Yasuke: In Search of the African Samurai

by Thomas Lockley

  Portuguese Buccaneer

  A team of African bodyguards was a very fashionable accoutrement among the elite of the East Asian seaways at this time. Rich merchants competed to see who could have the grandest and most ostentatious entourage, and what could be grander than a six-foot-plus African warrior? Valignano and Nobunaga had certainly agreed with this sentiment, as clearly did other Japanese lords. A good example of a Portuguese man who also gloried in an African warrior corps was Bartolomeu Vaz Landeiro—a powerful ship’s captain, pirate, trader and early Macao pioneer—who kept a bodyguard of around eighty Africans with him. The men were armed with halberds and shields and accompanied him everywhere. Landeiro, a Portuguese man of Jewish origin and hence fleeing anti-Semitism and pogroms in his homeland, left his background behind him after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching the Indian Ocean. As many did, he faked his ancestry and claimed Portuguese aristocratic descent on arrival in Goa in 1560, and nobody seems to have had the gumption to contest it. Perhaps the African bodyguard corps, which he seems to have recruited in India, ensured he was taken seriously.

  Landeiro was active in Asian waters between Macao, Manila and Japan, where he did much of his business of slaving, smuggling, piracy and occasionally more savory trading pursuits until his death sometime after 1585. His regular and generous financial support for the Jesuits ensured his ships were welcome in Nagasaki and he also paid calls to other Kyushu ports such as Kuchinotsu, especially to obtain Japanese slaves. His notoriety and success earned him the epithet “The King of the Portuguese from Macao.” His ships’ crews were notably multiethnic—employing Chinese, Japanese, European, Filipino, Indian and African sailors and buccaneers. It is entirely possible that Yasuke could have become one of them.

  Chinese Pirate

  Chinese pirate crews in the South China Seas, an area which no state power adequately controlled and where it was often in minor rulers’ interests to turn a blind eye for their own financial benefit, often employed Africans who had escaped from slavery or gone it alone. An example, though shortly after Yasuke’s time in the 1620s, was the Chinese pirate, smuggler and merchant, Zheng Zhilong.

  Zheng had a large African bodyguard corps, more than three hundred men at its peak. The bodyguards were recruited from various places, but most entered his service via Macao, the Portuguese enclave in southern China, and many were escaped slaves. They could also have been men freed in reward for their part in the successful defense of Macao against the Dutch in 1622.

  In this battle, an attempt by the Dutch to wrest control of the inter-Asian trade from the Portuguese, Macao found itself virtually defenseless as the Dutch attacked when most of the Portuguese merchant militia were away on trading missions in China. In a desperate bid to defend the outpost, all African slaves—a large group who did most of the manual labor in the colony—were granted their freedom, and as much alcohol as they could drink, in exchange for fighting in the city’s defense. These drunken, newly freed men and women were wildly successful in destroying the Dutch, and their mercenary Japanese and Thai troops, despite being heavily outnumbered. The Africans charged the Dutch musket fire fearlessly and gave no quarter; and as it was the feast of John the Baptist, allegedly celebrated by removing heretic Protestant heads from their bodies. The former slaves, having been released from their bondage, would have been searching for better employment (and quickly), and pirates such as Zheng Zhilong could provide this.

  Zheng had lived much of his life in Japan, where he was safe from Chinese government authority and could take advantage of Japanese and European trade and smuggling opportunities. At the height of his power, his fleet was estimated at up to a thousand ships and controlled almost all interactions in the South China Sea.

  Zheng’s era coincided with the conquest of China by the Manchu tribes from the nomadic lands of the northeast. The Manchus usurped the Ming dynasty and formed their own new Qing dynasty that lasted from 1644 to 1912. The famous movie, The Last Emperor, is based on the life of the final Qing emperor, Pu Yi.

  In 1628, Zheng turned respectable, to serve his country by resisting the invaders, who most Chinese people despised. He and his pirates became the legitimate naval forces of the retreating Ming dynasty. Zheng fought hard for his new masters (and old enemies), but eventually realized that further resistance to the Manchus was useless. In 1646, he surrendered.

