Talk:Yasuke

Untitled

Hi! While reading the article, I see "According to other, unattributed, accounts Yasuke may have come"... If these accounts are unattributed, where do they come from ? Can't we find a source for them (contemporary or not)... If they just come from internet forum or romans, we can not take them in account... -Ash_Crow 01:06, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

One point of mentioning the "other, unattributed" accounts is to show how many contradictory, or clearly wrong, accounts there are about Yasuke. Look at earlier versions of the article. I meant to say "beware of what you read."

Another purpose is to make it so if someone adds something and does not attribute it, hopefully the reader will realize that it is not attributed, unlike earlier versions where there was no idea at all of what came from where, or what was supposed to be attributed or not. (Though most was wrong anyway.)

Of course, people do make attributions without checking them, such as saying that "Yasuke" was mentioned in Frois's History. I could not find any such mention in the relevant chapters, even with an index. Frois wrote a lot besides his History. And Frois did not say most of what was in the article, anywhere. Stone-turner 08:52, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

About a description different from the original of Japan.

"Because it was not a Japanese race, liberated it" is a bent translation.

"Because it was not a person, liberated it" is correct.

Yasuke was not recognized that human from Akechi Mitsuhide. (221.184.32.93 (talk) 01:49, 9 March 2009 (UTC))

The original was in Portuguese, and the whole was translated into Japanese in Jūroku-jūnanaseiki Iezusukai Nihon Hōkokushuu, Matsuda, Kiichi, ed., Hōdōsha, 1987-98. This is the modern, scholarly translation. The passage in the translation reads:黒人（カフレ）をいかがにすべきか問うたところ、この黒人（カフレ）は動物（ベスティアル）であって何も知らず、また日本人でもないから彼を殺さず、インドの祭司たちの教会に置くように命じた．(Vol. 3-6, p. 129) So Akechi gave two reasons.--Stone-turner (talk) 06:17, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, this article states that the Shinchoko-ki says Yakuke was stronger than 10 men (強力十の人に勝たり）. Did you check the Shinchokoki? I don't know what source has 100 men, but if it was written before the Shinchoko-ki (1622) I would be very interested to know what it is.--Stone-turner (talk) 06:35, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

この黒人（カフレ）は動物（ベスティアル）であって何も知らず - How is this part translated? It is said that it will not know anything because it is an animal (non-man). Akechi Mitsuhide saw yasuke in an aspect different from Oda Nobutada. 61.119.255.42 (talk) 04:23, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

People even say he will be made a 'tono' (lord)," though this did not happen.

Is this a joke? The statesmanship is necessary to become tono(lord). 61.119.255.42 (talk) 04:24, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't be obscene. I edited your above statement.

I don't know what you mean by a joke. It is a direct quote from Mexia's letter. He was in Azuchi at the time and reported what people said, which is why the statement was in quotes and the present tense. I will reword it a little.--Stone-turner (talk) 12:51, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

In the English page, yasuke is legend Soldier(lol

"Moreover, his strength was greater than that of 10 men."

強力（ごうりき）十の人に勝（すぐ）れたり

nobunaga praised strength of yasuke. However, yasuke does not fight against ten people.

juninriki(十人力) is not 10men power. When it is expression exaggerated a little, understand it.

Japanese has the word hyakuninriki(百人力). When the person who edited this page translates it, it will become the 100men power. However, the true meaning is "With strong help, I feel very stouthearted".

A commentary of hyakuninriki. http://kotobank.jp/word/%E7%99%BE%E4%BA%BA%E5%8A%9B

By a mistake to occur because of a literal translation, yasuke becomes a legendary soldier. 60.33.38.8 (talk) 07:01, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

An English page with useless yasuke as a hero.

Yasuke fought alongside the Nobutada forces for a long time but when all his comrades had died, he surrendered his sword to Akechi's men.

Is yasuke the only survivor in the fight? Do not make an impressive false story. 220.106.175.174 (talk) 05:51, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

To an English editor and people seeing this page.

yasuke is not evaluated historically in Japan. The reason is because he was worthless. yasuke does not have an impressive event in a fight. It is only it that he was defeated by the akechi forces. There is no useful description in yasuke as an aide of nobunaga.

However, the people of the English zone seem to want to change Yasuke to the hero. Please be careful about the impressions of this page. A false script with yasuke as a hero is added.220.106.175.174 (talk) 06:24, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

The Yasuke/black people was identified with Buddha in Japan and was admired. Information disgusted with is on this page a lot.

Please submit the information that yasuke was admired like Buddha.

Please show a source of information where a black people was praised as Buddha in Japan.

The Japanese book seems to be shown as a source of information. However, it is obvious that it is not a mainstream thought. The words that akechi said to yasuke are famous. Yasuke is a beast(not Buddha).

Does the Westerner believe this information? They attach a plausible reason from the source of information of the doubt and recite an unrealistic made-up story.220.106.175.174 (talk) 07:03, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

I edited the first sentence to make it clear

I hope no one has a problem with this, but I corrected this clause in the first sentence from this:

"...a black ( Erroneously thought of as African, or of African origin) retainer who was in the duke of the Japanese hegemon and warlord Oda Nobunaga between 1581 and 1582."

to this retainer of the Japanese hegemon and warlord Oda Nobunaga between 1581 and 1582."

Best regards TheBaron0530 (talk) 13:58, 21 June 2016 (UTC)theBaron0530

To add to article

To add to this article: is there a film about Yasuke that is in production as of early 2020? 76.189.141.37 (talk) 21:05, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Samurai

Pinging Havsjö and Natemup. Please use this space to discuss the merits of describing Yasuke as a samurai instead of relying on edit summaries. Havsjö, will you please self-revert your most recent edit? It was your fourth reversion in 24 hours, breaking WP:3RR. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 20:18, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

I've re-added the samurai reference (which was almost certainly removed at point in the past, perhaps as an act of vandalism), with multiple reliable sources. natemup (talk) 20:50, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Sourced samurai reference is now being removed without explanation by an anonymous editor. natemup (talk) 03:08, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Natemup: I have reverted your edit. Please locate better sources. Geoffrey Girard is a novelist who almost certainly doesn't read Japanese, classical Chinese, or even Portuguese or Latin. Naima Mohamud is a filmmaker who AFAICT is similarly unqualified to write about these matters. What's worse, the titles of those two sources strongly imply you just Googled "African samurai" to locate sources that could be used as a pretext to write what you already wanted to write rather than honestly and accurately reflecting how our subject is described in the best scholarly sources. This practice, which demands that anyone seeking to remove dubiously sourced factual claims somehow prove a negative, turns WP:BURDEN on its head. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:14, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

In fact, one could Google anything about Yasuke and virtually every result would refer to him as a samurai. It seems extremely odd to be this pedantic about a claim found in virtually every source already used in the article. natemup (talk) 03:00, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

@Natemup: "almost certainly vandalism"? Please retract that personal attack immediately. Anyway, as I have explained on my talk page, "samurai" is a somewhat loaded term, and whether this subject "was a samurai" (or "Samurai" as this article has written it quite often in the past) kinda misses the point. A popular source, even one written by someone with a PhD in a relevant field, is not reliable for this material if it does not address these matters. If we take "samurai" as a generic term for "warrior" or "soldier" then it's a truism that Yasuke was a samurai, but this is not worth mentioning; if we take it to mean someone who was born or adopted into one of the buke families of pre-modern Japan, then it's a truism that Yasuke was not a samurai and you won't find any scholar who argues otherwise. But if you are going to persist in name-calling, such questions are irrelevant as I don't want to discuss the matter with anyone who doesn't abide by WP:CIVIL. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:11, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't know why you assume that was directed at you. It was my understanding that the term was removed from the article at some point in the distant past and I didn't care to find out who it was. But you seem to have outed yourself here with that very stringent definition that is alien to the dictionary. By nature of his being a retainer in the Oda clan under a daimyo, Yasuke was a samurai. natemup (talk) 11:40, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Anon continues to vandalize the page with original research and biased edits. natemup (talk) 23:22, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I don't know any anon: I was invited to keep an eye this article by User:Goszei, and it was my edit that you reverted with the edit summary The removal of this term from the article was almost certainly vandalism. Moreover, at the end of every calendar month in 2020 the lead sentence described him as a "retainer" with a link to affinity (medieval), which unlike "samurai" is not a loaded term that implies an unverifiable (but likely wrong/anachronistic) conclusion: the present "samurai" debate seems to have been initiated in mid-February with this edit; accusing someone, even an editor who doesn't have an account (!), let alone someone with ten times your edit count over a period twice as long, of "vandalism" because said editors joined User:Havsjö in undoing your unilateral and WP:BOLD edit is simply unacceptable, and you need to stop doing it. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:13, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

And no, the fact that your initial BOLD edit stood for almost two weeks before someone else happened to notice the problem and changed it a third option does not make your edit the WP:STATUSQUO and said third option "bold". @Havsjö and Goszei: What would you say to restoring the lead sentence's "status quo ante bellum"? That he was a "retainer" of Nobunaga is plainly true and is probably the only verifiable fact about him, and my problem with "samurai" is that it's a vague term that typically is used as a translation of buke, and he almost certainly was not a buke, but how about you? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:24, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Sorry! It seems the original was a straight revert and the "man" thing originated with this edit more than a month later. "Samurai" appears to have stayed out of the lead sentence until very recently, when the bogus "former samurai" was added. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:37, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

