Commentary | Kimberly Hassel, Akil Fletcher, and John G. Russell, Stranger Than Fiction?: Yasuke and the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Controversy
Introduction
“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.”
— Assassin’s maxim, Assassin’s Creed
On May 15th, 2024, video game publisher Ubisoft released the trailer for the anticipated next installment of the Assassin’s Creed (henceforth AC) franchise on YouTube. The latest installment, titled Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (henceforth AC:S), takes place in 16th-century Japan. The trailer for the game revealed two playable protagonists: Naoe, a female assassin (shinobi), and Yasuke, a Black African samurai. In the trailer, viewers see alternating scenes of Naoe engaging in stealth action and Yasuke—an imposing figure—wielding his katana in combat against army forces. Coinciding with this trailer, press releases regarding the game’s mechanics, design, and development soon appeared on Ubisoft’s website and other major gaming networks such as IGN and Kotaku. While there was immediate buzz about the game, particularly from Black communities and Japanese individuals who were excited to see Naoe and Yasuke as playable characters, a backlash to the game quickly ensued.
Figure 1: Promotional image of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Image taken from Ubisoft.com
Soon after the release of the trailer, AC:S trended on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), as a fire of debate ignited the site. Multiple individuals immediately took to the platform to complain that Ubisoft and the developers of AC:S had besmirched the series by including Yasuke instead of a male Japanese protagonist. Memes mocking the game then were circulated, depicting the racialized directions of the conversation, as many insinuated that AC:S was historically inaccurate since Yasuke was never a “true” samurai.
Figure 2: A compilation of anti-Black memes circulated in reference to Yasuke’s appearance in AC:S. Compilation courtesy of Akil Fletcher and John G. Russell.
Meanwhile, the response in Japan was not negative, at least initially. Users on Japanese Twitter first responded positively to the appearance of Yasuke, a known figure in history and popular culture. In fact, many expressed shock that so many Westerners were upset at Yasuke’s protagonist role. However, as the outrage continued in Anglophone media, outrage among far-right netizens in Japan known as netto uyoku (ネット右翼) began to grow. This meant that Ubisoft now had to contend with opposition from both the “West” and Japan, as U.S. critics quickly found that Japanese culture could be deployed as a shield to disparage Yasuke. This disparagement was made specifically on the grounds that Ubisoft had allegedly disrespected Japanese people by choosing a Black man to be the main protagonist over a Japanese man—which disregards the fact that a Japanese woman is another protagonist. It should be noted that the users behind the vitriol may be considered a vocal minority of social media users and gamers. The controversy was ignited by the cinematic trailer and fueled by players and non-players with various grievances and biases pertaining to identity. Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Yasuke and AC:S more broadly offers an opportunity to examine the racial and gendered aspects of video games and play.
In this commentary, we examine the parameters of the reception of AC:S as reflected in social media posts in English and Japanese. As we note, the reception of the game’s cinematic trailer appeared largely negative among Anglophone social media users, due to their presumption that the decision to feature Yasuke as a protagonist is “historically inaccurate” and “hinders Asian representation.” This discourse then proliferated among users—both players and non-players of AC—posting in Japanese, a disturbing example of a group’s weaponizing the notion of representation to exclude a particular identity. It bears mentioning that there are multiple actors to consider in this outrage. There are ones who are genuinely upset about the lack of a male Asian protagonist. There are also others who genuinely did not know about Yasuke’s existence and hence assumed his casting was part of a virtue-signaling agenda. Finally, there are still others who valorized discourse of historicity and representation as a pretext to push for their anti-Black, misogynist, and ethno-nationalist narratives, which are prevalent in gaming culture and Japanese popular culture more broadly. While we explore these groups of users, we especially focus on some of the more concerning dimensions of the controversy as they pertain to hate speech, discrimination, and exclusion. We conclude with a discussion as to the ways in which the AC:S controversy—and video games as a discursive sphere—can serve as a lens into social issues. As scholars such as Nakamura (2019), Gray (2020), and Phillips (2020) have highlighted, video games may serve as a frontier for human biases and oppressive ideologies.
While our examination is not exhaustive of all social media platforms or the entire spectrum of posts on the subject, we hope that this commentary will be a part of the ongoing, nuanced conversations on social issues such as anti-Blackness, misogyny, representation, and ethno-nationalism. We also hope that our collaboration as anthropologists will foster further conversations on historical and contemporary Afro-Japanese encounters.