  The fate of Zheng Zhilong’s three hundred African warriors is unclear. Upon his surrender to the Qing imperial authorities, his Chinese troops abandoned him and the Africans were the only men to stick by him. It is said they were massacred in a last ditch stand after it became clear their general had been double-crossed by his captors. Zheng was taken to Beijing as a hostage against his son’s good behavior. His son continued the resistance and the father was executed like a common criminal in 1661.

  Zheng was not unique in having an African bodyguard corps, even if his was the largest recorded. Although Yasuke’s time, in the 1580s, would have been early in this historical trend, Yasuke could easily have joined one of these international mercenary groups in Chinese employ that would no doubt have enjoyed plenty of plunder when used in raids and outright war.

  Other Possibilities

  There are several other interesting African men recorded in Japan at this time, but the likelihood any are Yasuke diminishes as the years go by. The businesses that Yasuke was involved in—war and seafaring—were the most dangerous on earth and hardly conducive to longevity.

  In 1615, Lord Arima Harunobu’s son, Naozumi, is recorded as having employed an unnamed African messenger as a retainer who routinely traveled the considerable distance from Kyoto to Nagasaki to deliver messages and represent his lord. The English merchant Richard Cocks, resident in Japan from 1613–1623 “gave lodging [to this African man] in the English house with meat and drink, because he was servant to such a master.” Yasuke would have been in his fifties at this time, probably a little old to be plying the cold waves of the Seto Inland Sea on such a regular basis.

  Another unnamed African is recorded in the early seventeenth century in Mexico City, as the friend of a Japanese slave named Tomé. Although the details of why are unclear, this Mozambican had lived several years in Nagasaki before being sent to Manila and, subsequently, to Mexico. He was perhaps a sailor on the Spanish galleons which plied the route between Manila and Acapulco or a manservant to a merchant.

  * * *

  Fast forward two centuries, and this face appears.

  Tamaki Mitsuya, twenty-three years old and a retainer of Kawada, Lord of Sagami (modern-day Kanagawa, near Tokyo) and senior vassal of the shogunal house, the Tokugawa. Both his lord, Kawada, and Tamaki were members of an 1864 Japanese mission to Paris seeking French support to renege on previous treaty commitments and close down the fast-developing international port of Yokohama near Edo (soon to be renamed Tokyo). Tamaki’s photograph was taken in a Paris salon by the famous photographer Antonio Beato. Tamaki and his colleagues had traveled there by way of Africa, even posing for a photograph in front of the Sphinx on the banks of the same river, the Nile, by which Yasuke had been born approximately three hundred years before. There is no more information about this fascinating man.

  However, if not for the samurai garb and swords he wears, you might easily mistake him for an African. There is absolutely no proof Yasuke was Tamaki’s ancestor; it could just be one of those coincidences or even a trick of the camera lights which suggest such mixed features. Still, several clues make Tamaki worth considering.

  First, the second Chinese character in his given name is the same as the Ya in Yasuke’s name and it is quite a common Japanese practice to carry on the use of a character through the generations; such customs have sometimes lasted hundreds of years and continue to this day.

  Tamaki Mitsuya, photographed in Paris, 1864.

  Second, the house he served, the Kawada, had originally served Nobunaga’s bitter enemies, the Uesu
gi, but around Yasuke’s time, entered the service of the Oda-allied Tokugawa clan. It is entirely within the realm of reason that, after leaving the Jesuits, Yasuke was offered a position by one of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s followers; after all, he had traveled extensively in their lands and one of their leading retainers, Matsudaira Ietada, recorded the African samurai in his diary. Perhaps it was at the behest of Ieyasu himself who later employed and promoted foreigners such as the Englishman William Adams (inspiration for the novel and hit 1980 TV series Shogun) extensively.

  Running against this possibility, we have two hundred years of Yasuke’s descendants marrying people with Asian features in Japan. There would have been no other Africans to marry, and thereby keep the facial features “African.” In similar circumstances, ancestors of Africans who lived in England during Yasuke’s time soon became indistinguishable from the local population as they and their descendants intermarried with indigenous people. This would have been the case in Japan too.