The initial insertion of original research appears to have been in March 2019, when an idiosyncratic definition of "samurai" occasioned the removal of the term from the article. No source used then or now supports that change. Again, virtually every source used (and extant) calls Yasuke a samurai, which he was by dictionary definition as a retainer under a daimyo. It is quite literally the very warp and woof of his notability, of which I'm sure every editor involved is aware. And it has nothing to do with "Afrocentrism", as has been vandalistically added to the article as of late (in reference to a bunch of White dudes and the bloody BBC). I know Wikipedia has processes for resolving these kinds of conflicts, though I have not yet resorted to them. Choose your next step wisely. natemup (talk) 11:50, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you are talking about, but my definition of samurai comes from Kōjien for the Japanese meaning(s) and Merriam-Webster for the English meaning; neither of them support the edit you started unilaterally pushing in February. Going back to early 2019 to establish the "status quo" would be highly questionable by itself, but going back into the page's earlier history the opening sentence doesn't appear to have used the word "samurai" on December 31 of 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, or 2015. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

You're picking arbitrary dates. The article began by calling him a samurai, and has referred to him as such at various points since. I was restoring a previous version that should supersede later (and unilateral, undiscussed) edits that were based on original research and a definition not found in any source used in the article. Merriam-Webster states that a samurai is a retainer under a daimyo, which throughout this dispute the article has unequivocally claimed Yasuke to be (based on the exact same sources that say he was a samurai). natemup (talk) 17:09, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Natemup, I haven't looked at the sources in-depth, but I am so far inclined to agree with you that the lead should describe Yasuke as a samurai. The body could note that there is some disagreement on the matter. I also agree that "Afro-centric" was a bizarre and POV statement to add.

That said, your most recent revert was a violation of WP:3RR and I urge you to self-revert. I also don't believe the recent IP edits to be vandalism, though I am frustrated that they are not participating in talk page discussion. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 17:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC) Struck because I'm bad at counting.

From what I can see, I haven't made more than 3 reverts in the last 24 hours. natemup (talk) 18:16, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

You're totally right! Struck. You may want to reach out to the IPs to demonstrate that you're trying to avoid an edit war. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 18:22, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Response to Natemup's response to me: I'm not picking arbitrary dates. I'm trying to establish that for most of this article's history the word "samurai" was not used in the opening sentence, because that is the WP:STATUSQUO that should remain intact pending consensus to the contrary. You are picking arbitrary dates that support your position. Meanwhile, the fact that the article used the word samurai when it was first started is completely immaterial because it was created in the bad old days when Wikipedia was "elementary and often wrong". That said, the earliest version of this article was actually superior to your version since it didn't begin "○○ was a samurai" but rather clarifies that he was born in Africa and became a "samurai" (i.e., it makes clear from its opening line that it is using a definition of "samurai" that allows one to become such without being born into it or even being born on the same continent). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:25, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

The "Afro-centric" bit was indeed bizarre and POV, and should not be re-added. I advise that parties comment further in the section break below, while the version I have restored remains in place. Please keep discussion strictly to the content at hand. — Goszei (talk) 01:54, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Section break

I think this discussion needs a reset. Could both parties please present the sources for their position in this thread? I believe that Hijiri is correct on the procedural point of status quo, which should stay in place while we have this discussion, but let us please put that aside for the moment and grind down on the sources so we can sort this out. Proposed versions of the lead/body sections with citations would be appreciated. — Goszei (talk) 01:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

I believe I have now restored a version of the lead with a suitable claim to the "status quo ante bellum". I have retained several changes to the body made in the interim that are unrelated to the current dispute. — Goszei (talk) 01:50, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

• I don't think sources are necessary for a negative statement on a talk page per WP:BURDEN, but:
  • OED defines "samurai" as A member of a powerful military caste in feudal Japan.[1],
  • Collins defines it as In former times, a samurai was a member of a powerful class of fighters in Japan.[2],
  • MW defines it as the warrior aristocracy of Japan[3] (it also seems to have changed since I last checked, as it now includes the obviously highly problematic definition a military retainer of a Japanese daimyo practicing the code of conduct of Bushido as well, and the fact that neither Oxford nor Collins gives this definition implies it is the less common), and
  • the commentary track on the Hong Kong Legends DVD of Moon Warriors distinguishes "samurai" from a similar Chinese term by referring to samurai as a "class" (I am not saying this is a reliable scholarly source, but rather that it is reflective of the popular/colloquial understanding of the word in question).
    • All of these imply that the English word "samurai" corresponds to the Japanese word 武家 more than the modern colloquial sense of the false friend 侍 (i.e., "a warrior" or "a soldier"), so Japanese-language sources that refer to our subject as a 黒人侍 are not reliable for the claim that he "was a samurai" in the common English sense, and English-language sources that translate 黒人侍 as "Black samurai" or "African samurai" are therefore mistranslations.
  • There's also this blog entry that compiles quotations from / summaries of the surviving primary sources (sorry, but covid is preventing me from going to libraries or museums, especially ones outside Osaka -- the same is, of course, true for everyone else involved in these discussions, so all we have is what we have on hand and what we can dig up online, and whether we trust that they are not misquoting anything is a matter of faith). None of them describe this person as a 侍, 武士, 武家, 士, or other such term; he is referred to repeatedly as a "Black slave" (using Japanese that I don't think I should repeat in polite company -- Ctrl+F "を見", and it's the two characters before that), or as a 黒坊主 (which may be similarly problematic, but I can't figure out how to translate, since 坊主 could mean an abbot, a monk, a young boy, a bald person, a master of some art or field of learning, a guy who serves in a castle in some super-complicated capacity...[4]).

I have yet to see any reliable source in either English or Japanese that explicitly addresses the problem of whether our subject was granted a title as a member of feudal Japan's military aristocracy ("the samurai") or he was a strong man who served under Nobunaga. The fact that he does not seem to have been given a surname, and that he seems to have been returned to the the Christians after the Honnoji Incident, strongly imply the latter. This is, of course, not to say that it's not okay to address the question in our article if reliable sources can be located, or to clarify somewhere in the article what we mean by "samurai" and then use it under that definition, but to say in the opening sentence that "Yasuke was a [member of the military aristocracy of feudal Japan]" is highly problematic.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:40, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

I have little knowledge in this area, but I will offer some quotes and summarization from a copy I obtained of Lockley and Girard's African Samurai book, which explains their working definition of samurai:

Extended content

At Yasuke’s time the samurai formed the ruling class and almost anybody of note in Japanese society was a samurai. The rest, for the most part, aspired to be. [...] [However], [t]he samurai, as an identifiable class, had not started out this way. It then says that the Genpei War allowed samurai to advance from simple instruments of war and tax-collection muscle to the ruling class. On the Sengoku period: the endless battles took their toll on the limited ranks of the traditional samurai families, and many daimyō lords decided they needed to expand their armies. Gone were the days when a few hundred highly trained, magnificently attired samurai squared off against each other with swords in battle. By Yasuke’s era, the armies were tens of thousands strong and the need for cheap soldiers had provisionally overridden the need to keep peasants exclusively growing rice. Many of the peasants now found themselves receiving regular wages and better arms from their lords and they held an ambiguous dual status as farmers and lower-ranking samurai, known as ashigaru. (The key difference from traditional samurai being that ashigaru were not normally permanently retained, nor did they hold fiefs.) [...] Thus, following The Age of the Country at War, there was no shortage of “samurai” in Japan. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to half a million, could have claimed the epithet, though few would have any real family pedigree beyond the last couple of generations in the elite warrior world. A daimyō could call upon both direct personal retainers such as Yasuke, and part-time ashigaru warriors to swell his ranks. It is not known exactly which rank Yasuke held, but it would probably have been equivalent to hatamoto. The hatamoto saw to the lord’s needs, handling everything from finance to transport, communications to trade. They were also the bodyguards and pages to the warlord, traveling with him and spending their days in his company.

It primarily calls Yasuke a samurai, and a few times calls him a "samurai retainer". — Goszei (talk) 04:15, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Note: Lockley is the sole expert quoted in the following news stories currently used: BBC 2019, The Japan Times 2019, and CNN 2019. USAToday 2021 also cites Lockley liberally, and also cites once "Jeff Taylor" (who self-published his book, no good). — Goszei (talk) 04:36, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

I am a little concerned by some facts about Lockley and his work.

• His GScholar is not very comforting on his academic credentials. Here is his self-description: [5] I am a Japan-based academic who researches CLIL (content and language integrated learning ) and the history which I teach as part of CLIL. I publish both educational outcomes research and historical stories of the people who inspire my learners to greater language learning, international empathy and understanding.
• The Japan Times source says: While the book is based on primary sources, Lockley has had to make quite a lot of “research-based assumptions” in order to complete the narrative.
• His co-author on the book was Geoffrey Girard, an author who primarily writes historical fiction.
• The book was published by Hanover Square Press, which is by no means an academic publisher – self description: Launched in 2017, Hanover Square Press aims to publish compelling, original fiction and narrative nonfiction—the kind of books that keep you up all night reading and that you want to talk about the next morning..

If Lockley's works and the descendant mass-media sources were the only ones we had, I would be more comfortable citing them, but that's not the case. There are many Japanese-language sources currently cited in this article (of whose academic credentials/merits I am uncertain, but I presume to be better than this), and I think we need to evaluate those first. — Goszei (talk) 05:07, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

To be clear, Lockley has published three works on Yasuke, none of which were published anywhere academic.