There were multiple dynamics at play in our process of collecting and analyzing online discourse we will address. We could not always confirm the race, ethnicity, or nationality of some commentators in our analysis due to the subterfuge of online anonymity. Indeed, multiple individuals had pretended to be Black or Japanese during the chaos. Notably, it was revealed that X user “Kenji Yamamoto” (@Samurai_KenjiYa), who described himself as a Japanese male and historian with an M.Ed. from the University of Tokyo, specializing in the Sengoku and Edo periods, was actually a white American male named Garrett Barnes. This was a racial deception akin to digital blackface, yellowface, and transracialism researched by scholars such as as Lisa Nakamura, Kishonna Gray, and Leonard David. We take this opportunity to discuss authority and authenticity—just as Barnes sought to make himself an authentic authority on Japanese culture, other pseudo-intellectuals have risen to do the same. Despite Ubisoft’s recruitment of multiple specialists such as Sachi Schmidt-Hori, a scholar of classical Japanese literature who helped to develop the characters and refine the scripts, the game’s choice to cast a Black man as a co-lead still sparked controversy.
Harassment in the digital sphere is a real risk and reality for scholars in the contemporary moment. In the case of Japanese Studies, Paula Curtis (2021) has written on her own experiences of harassment by netto uyoku in response to her efforts against the historical denialism of comfort women during World War II. We hope to shed light on the circumstances that inform the episode of online hate embodied by the AC:S controversy. While we cannot tell if our commentary will have a direct impact on the reception of the game, it is our hope that our readers will engage with our commentary openly and respectfully, and reflect on the intersections of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and hate speech in gaming culture.
The Anatomy of a Controversy
First released in 2007, Assassin’s Creed is a video game series centered on an organization of assassins engaged in a generational conflict against the Templars, a group of powerful elites. At its core, AC has always been historical fiction, where the protagonist would range from a man in the Italian renaissance to a Black woman living in the antebellum South (Murray 2017). While developers of AC relied on historical facts to create the protagonists and their worlds, they would also incorporate supernatural elements to accentuate the protagonists’ stories. A notable example was the inclusion of an advanced human race called the “Isu,” which served as the explanation for the more fantastical elements in the franchise. In previous games, players were also allowed to perform feats such as fighting the Egyptian god of death Anubis and surviving a fall from hundreds of feet in the air by falling into a pile of hay. These fantastical elements are not met with claims of “breaking the immersion.”
On the whole, online Anglophone complaints about AC:S have centered on Yasuke, a sixteenth-century African man (believed to be from Mozambique) brought to Japan by Italian Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano, who eventually came to the attention of the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga. It is believed that Nobunaga, impressed and fascinated by Yasuke’s obsidian skin, granted him the name “Yasuke” and bestowed him samurai status (Leupp 1995). Yasuke has become a popular figure in local and global media—he was adapted into video games like Nioh and receive his own anime series on Netflix in 2021. Despite such precedence, his appearance in AC:S in particular was met with outrage.
There have been multiple points of argumentation in the controversy surrounding Yasuke and AC:S. First, there are the calls of historical inaccuracy within the game. Following Ubisoft’s reveal of Yasuke as a playable protagonist, some netizens on both sides of the Pacific vociferously rejected Yasuke’s samurai status, instead insisting that he was Nobunaga’s “retainer.” Others have objected that the game forces players to play as a Black man and not a “true” Japanese samurai, although it does allow them to play as Naoe, a fictional Japanese female ninja. Second, there have been claims that Ubisoft only featured Yasuke in the game as an attempt to be “woke” or diverse, consequently denying Asian representation. Third, there have been claims that this “forced inclusion” breaks the immersion of the game. Some critics have asserted that a 6’2” Black man could not have realistically blended into the shadows and crowds of a primarily Japanese population.
There are several faults to these points of argumentation. For all the criticism, historical precision has never been a hallmark of the franchise’s 14-game history, a franchise whose overarching narrative is itself steeped in a pseudo-archaeological mythology reminiscent of Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1995). It also posits the existence of the Isu, a species of advanced humanoids, homo sapiens divinus, that created homo sapiens and once ruled the earth, not to mention that it features cameos by Cleopatra, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, and Napoleon Bonaparte, whose escapades depart from historical verisimilitude. None of these fantastical departures have resulted in countless critical YouTube and TikTok videos, ranting social media denunciations, Change.org petitions demanding that Ubisoft halt the release of the game, or led to the relentless harassment of the games’ developers.
