounds of Latin hymns and violin music from the Japanese seminary students who’d been practicing for months in anticipation of this day. This was followed by a sermon from Valignano himself and then High Mass where communion was celebrated by thousands. Valignano was well satisfied. His plans were advancing nicely and the enormous turnout likely surprised even him. His eye for spectacle and awe was once again paying off.

  After the enormous Mass, Lord Takayama treated the entire Jesuit party and senior retainers to a sumptuous feast of celebration with many speeches in the audience chamber of his grand keep.

  Special news came with eventide. Just after the feast, a mounted messenger approached the castle riding hard along the Kyoto road. He dismounted at the stables outside the main fortifications and approached the gate at a run, his armor clanking with every step.

  Yasuke, who was on duty outside the main reception chamber, watched him approach the main entrance to the hall and bow to the sentries before having a brief word with them, glancing sideways at Yasuke in surprise as he did. The sentries bowed back and slid the gilt paper doors apart silently on their smooth wooden rails; the messenger entered with dignity despite his obvious haste and strode down the hall, past the visiting foreigners and other guests of honor eating from low tables on the tatami floor to the head of the large room. The messenger waited for Lord Takayama to notice and beckon him, then approached, kneeling and performing a deep bow. He delivered his message in low tones, waited for the reply, bowed again and withdrew as quickly as he had appeared.

  Takayama stood, a look of great satisfaction on his face. This was, after all, his show as he’d arranged Valignano’s audience and acted as his patron in this part of Japan. He spoke loudly for all to hear and Father Fróis, seated next to Valignano, interpreted his speech in excited tones.

  “Fathers and Brothers in Christ,” Fróis translated. “We have been done great honor. Lord Nobunaga has requested us to proceed with all haste to his presence. You will be seen within mere days.”

  Oda Nobunaga had officially ordered them to speed up their visit. He could not wait to see them. The whole room held its excitement but the magnitude of the moment was not lost on anyone. While they’d all known they would be granted an audience with Nobunaga eventually, they had expected to lodge in Kyoto for weeks or months before being summoned. This swift recognition of Valignano’s presence was an honor rarely extended.

  Takayama, Oda’s sworn man since his youth, announced in decent Portuguese that they’d all leave first thing in the morning to meet his lord. The audience would be in three days and if they moved fast they could be in Kyoto late the next afternoon.

  Takayama’s sincerest hope, just like Valignano’s, was that Nobunaga would himself also become Catholic, and the signs were certainly positive if the man was demanding they move up their visit. Would he make some grand announcement? A request for baptism, a grant of further rights and privileges to the Azuchi seminary, or something even bigger—as Lord Ōmura had graciously done upon Valignano’s arrival two years before? It wasn’t beyond hope, although Valignano had no leverage over Nobunaga in the way he had had over Ōmura and Arima, and he knew it. Nobunaga kept people guessing, divide et impera, and kept his cards close. He was a master politician as well as warrior and also, for the most part, a man beloved by his people.

  As evidence of that, Nobunaga had planned and funded a massive public spectacle involving thousands of troops and special horseback performances to be performed by him, his sons, an inner core of retainers and his horse guards for later in the week. This extraordinary event was the talk of the region and would bring in visitors from all over Japan, meaning many more listeners for the Jesuits to proselytize to.

  Valignano addressed his hosts and colleagues and then, as Fróis interpreted, made a flowery speech of thanks for Takayama’s hospitality, even adding some basic thanks and a blessing in Japanese at the end. (He had learned some Japanese in his two years.) The Jesuits made ready to leave before dawn the next day.