• Lockley 2016 was published in a collection of treatises populated only by members of his university's faculty. ([6])
• Lockley 2017 was published by Ohta Publishing, which our article makes clear is not academic either.
• Lockley/Girard 2019 was what I analyzed in my above comment. — Goszei (talk) 05:59, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Concerning the matter at hand—that of sources, rather than cherry-picked dictionary entries—virtually every source cited in the article refers to Yasuke as a samurai. Full stop. It is literally the reason the article was created and is the warp and woof of Yasuke's significance. This has been obscured by an unsourced edit from 2019 that insisted on a hereditary definition of "samurai"—which is one of at least two, the other of which was cited above (and swiftly no-true-Scotsman'ed) by Hijiri. And lest anyone be misled, the article has been categorized under ~"foreign samurai" throughout this entire brouhaha, since well before I ever got involved, indicating the original state of the article before vandalism took hold. Hijiri has also deemed what would be considered a reliable source on any other article as unreliable here, even scholars whose work is *already* cited in the article without controversy. Thus three additional reliable sources I added have been removed, while the obvious original research seen above from Hijiri is being represented in the article at present without justification. natemup (talk) 04:28, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

and swiftly no-true-Scotsman'ed Wait, what? Please focus on content. I was quite clear that if we want to use the broader (Japanese) definition of "samurai" as meaning "soldier" or "servant", we can, but not in the lead sentence and not without comment, because (i) that is not how the word is conventionally used in English (as per its being unattested in most major dictionaries) and (ii) that is not how it is defined in the lead of the linked article. (If you are talking about how I called the definition "obviously highly problematic": it is a truism that Yasuke could not have "practic[ed] the code of conduct of Bushido" since said "code" was essentially invented around 300 years after Yasuke's death.[7])

As for general sources on Yasuke rather than ones specifically addressing the issue at hand (the definition of the word "samurai"), it would not be difficult to find sources on Yasuke that don't use the word "samurai" to describe him. Here is a Japanese popular culture (fictional) source that is arguably no worse than some of the sources previously cited, and here is a more academic one, but since it is impossible to prove a negative (and Wikipedia policy explicitly says we don't have to) of course such sources prove nothing. And needless to say, no one has yet produced a Japanese-language source that describes Yasuke as a 武家 or some term equivalent to how the above English dictionaries define "samurai".

Anyway, would you mind me asking how you would define "samurai"? If we know what those who want the word "samurai" to be used in the lead sentence want the meaning of this to be, I think that would help in figuring out a compromise, as I am only now getting the feeling we have been talking past each other and you have not been trying to make the claim that Yasuke was a member of the military aristocracy.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:50, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Both the Wikipedia article on samurai and the top dictionary definitions describe them (in at least one meaning) as the retainers of Daimyo. The sources say Yasuke was that. And I'm not aware of a Japanese-language requirement for reliable ones on this website. natemup (talk) 01:49, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Both the Wikipedia article on samurai and the top dictionary definitions describe them (in at least one meaning) as the retainers of Daimyo. That's simply not true. That is more technically accurate to the Japanese meaning of the word samurai, but all English dictionaries, and the opening sentence of our article define "samurai" as a a member of a warrior aristocracy. It is the exception that does otherwise (actually, no major dictionary gives the exact definition you cite, unless you consider "military" and "practicing the code of conduct of Bushido" to be inconsequential parts of the definition you are citing), and it seems that you are only claiming the word means X and not Y in order to "win" this argument so you can alter the article to make readers come away thinking Y, not X. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:19, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Okay, I see that Natemup has resorted to going to the samurai article and attempting to change the definition given there in the hopes that claiming that buke status was not "hereditary" will end this. I asked above for Natemup's definition of "samurai" and he seemingly ignored my request, but it now seems that he is actively trying to change any definition that he can in order to make the term practically meaningless. If a "samurai" is "anyone a semi-reliable source has called a samurai", then there is no reason to use such a meaningless term in the lead sentence of this article, any more than there is to use it in our Tom Cruise article. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:03, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

I have located digital scans of many of the primary sources that Lockley includes in the end matter of his book. [8] We shouldn't trust the content of this Reddit comment, obviously, but the links seem useful. — Goszei (talk) 03:25, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Well, "black monk" is a mistranslation; he/she cites Wikipedia and says we got it wrong to say "page", but 坊, as I said above, has a multiplicity of meanings, and indeed a nearly identical word to that used in the primary source (with ん inserted between the two kanji) is apparently the Japanese equivalent of the N-word. Apart from problems like this, these look useful, and at least "cafre" doesn't look like a translation from Japanese and provides a hint to the unrelated problem discussed below. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:20, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Methinks an RfC is in order both here and on the "Samurai" page. natemup (talk) 14:33, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

I mean... maybe? But you've been extremely evasive regarding what it is you want this article to say. You clearly don't want it to say our subject was "a member of the hereditary military aristocracy of Japan" because you tried to change the definition of "samurai" so it no longer says that. You've instead resorted to personal attacks and accusations of "original research" because the rest of us are carefully reading sources to see what they actually say, while you have been picking up words here and there and presenting them out of context. In this kind of situation, what would the RFC question even say? If it was just Should the article describe him as a "samurai"?, that doesn't work because I at least have not been arguing against that (I think it's fine to refer to him as a "samurai" in the article body, if "samurai" is defined inline as being something different from "hereditary military aristocracy of pre-modern Japan"). If the question was Should the lead sentence describe him as a "samurai" without further clarification? then it's fairly certain that most Wikipedia editors would oppose it, since the only sources that have been located that support such a claim either (a) are not RSes for Japanese history articles or (b) use a different definition of "samurai" from how the word is commonly used in English and defined in the lead of the samurai article. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:22, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

I will refrain from making a comment on what other editors would oppose until they have been consulted. I think it should read as "samurai" without explanation, because the public consensus (outside of Wikipedia and in the writings of several authors) seems to be that a samurai can be non-hereditary—a note contradicted on the Samurai wiki page only because of relatively recent edits from those such as (if not exactly) yourself. natemup (talk) 19:25, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

the public consensus ... seems to be that a samurai can be non-hereditary That is simply ridiculous and (as you have been told multiple times!!!) completely unrelated to the current dispute. Some sources refer to our subject as being created a member of the military aristocracy of feudal Japan, but those sources are not specialists in Japanese history (or even just "history"); other sources written by slightly more qualified individuals (but still not peer-reviewed or published through university presses) use "samurai" in a slightly more generic sense that is not how 99.999% of English speakers would intuitively understand it. You seem to be claiming that our subject (who, again, does not even seem to have had a family name but rather a super-generic, practically derogatory nickname -- bear in mind of course that the warrior caste were distinguished by their possession of family names[9]) was created a member of the hereditary military aristocracy of Japan[10] but that he was just created a member of the hereditary military aristocracy of Japan, since I doubt even Lockley/Girard 2019 support such a claim. Where is your source for any of this? Why would you think that? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:51, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

As has been the case from the beginning, my claim is only that Yasuke is referred to as a samurai in reliable sources (including virtually every source on the internet and those currently in this article), and that the primary dictionary definitions of samurai include non-hereditary descriptions. Again, we are in need of an RfC. natemup (talk) 02:20, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

That's not how WP:BURDEN works. You need reliable sources, enough to justify the inclusion of your specific claim in this article. Others have told you that since our article entitled samurai currently defines the term as referring to the hereditary military aristocracy of pre-modern Japan, sources that use the term in a different sense are not reliable for the specific claim you are making. Use of the term in the article body (not the lead sentence), accompanied by clarification that the term does not, here, refer to the hereditary military aristocracy of pre-modern Japan, would be different, but you have specifically rejected that proposal, and have refused to cite a single academic source written by a historian of pre-modern Japan that says our subject was made a member of the hereditary military aristocracy of pre-modern Japan. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:40, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

And, as discussed, you and a few other editors are the reason that the Samurai article refers to them as hereditary. It did not previously say this. Moreover, that is a textbook example of citing Wikipedia. As it is, you have no-true-Scotsman'ed every straightforward explanation and reliable source I've presented, which is why I'm calling for an RfC. natemup (talk) 02:50, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I have hardly ever edited the samurai article, and it would be in much better shape both sourcing- and prose-wise if it were the work of me and the other editors I normally tend to pal around with; but the description of "samurai" status as being hereditary is not one of that article's many failings. It is so widely known that even someone who got everything they learned about Japanese history from James Clavell's Shōgun and Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai would understand this fact. And anyway, what "reliable sources" are being referred to with this you have no-true-Scotsman'ed every ... reliable source I've presented -- I see one work of pop history (historical fiction?) written by a novelist and an American historian who works in a Japanese university (and seems to have published more on English pedagogy in Japan than pre-modern Japanese history, with his works in the latter field generally going through non-academic presses[11] -- indeed, his actual job appears to be in Nihon U's law school,[12] implying that he is employed primarily as an English teacher,[13] since the history of the Azuchi-Momoyama period and Oda Nobunaga more properly "belong" to the faculty of letters as in practically all major Japanese universities[14] -- it really, really hurts me to have to write this kind of thing about a fellow professional ネイティブスピーカー and amateur 研究者 in a field I enjoy, and I hate that I have now been forced to state it outright) and one Japanese translation of a work of popular history with said American historian who works in a Japanese university as its sole author that seems to be using "samurai" in a broader sense but even if it weren't it wouldn't matter since it did apparently not go through any kind of peer-review or editing process, and even its author appears to specialize in an entirely different field; but more importantly, neither of these sources were actually presented by you, as far as I can see. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:51, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

This all seems like a very roundabout way of avoiding an RfC. Please initiate one, as I don't know how to. natemup (talk) 12:26, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

RFC doesn't seem like the appropriate way of addressing this. I have asked for outside opinions regarding the "hereditary" matter (which you brought up above) on RSN. If you like, I could open a separate thread on whether the sources you claim to have cited are reliable for the content you are attributing to them: which sources are they, anyway? Surely none are by L, since we've already established that, since he is an English teacher at a Japanese law school, he is unreliable for the WP:EXTRAORDINARY claim that our subject was made a member of Japan's hereditary military aristocracy. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:47, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

As you know, that isn't my claim and whatever means there are to get this conversation out of this two-man back-and-forth should be initiated posthaste. The sources currently in the article and others extant on the internet (news sources, books, journal articles, etc) are all on the table. natemup (talk) 16:27, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

• FWIW I got access to Lockley 2016 (the closest thing to a peer-reviewed, scholarly source that gives any significant coverage to our subject) does include a definition of "samurai"; if a Japanese daigaku kiyō doesn't call our subject a "samurai" without clarifying in a footnote what that term means in the relevant context (because it's quite different from what it normally means in colloquial English), there's no way in hell English Wikipedia should be doing otherwise. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:58, 29 May 2021 (UTC)
• I'm out Please consider all my comments on this page stricken. I will support whatever the consensus of editors other than myself decides upon. Regardless of what said consensus is, so be it. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:02, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

I have seen all arguments on all sides, each one having a fair point, having said that. I would argue that since Japanese culture consider Yasuke himself as a samurai to the point list him AS one in there own section of wikipedia, that he should be re-included ON the list.