Furthermore, the claim that Yasuke is an example of “forced inclusion” neglects the fact that AC has long existed as one of the more historically rich and diverse franchises in the gaming world. The longstanding diverse casting is evident in previous characters such as Aveline De Granpre, a Black woman assassin who was tasked with freeing slaves and assisting in slave rebellions, and Adéwalé, a former Trinidadian slave who led a maroon rebellion in the Caribbean. It is here where one may begin to deduce the impetus behind the adverse response to Yasuke’s casting and begin to ask new questions that illuminate the state of Blackness in video games and Japan. Afterall, why is Yasuke such a jarring figure when there have been previous Black characters with more politically charged storylines? Why would it matter whether or not Yasuke was “real” (which he was), when fiction is the norm for the series? Why has Yasuke been the focus of the critique, when Naoe, a playable Japanese protagonist and female character, has been equally positioned for derision since female characters have been popular targets for harassment in the past?
The response to Yasuke as a playable protagonist mimicked that of other recently released Black characters such as Angrboda, the spiritual guide (and possible girlfriend) to Loki in God of War: Ragnarok (GOWR). Similar to AC:S, GOWR received massive backlash from those who believed that Blackness was encroaching on Norse mythology. Angrboda is one of the many Black characters who activate the “Go woke, Go broke” crowd that seem to spawn every time a Black person makes an appearance in media. However, Yasuke is unique in the fact that not only was he a historical figure unlike the mythological Angrboda, but he, along with Naoe, also came at a time when the gaming industry was hyper-aware of Blackness in the event known by many as “Gamergate 2.”
Figure 3: Promotional image of Angrboda in God of War: Ragnarok. Image taken from “God of War Wiki.”
Gamergate, as it has come to be colloquially known, was a hate campaign that targeted women and BIPOC gamers and game creators. The campaign started as a growing backlash to game critics like Anita Sarkesian, who in the early 2010s created a Kickstarter and YouTube series titled “Tropes vs Women in Video Games,” which identified long-running issues of representation that women faced in games and gaming culture more broadly. For many, this series signaled a dangerous inspection into an activity many had come to view as a significant part of their identities as male (often white) gamers. Any criticism about race or gender made on video games simultaneously felt like a critique of their personhood, as if they were being pushed out of gaming to make room for the women seemingly invading their spaces. While much of this had been said by others, Sarkisian became the face of the “woke” movement in games during the early 2010s as she was heavily targeted for her feminist focus.
Gamergate reached a fever pitch with the release of Depression Quest, a game developed by Zoe Quinn that launched the hate campaign into the public zeitgeist. While Depression Quest is seldom referenced, Quinn’s late partner accused the developer of sleeping with game reviewers to receive high scores. Even though the rumors were unfounded and later proven untrue, they managed to activate a gamer base that had grown tired of individuals like Sarkesian and Quinn bringing a critical eye to games. Many began claiming that women could only be successful in gaming through subterfuge and underhanded tactics, like using their appearance. In issuing their claims, this gamer base cited the popularity of “titty streamers,” a ribald term for streamers who use their appearance to garner viewership. Such claims discount the fact that the most popular streamers and workers in games have consistently been men and distill women into sexual objects whose perceived value only comes from their sexual attributes, not from their creativity or effort. This biased narrative formed the impetus for Gamergate and eventually resulted in the harassment and doxxing—or release of private information—of Quinn and many others who were characterized as “not real gamers” because they were not the white men who functioned as the face of gaming in the years prior.
Much like its predecessor, Gamergate 2 was also a hate campaign against the BIPOC, women, and LGBTQ characters who were appearing more frequently in video games. One of the delineating features of Gamergate 2 has been its public focus on Blackness. While not a literal sequel to the decentralized hate campaign that took place in 2014, Gamergate 2 is a novel denouncement of diversity, often Blackness, in games. At the center of the controversy is the company Sweet Baby Inc., run by CEO Kim Belair, which has been accused of introducing “wokeness” into beloved game series like Spider-Man, God of War, and Alan Wake (Farokhmanesh 2024). Each of these games has introduced more inclusive storylines, more realistic beauty standards, and more diverse casts—evident in characters such as Angrboda. The attacks against each of these games eventually spread to groups such as Black Girl Gamers, an organization created to facilitate safe gaming for Black women. While decentralized and coming from multiple sources and players, it is the emphasis on anti-Blackness that marks the new fervor in Gamergate 2. This differs from the original Gamergate, which made white women like Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn the targets of users’ ire.
