The first foreign-born Japanese samurai was the warrior Yasuke, represented here in a 2019 sculpture by South African artist Nicola Roos. We don’t have any images from the years around 1579, when he arrived in Japan alongside a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. However, Japanese sources from Yasuke’s contemporaries speak of the power that Yasuke held from the warlord/daimyo Odo Nobunaga.
It only took a short while for Yasuke to get noticed and promoted– Nobunaga loved the martial arts and looked for compatriots with intelligence and discipline, and Yasuke fit the bill. He was at least a foot taller than most Japanese men (6’2″) and had probably trained in fighting in Africa – at any rate, he rode alongside the daimyo in battle.
Yasuke also fell in with Nobunaga because he learned to speak Japanese and excelled in the African story-telling style of Utenzi, in which heroic deeds were related. That likely made him intriguing to the warrior class he surrounded himself with. Nobunaga was a patron of the arts, who enjoyed the Japanese style of musical performance called Noh Drama.
We do not know how the African samurai died. But his lord Nobunaga lost a struggle against a treasonous general and was forced to commit ritual suicide.
Source(s): _BBC_, “Yasuke the mysterious African samurai,” Oct 14, 2019, Naima Mohamud. VisualArtSource, Nicola Roos.