The link to those who don't believe me: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E6%B5%B7%E5%A4%96%E5%87%BA%E8%BA%AB%E3%81%AE%E6%AD%A6%E5%A3%AB — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.222.128.86 (talk) 17:23, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

@158.222.128.86 (talk · contribs) --

Regarding this edit of yours on the Yasuke page, you stated in your edit comment:

Japan list him as a samurai as seen here as seen here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E6%B5%B7%E5%A4%96%E5%87%BA%E8%BA%AB%E3%81%AE%E6%AD%A6%E5%A3%AB

There are two problems with this.

• Wikipedia is not a valid source for Wikipedia.

This means that you cannot use another Wikipedia article, even in another language, as a citation for adding text to another Wikipedia article.

• The page at ja:Category:海外出身の武士 does not list Yasuke as a samurai.

That page is for the category titled 海外出身の武士 (kaigai shusshin no bushi). Note the use of the word 武士 (bushi). In Japanese, this does not mean "samurai" (a specific hereditary class of caste in the social system of Edo-era Japan), and instead means "warrior" (put simply, a non-hereditary job in the social system of Edo-era Japan).

Not all "samurai" were "warriors", and not all "warriors" were "samurai". These were disparate, partially-overlapping categories.

See also the discussion threads at Talk:Samurai#Separate_section_needed_for_claimed_foreign_samurai and Talk:Yasuke#Request_for_comment_on_samurai_terminology. The former includes useful tables breaking down some of the differences between the "samurai" and "warrior" categories.

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 18:42, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

If we're going to restart this discussion, it should be based on new or newly-discovered sources, not on the actions of another Wikipedia. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 19:03, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Slave or Servant

Because of the ambiguity in whether he was a slave or a servant, I removed the categories that mention him as slave. Thoughts?Manabimasu (talk) 22:32, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Good idea. I'm sure it was from an old version of the page. natemup (talk) 22:40, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

黒奴 means "Negro slave" and is used in several of the primary sources. Admittedly most of these primary sources are (Japanese translations of?) Jesuit transactions, which Lockley 2017 appears to dismiss on the basis that 16th-century Jesuits didn't allow slavery, a rather outlandish claim from a historical standpoint given that Jesuits were buying and selling slaves in the United States even as late as the 1830s and our article on them repeatedly implies that they were among those Christians who opposed the enslavement of Native Americans and instead advocated for the importation of slaves from Africa (and no, I'm not basing this view on Wikipedia -- even setting aside the common sense that slavery was widely accepted in European society at the time and condoned by the Catholic church, peer-reviewed journal articles agree). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:40, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

@Manabimasu: I'm not that invested in this matter, but this is definitely not a reliable source on the matter; she cites the 2019 work of pop history / historical fiction discussed here, but Lockley seems to base his assumption that our subject could not have been a slave on the fact that he came to Japan with Jesuits and Jesuits opposed slavery, an extraordinary claim seemingly based on a misunderstanding of European debates on slavery in the 16th century (Jesuits were apparently generally among those who argued against using natives of the Americas as slaves, instead favouring the enslavement and transportation of Africans like our subject) and contradicted my numerous well-known historical facts. Moreover, almost all of our primary sources refer to our subject as a slave. I don't have a particularly strong view on this matter either way, and I don't like this edit or its edit summary for various policy reasons, but you didn't revert it based on said policy reasons so much as your apparent belief that the sources that reject the idea that our subject was a slave have the better case, no? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:15, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: I won’t comment on reliability of any source. I don’t have access to Cooper nor Fujita. Since Fujita is non-English(WP:RSUE), preference is to Cooper. Does Cooper have him as a slave? Or at least Fujita? Fujita from the inline citation has “slave or shipmate”. If so or you have a secondary source that states so, you can revert my edit.Manabimasu (talk) 16:18, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I am not commenting on the reliability of sources to which I don't currently have access, and I have already spent too much money on this article, so I will not have access to Fujita or Kaneko until the next time I can get to the library. (Please bear in mind that WP:NONENG is meant to be applied carefully based on context. Older or non-scholarly sources in English are treated as less reliable than recent scholarship in other languages, and in this article's case many, perhaps most, of the interested readership in the long term -- i.e., once interest in the Netflix show dies down -- are based in Japan [meaning it's much more difficult to access old English sources] and have some level of comprehension of Japanese [meaning that NONENG's assumption that the reader only reads English also does not necessarily apply]. This of course applies also to editors experienced in Japanese topics.) I also am not interested in defending various IP editors' misunderstanding of our policy regarding altering Wikipedia text currently attached to an inline citation. This is not an issue I have looked into that extensively, but from what I can see the primary sources (which are freely available online) either refer to our subject as a slave or do not say one way or the other, and the one written source that I do have easy access to (Lockley 2017) seems to consider it unlikely that Yasuke was a slave but this assumption seems to be based on the rather dubious claim that the Jesuits overall opposed the enslavement of Africans, but Lockley's more recent public lectures seem to side-step the issue of whether our subject himself was a slave while recognizing that the Africans travelling to Japan with the Jesuits included both slaves and non-slaves.[15] Have you read a reliable source that argues that our subject was not a slave? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 23:31, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

There seems to be no actual evidence from the time that he was a slave. Academic sources lay it out as a possibility, but I think we cannot present it as a sure fact on this page. The best way to present it is indeed to say that it is possible that he might have been a slave but that the evidence is unclear. The "Histoire Ecclesiastique Des Isles Et Royaumes Du Japon,", which seems to be the main primary source, calls him a "valet". Eccekevin (talk) 10:25, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

As I mentioned on your talk page, Valignano sent a letter to Rome saying that he had acquired a number of slaves in Africa, and he seems to have taken one of them on with him to Japan. Given that at least one professional historian takes this as being a reference to our subject (who, needless to say, did not get his name [which in modern Japanese means "sushi"] until getting to Japan), it is not our place as Wikipedians to be second-guessing her based on our original assessment of pre-modern sources and our assumption that "valet" (in 18th-century French) and "slave" (in contemporary English) are mutually exclusive terms. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:42, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I am not second guessing her (although I have yet to see a source), I am just saying that since there is no direct evidence, we have to phrase it so to make it clear that these are supposition/deductions of historians, rather than known/proven facts. Eccekevin (talk) 02:09, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Everything in history is supposition/deductions of historians, rather than known/proven facts. It's all about probability judgements. In this case, our evidence is a letter written by Valignano in which he says that he acquired a slave in Africa, and later one or two other documents say he presented a Black man to Nobunaga and this man was named Yasuke. That is stronger "direct evidence" than we have for the vast majority of slaves in human history having been slaves, most of whom are not named specifically in any historical documents but definitely existed and were slaves. Anyway, here's the source that I already linked on your talk page and you seem to have missed. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:58, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

That is fine, but then we have to be clear and follow WP:ATT, and state that this interpretation of the letter of Valignano is to be attributed to the NHK or whatever historian has made it. And, especially in this dubious context, I think we should write it as you said it: "According to a NHK docuemntary, Yasuke was probably a slave, since Valignano says in a letter that he acquired a slave in Africa, and later one or two other documents say he presented a Black man to Nobunaga and this man was named Yasuke". This would be neutral, without making claims that are stronger than those found in the literature, which would beWP:SYNTH or WP:OR. Eccekevin (talk) 04:55, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

You still have not answered my question on your talk page regarding your ability to read the Japanese sources. The claim does not originate in the NHK documentary but rather is attributed by NHK directly to Oka, who also says it directly in her interview. Her criticisms of the final product were not that it attributed statements directly to her that she never made, but rather that, in regard to other aspects of the topic, it did not include her interpretation of the matter but rather included footage of a non-specialist saying such-and-such might be the case (which is bad history). Moreover, the claim definitely does not originate with Oka (who had not researched this exact topic before being approached by NHK) or NHK (who made the documentary to tie into the then-recent Netflix show) as your proposed wording implies: this video game YouTuber in 2019 said that "most people theorize that he was a slave from Mozambique". You have, moreover, been unable to locate a single reliable source, written by a historian, that says "he was not a slave". Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:06, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I'm not saying he wasn't a slave, I am saying we need sources to claim that he was, need to attribute those sources, and put them in context. Right now the only source apart from Lockley seems to be this NHK documentary (I am not counting blogs are RS, although I also haven't seen anything about him being a slave in those blogs). Eccekevin (talk) 06:12, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