  And could Tamaki have been the ancestor of another African or even black American? It is estimated there were around three hundred Africans resident in Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and there were many more temporary visitors as sailors on foreign ships. After the 1630s, foreigners who were allowed to trade in Japan were severely restricted, among non-Asian nations only the Dutch were permitted. They were restricted to trading at Nagasaki and their movement was limited to a tiny man-made island called Dejima. Contacts with the local people were highly restricted, so any Dutch-African visitor, even if they successfully impregnated one of the low-ranking local sex workers who were permitted to them, would not have had children who became hereditary samurai to a prominent family in the Tokyo area, hundreds of miles away.

  The first African Americans probably arrived in Nagasaki in 1797 on the US ship Eliza which was flying the Dutch flag as it had been contracted to take care of Dutch trade at a time when the Netherlands were unable to sail due to the Napoleonic wars. The head of the Dutch station was approached by the Nagasaki authorities over the “unfamiliar kind of black people” on board. The locals were again fascinated by a racial type that they were unacquainted with or had forgotten about over the centuries. These sailors would have been confined to Dejima and unable to interact with local people properly.

  Furthermore, shortly after Yasuke’s time, the samurai became a hereditary caste. If you were not a samurai in the early seventeenth century, your descendants were not samurai in 1864 (there were some minor exceptions to this rule, but generally it held).

  As far as we know, Yasuke was the only African samurai, ever.

  It is almost impossible that any samurai with African looks would have been the descendant of another African-looking warrior. Thus, if Tamaki is of African descent, then Yasuke is highly likely to have been his ancestor. There is not enough information to draw definite conclusions, but the possibility that Yasuke’s family retained his looks and position as senior samurai in service to a Tokugawa family vassal is there.

  * * *

  Yasuke’s final years may have ended in any one of the historic paths above. But his legacy, as we shall see in the final chapter, still flourishes today.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Yasuke Through the Ages

  The story of Yasuke was first published in 1598 in the second volume of a compilation of letters and reports from the Jesuit mission in Japan entitled Cartas que os padres e irmãos da Companhia de Jesus escreverão dos reynos de Japão e China II (Letters written by the fathers and brothers of the Society of Jesus from the kingdoms of Japan and China—Volume II). The collection of letters—normally known simply as Cartas—covers the period from 1580–1598.

  Yasuke’s 1581 visits to Sakai, Kyoto, his audience with Nobunaga and his subsequent part in Nobunaga’s final stand and the Battle of Okitanawate were revealed in letters from Luis Fróis, the prolific chronicler of the mission. Yasuke’s time in Azuchi is also recorded in a letter by Lourenço Mexia, who was Valignano’s right-hand man and accompanied him to Nobunaga’s capital, Azuchi, in 1581.

  The compilation was published in Europe as publicity/propaganda to promulgate the huge success the Jesuits were enjoying in the Far East. The two volumes were disseminated among the literate classes in parts of Catholic Europe—Spain, Portugal, France and the German and Italian states—and then made their way clandestinely to Protestant Europe, mainly England and the Netherlands. For most readers, these were the first reliable eyewitness accounts they’d ever read about the Far East. Prior to this, much of what had been written of Japan was of questionable scholarship and often contained outright fabrications. Still, the Jesuits, mindful of their control over this valuable fount of information, made certain that only information they approved of was included, and edited to paint their mission in a very positive, even triumphal, light.

  The final published versions were substantially different from the editions actually sent from the Far East. The letters within went through three or more rounds of editing and censorship—in Nagasaki, in India and finally in Rome—before being released to the public. This became abundantly clear when a hoard of the original letters was curiously discovered in a miserable state of repair behind a painted Japanese screen in Lisbon in the early twentieth century. They’d been recycled and used as packaging for the painting on its long trip to Europe by sea from Japan. When rediscovered as the painting was being restored, they proved a treasure trove for historians as they revealed many details that had been edited out in the final published versions.