This is not to say that Blackness did not have a role in the original Gamergate, as Gray (2016) has made clear the ways in which Black players silently took on the brunt of the abuse. Our point here is that Gamergate 2 specifically targeted Black characters and Black players/creators. Blackness itself has become the villain of the DEI story, not just a bystander taking a bullet aimed at women. Campaigns like Gamergate 2 point to the obsession with Blackness or more specifically, a heavy need to purge Blackness from the collective imagination of games, television, and movies. Unless Blackness is made subservient or “lesser than,” its manifestation in media is viewed as an anomaly or an eyesore. AC:S finds itself burning in the embers of Gamergate and Gamergate 2 within Anglophone media—and soon in Japanese media, with additional kindling from the historical and contemporary contexts particular to Japanese society.
Battlefield 2: Yasuke, Assassin’s Creed, and the Shadow of Anti-Blackness in Japan
In some ways, the Anglophone criticism of AC:S echoes that of Battlefield 1, a first-person shooter game that allowed players to play as Black, including Black German and colonial soldiers (Quiroga 2022). Criticism of both games has centered on the purported historical inaccuracy of Black people in what have traditionally been perceived as non-Black spaces—
Western Front World War I Europe in the case of Battlefield 1 and late-sixteenth-century Japan in the case of AC:S. Both critiques dismiss the presence of Blacks in these ludic spaces as historically revisionist “Blackwashing” and “race swapping,” minimizing or outright denying the actual existence of Black people in those spaces unless they occupy expected subservient roles.
Online discourse reveals that critics would have less difficulty accepting Yasuke if he were presented as a slave, “freak show trophy,” “pet,” “court jester” or, as one Reddit poster suggested, Nobunaga’s “caddie” than an actual samurai. To recognize him as anything else is seen as an inauthentic, culturally inaccurate, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)-fueled, Social Justice Warrior perversion of an allocentric history that refuses to acknowledge the presence of Black people. For any Black presence to be “authentic,” it must, regardless of time and space, occupy a position of abject subordination.
In Japan, objection to the game exceeds the dismissal of the notion of an African samurai, the presence of Africans in Japan, or the aversion to roleplaying as Black. Acceptance of Yasuke is conditioned on recognizing him as a figure of fantasy and fiction. As one YouTube poster put it in response to the trailer for Netflix’s anime adaptation that centers Yasuke: “I can accept Yasuke as fantasy” (fantajii Yasuke nara yuruseru). As a historical figure, they are willing to accept him only as a slave (dorei), vassal (kerai), bodyguard (goei), or “entertainer/ jester” (entāteinā-/dōkeshi), never as a samurai. Others are offended at the suggestion that there were African slaves in Japan at all, dismissing it as a “malicious hoax” (akushitsu na dema). The irony here is that even when fictional, both conservative Western and Japanese players complain that Blackness ruins the immersion of their story. Consequently, these players respond to the appearance of Black characters with phrases such as “elves can’t be Black,” or “Black people don’t make good vampires,” as they feel Blackness encroaches upon the safety of their imagination.
Recent objection to Yasuke by Japanese people seems to have surprised Anglophone media. In part, this may be because his previous iterations in Japanese popular culture, media, and games did not ignite opprobrium. Yasuke has appeared as a character in Kurusu Yoshio and Mita Genjirō’s award-winning children’s book Kurosuke (1968), in which he is portrayed more as a cheerful magical Negro than a skilled warrior. However, numerous Japanese video games do depict him as samurai, including Guilty Gear Strive (Arc System Works 2021), Samurai Warriors 5 (Koei Tecmo 2021), and Nioh 2 (Team Ninja 2020). He has also served as the inspiration for Afro Samurai (1998–2002), a manga by hip-hop aficionado Okazaki (“Bob”) Takashi, which was later developed into a video game (2005) and animated miniseries for Spike TV (2007), and Yasuke (Netflix 2021), another anime miniseries. However, presumably because these aforementioned productions were less historical fiction than historical fantasy/science fiction, none of these past iterations have prompted a backlash.