A blog from a professional historian is a much better source than a work of historical fiction or pop history written by a TEFL teacher, even one with an interest in history (and I say that as former TEFL teacher with an interest in history). Anyway, here's another article by historian Daimon Watanabe that takes it as a given that Yasuke was a slave.[16] Here's another article by the same.[17] Here's an article in a popular magazine that does the same.[18] Here's a Japanese translation of the latter.[19] Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 07:02, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Those are not reliable academic sources. I am just trying to find a good source that claims he was a slave, and provide attribution.Eccekevin (talk) 07:36, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Eccekevin, the sourcing isn't very great on either side. Having looked into Lockley a bit, and that press, leaves me unconvinced that that's the kind of source we can call "academic" or properly peer-reviewed. [Foreign Policy]] is an acceptable source, I'd say--and that author calls Lockley's book "excellent", but at the same time has no problem proclaiming that "He would have been kidnapped and enslaved as a boy and sold to Portuguese traders", so it remains a mixed bag. Either way, I have to say that I thoroughly disagree with this edit. "Possibly as a slave" would have been a better option; "in the service of" denies that possibility and instead offers a euphemism; "in the service of" might include "enslaved" only for those who have no real appreciation for what slavery is. Drmies (talk) 16:12, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I didn't add anything, I simply reverted this change from an IP without source.Eccekevin (talk) 01:36, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

That doesn't square. Yeah, similar language has existed in the article since at least July 2012 (arbitrary date), but back then the article also unambiguously described him as a slave. You are the latest of a number of editors who have tried, with sub-standard sources, to claim that he was not a slave (immediately following the edit in question, the only use of the word "slave" in the article was in relation to unrelated Africans who arrived here decades earlier). The wording in question was in fact introduced by someone whose point was the opposite of yours[20] but then quickly altered by someone similarly seeking to remove all reference to our subject being a slave.[21]

Moreover, this statement and this one appear to apply a pretty unfair double standard; I have been careful not to add new original prose to the article without a reliable source (since there are so few genuinely reliable sources, I have not added much to this article at all...), and have instead limited myself to reverting unsourced or poorly-sourced changes to the status quo, but when I reverted your change, you accused me of "adding unsourced claims". The only "claim" that was in the text I restored was that he was a slave, and as far as I can see the two best sources that have been cited in this discussion are (i) the Watanabe articles and (ii) the Oka NHK interview. Both of these refer to him as a slave (奴隷 in Japanese), and while neither is a peer-reviewed academic source, the same is true of Lockley's pop-history book (and of these sources), and unlike Lockley both Watanabe and Oka are professional historians specializing in this area of history. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:33, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

That's not how normal Wikipedia editing works. If all the reliable sources say (or assume) he was a slave, then we just say he was a slave, and include the source(s) in the citations appearing at the bottom of the page. It is not standard practice to say "According to X, Y and Z..." for statements that are only controversial among a small number of Wikipedians (or even among outside bloggers, Twitter-users, etc.); indeed, doing so often creates the false impression that "the jury is still out" (to use a comparison to a more prominent case, no Wikipedia article says, or should say, that According to [Eugenie Scott], the view that all life on earth was created by god in its present form has minimal acceptance among scientists). If you can find a reliable source saying that it is controversial among such-and-such, then such-and-such can be named in the article as a dissenting voice. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:42, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I am the third of three users in this section alone pointing out that there is ambiguity on his status as slave, WP:ATT more than applies. Eccekevin (talk) 18:08, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I have not seen any sources that approach even the level of a blog written by, or a dubious interview with, a reputable historian and that dispute that he was a slave. WP:ATT, a failed proposal for a policy, does not apply to any page, but least of all a page whose content is disputed by a small number of Wikipedia editors who refuse to cite reliable sources (and one of whom was, if I recall correctly, already topic-banned...?). Writing the article so as to imply that there is a controversy among scholars regarding the matter, when no sources have been presented that imply as much and the only controversy exists among a small number of Wikipedia editors, would violate the actual policies of WP:WEIGHT and WP:NOR. Anyway, I don't think it's appropriate for you to be speaking for User:Manabimasu, someone who is from all I've seen a good Wikipedian who just didn't have access to sources back in April (so soon after the cartoon was released on Netflix). Manabimasu, do you still "point out that there is ambiguity on his status as [a] slave" in light of the sources I posted above and the NHK interview with Oka? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:28, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

I just noticed that my last comment in May requested a reliable source that disputes that our subject was a slave, and Eccekevin responded with OR about how a 17th-century Jesuit history doesn't use the word slave -- needless to say, no work of Jesuit propaganda from the 17th century would be generally regarded as reliable for our purposes: maybe the author knew that Yasuke was a slave but wanted to disassociate his Jesuit colleagues with the slave trade? This is SYNTH on my part, since I'm applying what I know about the history of Jesuits and the history of slavery to a specific old book that is not mentioned in the reliable sources I've consulted on the matter, but at least I have consulted reliable sources on the matter; Eccekevin is simply taking a 17th-century work of propaganda at its word. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:34, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Attribution is required for any challenge statement for Wikipedia:Verifiability, so I simply say that this needs attribution and a source. Lockley disputes it, and while you may not agree, he still is a published scholar, even if you don't like him. But most of all, I am concerned with the lack of sources stating that he is a slave, since all we've got so far is the non-scholarly documentary. Eccekevin (talk) 00:44, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Attribution is required for any challenge statement for Wikipedia:Verifiability That policy is talking about a citation of a source, and my personal policy is that everything should be cited, so that's redundant; what you are talking about now (rewriting the prose to say Oka says X [but Eccekevin says Y]) is not supported by policy. Lockley disputes it Give me a page number. I own a Kindle copy of Lockley 2019, but I'm not going to waste my time reading it from cover to cover because I found out shortly after purchasing it that Lockley is not a professional historian but rather an English teacher. he still is a published scholar He's not; he's an English teacher with a hobbyist's interest in our present topic. even if you don't like him Please don't make assumptions about who I personally "like" and "don't like". I don't know Lockley personally (even if we do sometimes run in the same circles), but even if I had an opinion of him as a person it wouldn't change the fact that he is not a professional historian, let alone one specializing in one of the relevant historical domains like Oka or Kaneko.

Anyway, page number please. I did a 文字検索 for "slave", which brought up a bunch of references to slavery but couldn't find any explicit statement to the effect "I don't think our present subject was ever a slave".

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:18, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

This just came to my attention, but Lockley's official Facebook page includes a post about the NHK documentary, in which he refers to the "new discoveries" (i.e., the Valignano letter [which the narrator refers to as such] and the document on Matadayū [which Lockley refers to as such]). Given this (and the fact that he seems to have had a controlling influence on the content of the documentary), I don't think any source written by Lockley before May 2021 can be taken as a reliable source for his currently holding a different view from the one espoused in the documentary (even if it does turn out that in 2017 or 2019 he explicitly said "I don't think Yasuke was ever a slave"). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:19, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Your interpretation of a Facebook post is definitely Original Research. Eccekevin (talk) 08:08, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

From WP:NOR: This policy of no original research does not apply to talk pages[,] ... which evaluate article content and sources This accusation is made against me so often I have it listed at User:Hijiri88#Pet peeves. You are claiming that the documentary is not a reliable source because [I told you that] Oka has said she doesn't like, and yet your preferred source, Lockley, has nothing but praise for the documentary. You also have not given me a page number or disclosed whether or not you can read Japanese. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:25, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

I've reverted the most recent edit. Needless to say, I am not going to "own" any problems with the version I have restored, including any lack of inline citations or including information in the lead, infobox, or categories that is not also found in the article body. Per WP:V, information needs to be verifiable (which, per the above, it is), but not necessarily conforming to a particular citation style. If anyone believes, in good faith, that I should "fix" all the problems with this article if I am going to argue this particular historical point on the talk page... fine, I will, but in my own time, and definitely not before the end of November. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:36, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

You cannot add unsourced claims. Any claim without a source can be removed at any time, per WP:Verifiability. I reverted to the version before an unregistered IP added the word slave without a source (you can [the addition here] ). Eccekevin (talk) 08:41, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Additionally, you mentioned the NHK documentary, but these is also another documentary, done with the historical consultation of Hiraku Kaneko, that claims that assertions that he was a slave to be speculative at best.

I will be checking out ["The Portuguese slave trade in early modern Japan : merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean slaves"] by Lúcio De Sousa, which seems a perfect source for this topic. Lockley says he consulted this book and De Sousa himself, so I wonder if this books also mentions Yasuke.

Finally, I'd like to point out that Lokcley (who states as recently as 2019 that Yasuke was likely not a slave) is a contributor for the peer-reviewed Journal of Global Slavery, so he has academic expertise in the subject.

All Lockley says on his Facebook page is "Spoiler alert, there are some new discoveries about his life.", he does not mention anything about slavery or that in any way he has changed his opinion. Eccekevin (talk) 09:32, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

I didn't. You removed information that had been in the article for most of its history, without citing a source; I pointed you to several sources on the talk page, and you ignored me, so I reverted you. I did not add any new unsourced information but rather restored some uncited (but sourced) information).

I'm sorry, but does that claim come from Kaneko or from the filmmakers? Have you seen the docu-drama in question? The NHK documentary includes an interview with Oka Mihoko, in which she actually refers to him as a slave.

It might, but after all of the above, I don't trust you to report what it actually says: if it contains text that supports what you want the article to say, I now strongly suspect you will quote said text at me and leave out anything that doesn't support your position. Anyway, if you haven't read the source yet and don't even know if it mentions our subject, why would you bring it up here?