  Europe was crying out for reliable news of the Far East in the sixteenth century. It was an era of turmoil in “Christendom,” as the continent was loosely known at the time. The Reformation had torn any religious unity apart and vicious sectarian warring continued unabated. Catholics saw the Asian missions—and Japan in particular, due to its noted success—as ways to revitalize the Church and make up for the loss of devotees who’d converted to Protestantism in northern Europe. The Protestants, in turn, saw access to the legendary wealth of the Far East as a means to strengthen their relatively weak economic standing and to establish allies against Catholic enemies, particularly against Spain. The Dutch and English put huge efforts into their attempts to navigate the unknown seas to China and Japan. Both had good reason to hate Spain; the Dutch had only recently declared independence from the Iberian monarchy and would be at war to validate that state until 1648, and the English had narrowly escaped invasion at the hands of the Spanish Armada in 1588, more by luck than military prowess. The threat of Spanish domination continued to hang over both countries for decades.

  As the Cartas were going to press in Evora, Portugal, the first Protestant ship to reach Japan, de Liefde, was just setting sail from Rotterdam. Her voyage took nearly two years and she suffered the loss of most of her crew, but arrived in April 1600, a virtual wreck, off Bungo, in the territory of the Ōtomo (the very place Yasuke had begun his fateful journey to meet Nobunaga in the spring of 1581). Only twenty-four of the original hundred-man crew survived and many of those died shortly after their arrival in Japan. Among those who survived was William Adams, a man who’d rise quickly in the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Hideyoshi’s political heir to leadership of the realm. Adams, an Englishman from Gillingham in Kent, was granted high samurai rank, hatamoto, generous trading rights and a small fief by Ieyasu. His notable achievements include becoming court interpreter, foreign affairs advisor, scientific and mathematics tutor to Ieyasu and the building of two English-style ships, one of which became the first Japanese vessel to reach North America in 1610 when it repatriated the crew of a Spanish treasure galleon, which had wrecked off what is now Chiba Prefecture near Tokyo, to Mexico (then called “New Spain” and Spain’s most important colony).

  The Spanish were so alarmed and threatened by the prospect of a Japanese ship navigating the Pacific, that they confiscated it upon arrival. The Japanese crew and the officials onboard we
re sent back to Japan on a Spanish ship. To compensate the Japanese for the theft of their ship, the Spanish paid a generous compensation, agreed to trading privileges in Mexico and to share precious gold and silver mining technology.

  Of the remainder of de Liefde’s surviving crew, the Dutchman Jan Joosten van Lodensteyn was also granted samurai rank and the few others who survived made small fortunes as teachers of subjects such as gunnery and mathematics. Both Adams and van Lodensteyn have areas of Tokyo named after them, and Adams’s story, in particular, has been repeatedly told on screen, in theatres and in print. Adams provided the first information about Japan to be penned in English. He also facilitated the first direct diplomatic contact between England and Japan. (A suit of armor sent by the second Tokugawa shogun, Tokugawa Hidetada, to James I in 1613 can still be seen among the British royal treasures in the Tower of London today.)

  Yasuke’s story—derived only from Cartas—was repeated several times in works published in Europe during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

  The first mention was in the French Jesuit educator François Solier’s Histoire ecclésiastique des îles et royaume du Japon (The Ecclesiastical History of the Islands and Kingdom of Japan) of 1627. The second record was in the rather cumbersomely titled, but no doubt sincere, Elogios, e ramalhete de flores borrifado com o sangue dos religiosos da Companhia de Iesu, a quem os tyrannos do imperio do Iappão tiraraõ as vidas por odio da fé catholica (Praises, and Bouquets of Flowers Sprinkled with Jesuit Blood, to Those Whom the Japanese Tyrants Kill Through Hatred of the Catholic Faith) by the Portuguese Jesuit and historian Antonio Francisco Cardim in 1650. The third and final rendering was by the French Jesuit scholar, Jean Crasset, in his Historie de l’eglise du Japon (History of the Japanese Church) in 1669.