  * * *

  They left Takayama’s castle for Kyoto, a mere twenty-five miles away, to arrive after midday. Humbly walking on foot, banners and icons raised high, candles and lanterns blazing in the cool of the early morning darkness, they processed like stars threading through the night sky.
>
  Valignano led the finely dressed crowd in person bearing his holy relic of the Cross. Next came Takayama and the other Japanese notables accompanying them from Nagasaki, Bungo, Ōmura, Arima and Sakai, all displaying devotional icons. Behind the notables followed twenty-five choir boys from the seminary in Azuchi singing hymns of Christian praise in a joyful Latin harmony. The boys were exquisitely dressed, all carrying white candles, and the four at the front were garbed as actual angels in pure white with artificial wings made from bamboo and brilliant silk. Finally, came the fathers and brothers of the Society of Jesus dressed in clean surplices and stoles draped with long capes, bearing glass lanterns which shone in kaleidoscopic colors and designs. Perhaps for the first time in this region so distant from Christian Europe, the foreign words and notes of the choir did not seem so outlandish. They were being sung by Japanese boys and celebrated by local people as they approached a hegemon who seemed to welcome their message with open arms.

  As they traveled together, Takayama proudly showed Valignano’s party evidence of the changes in the human landscape; the clear carnage of burned-out and abandoned Buddhist temples and smashed Shinto shrines he’d ordered. In their place were new Christian churches by the side of the road and on the low slopes of the mountains. Man-sized crosses, and bigger, were planted everywhere. The procession had grown again. It was now accompanied by crowds of people, more than two hundred of Takayama’s warriors and numerous faithful from his fief who’d joined the procession as it advanced to Kyoto. The scene was set for a most magnificent entry into Japan’s greatest city.

  It was March 27, 1581.

  Only a few hours away, Kyoto and Lord Nobunaga waited. As did consequences that Yasuke, for all his vigilance, could never have foreseen.

  Chapter Eight

  A Riot on Monday

  The march into Kyoto began as a well-planned Valignano production. The procession of priests, worshippers, seminary students, hundreds of Christian samurai and hired help had journeyed on foot and been followed all the way from Sakai. Sometimes by a dozen curious farmers, and sometimes—when passing through a decent-sized village—by as many as a hundred. But, expanded by a contingent of believers at Takatsuki, their pilgrimage had mushroomed quickly to include several hundred escorts and hangers-on.

  Engineering large crowds was an old Jesuit tactic to generate publicity and new followers, and the exotic foreigners provided much entertainment as well as provoking sincere religious interest in the local populace. On at least two occasions in Kyoto before Yasuke, such crowds had been seen; one time, more than ten thousand had turned out for a Catholic funeral, something the Jesuits were very proud of. But never had the crowds turned violent and never had they truly threatened the physical fabric of the city. This time, however, was different.

  Valignano had not at first realized his entrance into this city was atypical. But Kyoto was the most populous and boisterous city in Japan on any normal day of the week. And today, Kyoto was not having a normal day.

  Tens of thousands had traveled to the city for a proper vacation tied to the impending umazoroe, Nobunaga’s promised Cavalcade of Horses spectacle. The streets and alleyways were packed and heaving with life. Most of the crowd was drunk on a mix of alcohol and festival fever, and having a fabulous time. Pranks being played and good-natured wrestling between old friends and new. Old men were passed out in corners with their distinct conical kasa hats tumbled to the ground next to them and their undergarments parted to reveal all; dancers, their kimonos hoisted up, capering to the swift beat of hand drums and the whistle of bamboo flutes, were surrounded by teeming crowds of onlookers. Giggling giddy women, of all ages, arms akimbo, were flashing breasts, or even lifting their kimonos for a laugh, cheer, or even to dramatically pee in the street for still bigger laughter. Other ladies, the more dignified local aristocracy, looked on in horror, covering their dainty mouths and black-varnished teeth with pale hands while men, however dignified they pretended to be, openly ogled and pointed with their fans. In among the adults ran grubby shoeless children, playing tag, war games, nicking snacks from bamboo stalls and drawing gleefully with moistened charcoal on the faces of the passed-out elders while trying to suppress their giggles. The human soundscape was incessant, chatter and cheering interspersed with loud laughs, gasps, exclamations and the occasional gurgle of vomit.