2019 is not "recent" in this particular topic area. Everything changed in April of this year. Moreover "he has academic expertise in the subject" is not the same as what you have been saying thus far, nor does having written a book review for a peer-reviewed publication by itself make him a professional historian or an expert in this field: (almost?) all of his actual peer-reviewed work[22] has been in the field of English pedagogy or the very closely related area of CLIL, and it also wouldn't surprise me if he got his MA and PhD in English or teaching (although none of his nor anything I could find online actually provide that information).

You haven't watched the NHK documentary (and, per your repeated refusal to answer my question regarding your ability to read Japanese, I suspect you couldn't understand it even if you watched it), so you don't know what he's talking about. I've watched it multiple times and I think it's painfully obvious what he's talking about. I've also seen a reasonable amount of evidence that, if he didn't agree with something, it wouldn't have made it in, much less been stated matter-of-factly over the course of around 20 minutes of airtime.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:36, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

References

Lockley 2016, Lockley 2017, and Lockley 2019?

I have some questions about these. Amazon says Lockley 2017 is close to 300 pages in Japanese, so it's a little hard to believe that it could be a translation of Lockley 2016, which is less than 40 pages -- can someone identify the English version and replace the citations? I understand that WP:NONENG prioritizes a reliable source text in a foreign language over a possibly mistaken translation into English, so all the more we should almost never cite a translation of a text originally written in English. Lockley 2019, while I appreciate that it is not cited anywhere in the article, it appears based on its co-authors' resumes to be a work of historical fiction, and is therefore inappropriate even for a further reading section -- the article includes an "In popular culture" section for that reason. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:27, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

I was looking for the English version of Lockley 2017 as well, to no avail. He talks about what happened a little in this interview, and I think that Lockley 2017 was only ever published in Japanese because it was derived from an unpublished expansion of the Lockley 2016 essay. — Goszei (talk) 06:02, 7 May 2021 (UTC) See my comment below. — Goszei (talk) 06:31, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

According to this academic review (accessible through WP:TWL), Lockley 2019 is a work of popular history. I quote the paragraph most pertinent to the discussion here:

The book is clearly intended as popular history, and, while it might be unfair to judge a book by what is it not, the scarcity of primary sources on Yasuke is compounded by the lack of scholarly citations or other means to document the narrative. The afterward lists chapter-by-chapter “Selected Readings” of primary and secondary sources, but no direct citations. The omission of citations is not necessarily a question a veracity of the scholarship, but the authors frequently go into detail about Yasuke and his personal reactions, like his kidnapping from Africa and his sword fight with a young enemy samurai, with no cited documentation. Likewise, there is no discussion of the evidence that explains how, in just fifteen months, Yasuke and Nobunaga developed such a close relationship. Was it just Yasuke’s height and skin color? Presumably, much of this might come from Fróis or be based on reasonable speculation, but, without specific references, details often seem like creative embellishments, rather than historical narrative.
— R. W. Purdy

_dk (talk) 06:06, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

• So, after writing the above I noticed that the Japanese version of Lockley 2017 is on Kindle and therefore immediately accessible to those who, like me, are interested in this topic outside of Wikipedia arguments and therefore wouldn't mind paying to own a copy. It says that it is a translation of Yasuke: In [S]earch of the African Samurai, which it says was published in 2016; however, putting this into Google brings up a bunch of libraries, etc. that all seem to have it quite confused with another book, as they all show a photo of the cover of a book with a different title,[23][24][25] and one even says Search is a different book due to be published in 2019![26] Moreover, they all attribute the book to Thomas Lockley and Geoffrey Girard, which the translation does not. Moreover, as skeptical as I am of Lockley 2017's scholarly value, it is at least a work of non-fiction with extensive endnotes, and I don't think Girard -- apparently a novelist by profession -- would have anything to do with such a book. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:17, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  I just read the author's note in Lockley 2019, where Lockley says that the book had an earlier rendering of this book (published in Japan), and then thanks Ohta Publishing and Yoshiko Fuji (the publisher and translators of Lockley 2017). He goes on to explain that he teamed up with Girard in 2017, whose new tips, ideas and techniques which continuously strengthened and took the book in new, exciting and often unforeseen directions. It appears these two books are in fact the same book, the latter having a popular history spin from Girard. — Goszei (talk) 06:31, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

  I own paper book of 2017 and 2019. I can say 2017 had nothing to do with Geoffrey Girard. 2019 version looks like historical novel for me but contains new findings after 2017.--Sacchisachi (talk) 15:43, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Folding screen "depicting a well-dressed black man who could be Yasuke"?

My Kindle copy of Lockley 2017 doesn't have page numbers so I can only guess that "pp. 147–148" probably corresponds to (the latter half of?) "十六世紀の日本にいたアフリカ人" (which is seemingly around two thirds of the way through the volume), but this explicitly says that there is no possibility that Yasuke was the model for the man in the image. Moreover, the first two thirds of this paragraph appears to bear a closer resemblance to a much earlier passage in Lockley 2017 (the final paragraph of "信長の小姓に", perhaps about halfway through the first chapter), which explicitly states that none of the African men portrayed in such screens is Yasuke but that there is a high probability that Yasuke left an impression on Eitoku and that memore served as a model for his later depictions of other African men. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:04, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

@Sacchisachi: I was curious, so I used Wikiblame and, after a number of tries (the text has gone through several permutations in the last three and a half years), found that you originally added this text.[27] Do you have a paper copy of Lockley 2017 that you can check? My Kindle copy makes pinpointing page numbers difficult, but if you could quote the first five or six characters of the relevant paragraph(s) that would be a tremendous help. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:38, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: The book was written in Japanese, translated from Lockley's original English text. At that time, I thought that the translation was not good, and found some conflicting descriptions in the book. That paragraph 「残念ながら、屏風絵の中の人物が...」also looked conflicting for me and I interpreted that there is no "faithful portrait" of Yasuke but later Kano painter put him as one of the characters in byobu. But now I think your interpretation is better. On the other hand, the new TV program of NHK about Yasuke starring Lockley and other scholars was aired yesterday. The program introduced one byobu possibly depicting Yasuke according to a museum curator. I wonder this can not be the source though.Sacchisachi (talk) 15:23, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

It seems somewhat inappropriate to be assessing whether this or that passage may be mistranslated or dubious and insert our own interpretations (this is actually explicitly prohibited by WP:NOR). If Lockley 2017 is dubious, then Lockley 2016 should be consulted, and if Lockley 2016 is dubious, then none of these sources should be used.

I would also be very, very reluctant to trust such a show regarding such speculations, per Oka's blog cited below. The producers might have asked the curator if they had any possible depictions of Yasuke, had the curator show them a screen that could be the least implausible, and then cut around it to make it seem "possible". Moreover, I don't think other Wikipedia articles include speculation about how certain artworks may possibly depict this or that historical figure, since history is, by definition, about what is probable, not what is possible. (Ask any New Testament historian.)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:34, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

@Hijiri88:I apology for causing misunderstanding about it, I will delete that section. I will be more careful about the statement not directly from expert of the topic. I now fully agree your opinion that history is what is probable not possible. On the other hand, I am afraid to say I think the problem is Lockley, the most known expert of Yasuke is maximalist which other historian called him according to 2017.「君は最大主義者的手法を取っているように思う。」「同じだけの確率で"ないかもしれない"場合もにも、大体において"あるかもしれない"方を採用している。とはいっても、史料が不十分な場合には、そうでもしないと先に進めないだろう」 Lockley was the first author who wrote the book about Yasuke exclusively, most of information about Yasuke relies on his research seeking what is possible. That is one of the origins of confusions in this article, I think. We have to discuss about it on other section though. Thank you for clarify my fault.--Sacchisachi (talk) 04:28, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

In popular culture

@KuroMina: Thank you for your recent edits. I was actually wondering how to incorporate Kurosuke and Endō Shūsaku, since they're almost certainly more important to this topic than practically everything else in the article.

The problem, though, is that neither is really "popular culture" as our article defines it. Endō Shūsaku is generally regarded as one of the more important novelists in the post-war Japanese literary tradition, and Kurosuke appears to almost always be mentioned in conjunction with its literary award. Another (probably bigger) issue is that Wikipedia "In popular culture" sections generally appear in articles on historical, mythological, or literary figures who were later incorporated into film, TV, pop music, comic books, etc., whereas Yasuke is a super-minor historical figure about whom virtually nothing is known (evidenced by the fact that he doesn't appear to have an entry in any Japanese paper encyclopedia -- most of them are more interested in sushi and cultural depictions of Minamoto no Yoshitsune) who has since the latter half of the 20th century experienced several "booms" in public interest resulting in these various pop culture interpretations. It therefore seems somewhat problematic to confine the two Showa 40-nendai works that represent the first "boom" (and to which most of the later works can trace their origins) to the "In popular culture" section.

It's a general problem with how this article is written: modern cultural depictions and hypothesizing by both professional and amateur historians comprise the core of the article, but it is written to present our subject as a well-documented historical figure: we have one apparently completely-bogus section entitled "Possible depictions in art" that discusses various Black people in late 16th- and early 17th-century Japanese are, one section marked as "theories" and another section marked "documented life" that is fairly overwritten and itself includes a fair bit of theorizing (it includes a lot of details of Frois and Nobunaga's adventures on which it is assumed our subject joined them). These matters could perhaps be ignored if we changed "In popular culture" to "Cultural depictions", dropped the bullet points, and wrote a prose description of the various "Yasuke booms" in modern Japan and modern African-American circles. This would make it by far the longest section in the article, but it would be much more in line with various Wikipedia policies and guidelines, particularly WP:WEIGHT.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:15, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

@Hijiri88: Apologies for the late reply! I haven't been able to edit anything for the past week due to family issues. Anyway, yeah, that's something that crossed my mind after adding Kurosuke and Shūsaku Endō's novel to the list: how they're certainly more significant than the other "pop culture" entries, since Kurosuke inspired Endō, LeSean Thomas, etc., and Endō's novel has generated a decent amount of scholarly interest/writings in English (probably more in Japanese). I think converting to a "cultural depictions" section, expanding on the various "Yasuke booms" in Japan and overseas, is a good idea. :) KuroMina (talk) 19:27, 21 May 2021 (UTC)

NHK program about Yasuke

The TV program of NHK about Yasuke(only tailor available https://www6.nhk.or.jp/nhkpr/post/trailer.html?i=29252) was aired yesterday. There was some new discovery about early life of Yasuke I wanna introduce. According to the research by Mihoko Oka, the professor of Tokyo university specializing Kirishitan history, she found new letter of Valignano in Rome about the man likely Yasuke . To summarize the points,

• In August 4 1574 he was given slaves from the commander of Mozambique Island.
• He soon hand over most of slaves out of three men. He sent two of them to monastery in Lisbon, only one man remain beside him.

This letter suggests new perspective which may solve the problems.

• If this man was Yasuke, he was probably born in coastal area near Mozambique Island.
• He was the slave worked under Portuguese colonial government, then became the servant of Valignano.

Oka suggests he might studied at St. Paul's college in Goa and was trained as soldier utilizing firearms. The program was not entirely academic, but I think this theory is worth considering.--Sacchisachi (talk) 13:11, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

We don't generally rely on research results published by means of NHK shows, but FWIW Oka wrote a blog about the show.[28] She doesn't seem to have been too impressed with the final product: unfortunately I missed the actual show so I can't speak to it, but it would be preferable if we could cite something written by her and edited by other professional historians in consultation with her, rather than (perhaps inappropriately) cut together by TV producers attempting to cash in on the hype surrounding the Netflix show. She apparently told them that she saw no reason to believe that the "くろぼう" named "又大夫" was actually secretly Yasuke, but the producers apparently didn't listen to her? And she was apparently very upset that they put her name at the end, implying that she oversaw the production, without her consent. This reminds me a little of Marushima's reaction to Age of Samurai, and is generally why we shouldn't trust mass-market TV shows for historical information. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:03, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

I see. I did not know Oka was confused about the show. It is terrifying, if misconception about historical figure spread due to commercialism. About くろぼう, I did not even noticed that part of the program was associated Oka. I know the book identifying くろぼう or 又大夫 as Yasuke　大航海時代の日本人奴隷-増補新版 (中公選書 116)　by ルシオ・デ・ソウザ and her. But there was no explanation of this interpretation, I thought ソウザ misunderstood that くろぼう was personal name applied for Yasuke.--Sacchisachi (talk) 04:49, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

It is terrifying, if misconception about historical figure spread due to commercialism. This is why I find it frustrating when non-Japanese with no grounding in Japanese history watch shows like Netflix's Yasuke or virtually any Japanese anime with a historical setting in the last 30 years. (NHK specials are not so risky.) The target audiences for such shows learned about Japanese history in their shakai classes in school, and I don't think anyone takes these kinds of shows too seriously. The real problem is that they sometimes drag professional scholars down with them, but this is not so much an issue for public understanding of history as it is for the individual scholars' reputations. (As an aside, I was re-reading the "Tokonatsu" chapter of Genji over the weekend: 「あな、うたて。まことにみづからのにもこそ言ひなせ」と、かたはらいたげに思したれど indeed; hopefully the 聞かむ人 will わきまへはべり in these cases.) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:40, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

"original research"?

@Firefangledfeathers: Regarding this revert, you accuse the IP editor of original research and say the information as previously written is cited to a reliable source. I will admit that I have not read said source (for reasons already stated above), but I at least can read said source, which is written in Japanese, whereas nothing in your edit history or on your user page implies you can read Japanese, so you are almost certainly not in a position to claim the information is reliably sourced as written. Moreover, even if this information is reliably sourced as you have restored it, it is most likely WP:SYNTH (a type of original research) if the source does not mention our present subject (the late 16th-century figure known to history as Yasuke) on the relevant pages. Do you understand this? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:41, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Hi Hijiiri 88: no I can't access or read that source. I admit that it was a borderline revert. Here's my thought process: that sentence was added by Sacchisachi and altered in an IP user's first edit with the edit summary "Removed shipmate and left slave. During this timeframe all African were slave who were removed from their original origin." Sacchisachi, do you believe that sentence was inappropriate WP:SYNTH? Hijri 88, do you believe the IP user's assertion that all Africans outside of Africa at the time were slaves? Firefangledfeathers (talk) 12:47, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

I don't think it matters: our primary sources for "Yasuke" say he was a slave, and you have not provided a justification for the sentence's inclusion. I would, therefore, like you to refrain from accusing other users of "original research" until you have further familiarized yourself with our policies and guidelines. You are not the "main culprit" in that other discussion up above, but you have definitely been enabling the bogus accusation that being skeptical of popular media sources' reliability for this topic is "original research", which is counterproductive. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 00:27, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

I have a lot of respect for your opinion, and it seems you have reasonable concerns about my conduct. I am happy to discuss it at my talk page, or yours if you like, but it's unlikely to involve anything helpful to this article's talk page. For this article, I would love input from Sacchisachi, or anyone else with access to the source. I would not revert any good-faith claim that the current line is unverified, but I do object to removal on the grounds of offensive falsehoods. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 00:36, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

I guess that sounds reasonable, but given that you are thus far the only one to give any credence (and therefore add "legitimacy") to Natemup's claims, it seems relevant to the future of this article: there was a six-day period when it looked like the problem had resolved itself and the "original research" accusations against, e.g., me had ceased (once Natemup had seen sources that explicitly referred to "samurai" as "the hereditary military aristocracy of Japan"), but then this happened. As far as I am concerned, the IP editors (whether they are Japanese editors who may or may not be right-wing or racist but in this case are right on the subject or bigots from South Carolina or, indeed, POV-pushers who have never studied Japanese history) are only here because of the recent pop culture attention our subject has been receiving in the US and Europe because of various pop culture properties. (Yes, some of these pop culture properties are made by and for Japanese, but in Japan everyone receives a basic education in Japanese history, know that Yasuke was not the -- or even a -- central figure in 16th-century Japan, and do not mistakenly refer to him with a word that means "a member of the hereditary military aristocracy".) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:02, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I see. At the time, I hope I was clear that was an only-barely-informed, preliminary opinion. We've all, I think, learned much more about Lockley's reliability since then. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 01:58, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Screenplay used as source

User @Natemup has used this thesis/screenplay Yasuke: The Black Samurai as source for the claim that Yasuke was a samurai. I'd like to point out that this is not an academic thesis on history, nor is it peer-reviewed, but it a screenplay thesis for a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting. Clearly, it has no historical or academic relevance here. This source does not belong on this page. I am in favor tho of pointing out on the page that some writers/historians have categorized him as Samuari, but it has to be clear that it is an opinion and not a fact/consensus among historians. It also should not be in the lede sentence since it needs to be phrased that it is no certainty. Eccekevin (talk) 01:22, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Request for comment on samurai terminology

Should this article include reference to Yasuke as a samurai? natemup (talk) 01:56, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Oppose, with another option. The source provided for the categorization as samurai so far was this thesis/screenplay Yasuke: The Black Samurai . I'd like to point out that this is not an academic thesis on history, nor is it peer-reviewed, but it a screenplay thesis for a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting. Clearly, it has no historical or academic relevance here. This source does not belong on this page. Additionally, the term samurai has been used on a Netflix series and on plenty of online magazines and pop culture pieces. But there are all loosely based on the real figure and are not historical/academic RSs.

I am in favor tho of pointing out on the page that some writers/historians have categorized him as samuari, but it has to be clear that it is an opinion and not a fact/consensus among historians. The truth is that basically nothing is known for sure about Yasuke. There are only 3-4 sources that mention him at all, and provide only brief in passing mentiones. The more academic treatments of the topic, such as Cooper and Russell do not use the term samurai, but the terms warrior or retainer. Locksley, which is the author that more recently has devoted research on the topic, uses mostly warrior and also the term samurai carefully and makes it clear it is his categorization based on evidence he provides, but always makes it clear that indeed it is an academic theory since there is very little known. Hence, I suggest we insert language such as "some authors categorize him as a samurai" and we can summarize Locksely's theory and evidnece. But we should not use the term samurai in the lede or make it seem like it is fact/consensus among historians. Eccekevin (talk) 01:22, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

References

Nearly every source on the page calls him a samurai, and they've been used in the past to justify "samurai" terminology in the article (including during the most of the history of its existence), but you and Hjiri88 have repeatedly removed it in recent years with varying excuses.

My understanding is that the role of Wikipedia is to represent what writers and historians call the subject. Not to hedge claims as an opinion when we disagree with them. natemup (talk) 11:23, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

The role of WP is to be objective in representing what the RSs say. Most RSs do not call him a samurai, but as I said we could talk in the article about those writers (in this case just Lockley) considering him a samurai without being WP:UNDUE. Eccekevin (talk) 00:10, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

• Hearkening back to a persistent university professor, we must define our terms.  :)

I read through a thread about Yasuke a few months back where the crux of the disagreement hinged on how the word samurai was defined. It hadn't occurred to the participants that they were talking past each other, using the word samurai to mean different things.