  By the time Valignano realized there were so many nonlocals in town, it was too late. Kyoto was unexpectedly, and uncharacteristically, filled with modest country bumpkins and rural warriors from all over Japan. Not from the port cities where Japan was meeting the world, but from the plains and mountains inland, where one could live for generations having not traveled more than a day’s walk in any direction and having spent an entire lifetime looking only at the same dozen farming families. Few of these people had ever before seen Europeans—or even a Chinese man—let alone the remarkable wonder of a giant black-skinned warrior from distant Africa, a place most of them didn’t yet know existed.

  * * *

  While a man with black skin may have seemed remarkable to them, the connotations were entirely positive. Japanese people seem to have had no negative images associated with dark skin at this period in history. On the contrary, many even revered it due to the fact that the Buddha was sometimes portrayed as black-skinned. Moreover, there was also Daikokuten, a Japanese manifestation of the Indian god Shiva, a deity of wealth and prosperity who is normally portrayed with ebony black skin.

  A very good resource to judge the Japanese relationship with, and attitude to, Africans at this time is available to us today in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Japanese artwork. Particularly in the form of folding screen pictures.

  Such screens were typical of the upper class, and decorated lords’ castles and the homes of the wealthy. Many have survived because they were so valuable. The black characters depicted in this artwork are representative of this point in history and the plethora of subjects available for the artists to depict. As with European portraits, and modern contemporary photography, the screens recorded what was going on at the time.

  A folding screen representing the arrival of Portuguese merchants in Nagasaki. They are welcomed by Jesuits and local dignitaries. The entourage includes Africans as porters, parasol carriers and armed bodyguards.

  Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

  This detail from the folding screen above shows both armed African bodyguards and porters carrying bread and a chair. All are sumptuously dressed.

  Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

  The artwork featuring Africans was produced initially by the Kanō School, drawn and printed by teams of artists led by master craftsmen, in the early 1590s, shortly after Yasuke’s arrival in Japan. The screens show European, Indian and African visitors, and the Japanese people who associated with them. The earliest versions of such screens were created by eyewitnesses of these events, and include multiple depictions of dark-skinned men. Later, these nanban byobu, or “screens of southern barbarians,” would become a genre copied in different forms for a century afterward, providing fascinating viewing for generations of Japanese art lovers.

  African bodyguards with bows, spears and parasols serve a Portuguese merchant. Kano School, early seventeenth century.

  The most common image adorning such screens is the African man—always men, with no records of African women in Japan until the 1860s—as a sailor, slave or servant of Europeans or Japanese. These men are generally portrayed in lower social positions, carrying parasols, unloading ships, driving exotic animals or serving food. They are unarmed, bareheaded and without shoes or stockings, although often appear wearing smart doublets, shirts, collars, jackets and wide pantaloons. While the cloth of the merchants’ apparel is notably shinier or with braid and trim, to show higher quality, the Africans are still well dressed and have several layers of clothing including white undershirts. This indicates
they may be socially inferior, but not poverty stricken.

  The next category of dark-skinned men is shown wearing skullcaps or sometimes a turban, with extravagantly styled facial hair. These would be Indian workers, or lascars as they were known. Both lascars and Africans seem to make up the majority of crews on the ships represented in these pictures and they can be seen scaling the rigging, manning the crow’s nests and performing gravity-defying feats on the spars. The Japanese artists must have been truly astonished and impressed by this sight to continually paint it with such detail.

  A third representation seen in art is the armed black man: Africans like Yasuke, working as bodyguards or mercenary muscle for the Portuguese. These men are typically better dressed, sometimes with shoes and socks in comparison to their barefoot brethren. The weapons they bear vary: sword, lance, trident, bow and arrow, among others. No lower-ranking Portuguese soldiers seem to appear in these pictures, and that is consistent with historical fact. Due to high mortality rates among the lower ranks and voyage fatigue most Portuguese rank and file could rarely be persuaded to board a ship again after their arrival in India. Hence, African soldiers in the pay of the Portuguese were common in the Far East. The inclusion of the trident as a weapon, rare in contemporary European, African or Japanese warfare, is significant and harkens back to Japanese people connecting the idea of Africans with the Indian god Shiva, who is typically portrayed carrying a trident weapon.

  Writing box with a very large and well-dressed African man, two African boys and a Portuguese merchant. This could possibly be Yasuke.