Reading this thread here, I think I see the same confusion.

In any description in the article of Yasuke as a "samurai", I strongly feel that that description must include an explanation of how the relevant RS(es) define the term. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 17:08, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

That's fair (and a much better solution than deleting all mentions of the word altogether, which has been done in the article despite the consistent terminology used in the sources). natemup (talk) 03:32, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose until reliable academic sources are found. For now, all the sources using the word samurai tend to be magazines and pop culture pieces. Eccekevin (talk) 20:51, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Would this Smithsonian magazine piece count as reliable? GoutComplex (talk) 17:33, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd say no. It is a magazine piece, not a academic one. It cites no sources, no literature, and is written as a pop history piece. Eccekevin (talk) 18:25, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Was Yasuke really a kashin?

The first sentence in the lede states that Yasuke "...served as a kashin (家臣, retainer) under the Japanese daimyō Oda Nobunaga." The source cited for this is "...a variant text of the Shinchō-ki (信長記) owned by Sonkeikaku Bunko (尊経閣文庫), the archives of the Maeda clan". This text was originally the private journal kept by the samurai Matsudaira Ietada, which has since been published as "Ietada Nikki". I have not been able to find any version of this text on-line, so I cannot verify whether or not Yasuke is actually described in it as having been a kashin, which is to say, a member of the kashindan. Most reliable sources who mention Yasuke describe him as a "retainer" and "weapon-bearer", but it is important to remember that while all kashin were retainers, only a small subset of retainers were kashin. During the Sengoku (i.e., during Yasuke's time in Japan), being a member of the kashindan was largely restricted to samurai and jizamurai. Later in the article, under the heading "Documented life in Japan" it makes the claim that Yasuke "was given his own residence and a short, ceremonial katana [dubious – discuss] by Nobunaga. Nobunaga also assigned him the duty of weapon bearer." I am not interested in disputing whatever claims are made in inaccessible sources, but even taking them as gospel, the source conspicuously does not claim that Yasuke was a samurai or a kashin; it describes him as a "weapon bearer" who was granted a residence and possibly a short sword. Because of the lack of access to cited sources, and the ambiguity around the various claims of Yasuke having been a samurai, a kashin or some other officially-granted status, I think it would be more accurate to remove the claim that he was a kashin, and simply describe him as what most of the (scant) evidence suggests: that he was a retainer of, and weapons bearer to, Nobunaga. I have made this correction. If you intend to revert it, please make a good-faith effort here first to justify your revert. Bricology (talk) 07:06, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

"Possible depictions in art"?

Under the heading "Possible depictions in art", the first example cited is extremely tenuous. It claims "An ink-stone box (suzuri-bako) made by a Rinpa artist in the 1590s, owned by Museu do Caramulo pt, depicts a black man wearing high-class clothing, who does not appear to be subordinate to the Portuguese. It is possible that this man is Yasuke in Portuguese attire." The source cited for this is one of the texts written by Thomas Lockley, published under a bewildering variety of different titles. Lockley is an associate professor at Nihon University College of Law in Tokyo where, according to the blurb at Audible, where his audio-books are available, "he teaches courses about the the international and multicultural history of Japan and East Asia." All well and good, but unfortunately Prof. Lockley has titled his two main texts "African Samurai" and "Yosuke: The True Story of the Legendary African Samurai", attaching the title of "samurai" to a person for whom there is no evidence of them actually having been a samurai, and much evidence of them having been a retainer and weapon-bearer. So unfortunately Prof. Lockley would seem to be more interested in promoting his books' dubious claims than in being historically accurate.
Having said that, Lockley's alleged support for the suzuri-bako shown depicting Yasuke is inscrutable unless one has access to his texts; no further information is supplied. But the claim seems to literally be false on its face. The image file provided is fairly small; under 700px wide at its largest. The link provided for the original image (in the Museu do Caramulo in Portugal) is broken, but I managed to track it down and after searching for the image there, found a close-up of just a portion of the inner lid where the figures are depicted. https://museudocaramulo.pt/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/arte_artejaponesa-1.jpg The figure whom Lockley is supposedly proposing to be Yasuke is clearly not. It depicts a European man with a mustache and goatee, and with hands that are the same color as the other main figure's face (nominally white). He is dressed in the clothing of a Portuguese nobleman and carrying the daishō of a samurai. Furthermore, there are two small figures also depicted (children?) whose faces are also the same color as the figure purportedly Yasuke. They too have light-colored hands. So if indeed Lockley is putting forward the claim that Yasuke is depicted, he will need to explain how an African could have grown a goatee, dressed as a Portuguese nobleman, had "white" hands, and had been accompanied by two small figures with the same colors of face and hands as he. In short, it is a preposterous suggestion, based entirely upon the fact that the skin of faces depicted are dark. There are many possible explanations for why this could be, from artistic license, to the pigments used to render the faces having changed over the centuries. But depicting an African who was formerly enslaved, and now living as a retainer to Oda Nobunaga? That's not even remotely possible. Unless anyone cares to mount a substantive defense for this claim remaining, I will remove it in a few weeks. Bricology (talk) 07:56, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Using Mr Tsuji as a Primary?

There is no attestation to Yasuke receiving a stipend. We can assume as much, as Mr Tsuji contends, but he doesn't use a source for that claim. The very few sources about Yasuke do not state what Mr Tsuji speculated at. Please don't just Google translate a Japanese article to randomly include nonsense. If you can actually read Japanese use the SOURCE MATERIAL. 2001:268:922D:95C5:1032:77E9:BA33:5E2B (talk) 09:37, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Problematic sources in recent edit re-introducing the troublesome "samurai" title

@Gloveup37 added a paragraph in the lede in this edit, giving an edit summary that this "Added an important background detail that is well supported." However, the supporting references are themselves problematic: Britannica (another encyclopedia, no primary sources given), the Smithsonian Magazine article (link) already discussed above as unsuitable as a source (currently at the bottom of the Talk:Yasuke#Request for comment on samurai terminology section), the Lockley and Girard book African Samurai (Google Books link), also discussed above as unsuitable (in both the Talk:Yasuke#Samurai and Talk:Yasuke#Lockley 2016, Lockley 2017, and Lockley 2019? sections), and apparently also relying on a French article from Radio France Internationale (link), which itself provides no primary sources, doesn't define "samurai", and reads like a pop-culture piece.

Here, I address just Britannica.

The Britannica.com article about Yasuke at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yasuke claims that Yasuke was granted the title of "samurai", without explaining their own sources. Their article about "samurai" at https://www.britannica.com/topic/samurai is vague in its defintion of the term and is inconsistent with what I've read in other more-detailed sources, with Britannica's content seeming to state that anyone who was a warrior from the 1100s through to 1868 was also a samurai, which is patently wrong — the categories of 武士 (bushi, "warrior [as a job]") and 侍 (samurai, "samurai [as a member of a specific hereditary social class]") are definitely distinct, such that even Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the second of Japan's three unifiers (after Oda Nobunaga, before Tokugawa Ieyasu), was pointedly described as not a samurai, due to his family's agricultural background.

• Britannica's article also claims that "As a samurai, Yasuke would have fought in several battles for Nobunaga, though the exact number is unknown." This is temporally problematic.

Based on historical dating alone, we know that Yasuke met Oda Nobunaga in March 1581. The Honnō-ji Incident was in June 1582, after which Yasuke was effectively banished from Japan.

March 1581 to June 1582 is only about 15 or 16 months.

Looking at a timeline of events during the Sengoku period, the only battles listed during that period are the Second Tenshō Iga War in autumn 1581, and the Honnō-ji Incident in June 1582. These are the only battles that Yasuke could have possibly participated in, without being a time traveler.

• We have zero records indicating that Yasuke was present for the Second Tenshō Iga War, and we do have records indicating that Oda Nobunaga himself was not present. Given that Yasuke was a personal attendant to Oda Nobunaga, we can infer that Yasuke was not a participant in the Second Tenshō Iga War.

• We do have records indicating that Yasuke was present for the Honnō-ji Incident, and that he did indeed fight. This is, as far as I know, the only battle for which we have historical records stating that Yasuke was a participant.

• Britannica's article also claims that "It is possible that Yasuke served as Nobunaga’s kaishakunin, a designated second in the ritual who beheads the man dying by seppuku." This is also problematic, not on time-traveling grounds but due to a disagreement with other known sources.

We have records indicating that Yasuke was not Nobunaga's attendant for his seppuku, as Nobunaga shut himself alone inside an inner chamber of the Honnō temple complex as his final witnessed act. See also Honnō-ji_Incident#Scene_of_the_incident. Confusingly, the last sentence of that section states that someone named Kamata Shinsuke served as Nobunaga's seppuku assistant; at any rate, it wasn't Yasuke.

We do read that a fellow named 森成利 (Mori Naritoshi), also known as 森蘭丸 (Mori Ranmaru), and his brothers were helping defend Oda Nobunaga right up to the end. Mori himself was killed by someone named 安田国継 (Yasuda Kunitsugu). The account of Luis Frois, the Jesuit who introduced Oda to Yasuke, also appears to corroborate that Oda Nobunaga shut himself alone into an interior room.

In the absence of anything scholarly that 1) defines the word "samurai" for purposes of the text, and 2) claims that Yasuke himself was specifically granted this title / social rank, I am removing "samurai" from the "Rank" field in the right-hand info-box, and adding clarifying text that whether to call Yasuke a "samurai" depends very much on how one defines the term -- as much of this talk page also discusses. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 22:26, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

In the lead section, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was described as a samurai Merzostin (talk) 15:02, 1 May 2024 (UTC)