In part, the current outrage, particularly among netto uyoku, has been fueled by the work of Thomas Lockley, an associate professor of foreign languages at Nihon University who has asserted that Nobunaga’s retention of Yasuke initiated a trend among Japanese feudal lords of using African slaves as a symbolic display of their authority (Lockley 2017, 16) and that, like Europe, “Japan, too, was also a slave trading society at the time” (Lockley 2019, 80). His critics have seized upon these statements, declaring them not only historically inaccurate but a slander against Japanese culture and a malicious assault on the nation’s honor. Significantly, some rightwing commentary, adhering to the propensity for online posters to wed anti-Black and anti-Korean bias, has described the controversy as “a second comfort woman problem” (daini no ianfu mondai) (Takahashi 2024) and ominously posited that with time Japan will be pressured to apologize and pay compensation to Blacks. While Lockley’s Anglophone critics have dismissed him as a “race grifter,” his Japanese detractors have labeled him a “second Yoshida Seiji” (Nippon Journal 2024), a reference to the author of memoirs that described his participation in the abduction of Korean women as sex slaves for the Japanese military during the war but which subsequently were determined to be a fabrication.
Figure 4: Image still of a YouTube video bearing the caption: “The Assassin’s Creed Uproar: Japan Gave Rise to Black Slavery. If Left Alone, This Will Become a Second Comfort Women Problem.” Nippon Journal (July 20, 2024)
Contrary to the claim that their main objection to the game is its culturally and historically inaccurate representation of Japan—including errors in its depiction of the shape of tatami, architecture, and sword placement—the focal criticism has been Yasuke, with numerous YouTube and social media posts referring to the controversial depiction of Yasuke in AC:S and Lockley’s work as the “Yasuke problem” (Yasuke mondai). Criticism has been leveled not only at Lockley and Ubisoft but also at BS-NHK for its 2021 broadcast of the documentary “Black Samurai: Yasuke, the African Samurai Who Served Nobunaga” (Burakku Samurai: Nobunaga ni Tsukaeta Afurikan Samurai–Yasuke), which rightwing politicians and media outlets have likened to a 1955 NHK documentary about Hashima Island (aka Gunkanjima) in Nagasaki – where Korean civilians were conscripted as labor to work in coal mines during WWII – that critics claim uses fake footage and tarnishes the reputation of former residents of the island (Sankei Shimbun 2023; The Truth of Gunkanjima 2021).
Whatever the perceived faults of Lockley’s research, it is revealing that critics conflate it with the game itself, a precariously premature conclusion since, as of this writing, the game has yet to be released and critical commentary on it is based only on promotional trailers. While some bloggers claim that the game is based on Lockley’s work and that he served as a consultant, (Lockley has denied this in a YouTube interview (Lance E. Lee Podcast 2024) that has since been removed from the platform) and some even go as far as to claim that “without his book [the game] would have featured a Japanese ninja as a protagonist” (Naoto 2024), there are no indications in the released trailers that the game itself suggests Black slavery was practiced in Japan or that Yasuke was Nobunaga’s slave. Some Japanese and Asian American critics have expressed fears that the game fosters anti-Asian and anti-Japanese sentiments because he kills Japanese samurai and perpetuates the view of Japanese as racists. Yet among African Americans familiar with the story of Yasuke, his elevation from a Jesuit-enslaved African to samurai has been taken as an indication of the lack of anti-Black sentiment in pre-modern Japan. Ironically, Japanese response to the video game has reignited online discussions of anti-Blackness in modern Japan.
To the contrary, the issue of Japanese anti-Black racism has preceded the current controversy. Japan is still recovering from controversies that followed reports in the 1980s and 1990s of Sambo and Hannah goods, Little Black Sambo books, and Blackface in Japan, which is not surprising given the lingering popularity of these items and practices. However, the problem is not confined to the reproduction and localization of imported western cultural kitsch. More recent and more immediate examples of Japanese anti-Black bias include online criticism of Black cosplayers who portray non-Black Japanese anime characters and Black creatives who have reimagined popular Japanese anime characters as Black. Both practices have been condemned by both Anglophone and Japanese netizens as “Blackwashing” (Burakku wosshu, kokujin-ka), “cultural appropriation” (bunka tōyō) and as an insult to the artistic intentions of the original creators. Yet, tellingly, the presence of white samurai in Japanese video games, the cosplaying of Japanese anime characters by white anime fans, and their rendering of them as distinctly white in A.I.-generated art have not prompted similar displays of opprobrium.
The controversies engulfing AC:S did not arise in a vacuum but are reflections of a global allophobism that imports American discourses of race, diversity, and alterity, adapting it to local concerns and couching it in a language which, despite crossing national boundaries, remains true to its origins. The AC:S controversy reveals that among an increasing number of contemporary Japanese netizens, much of the criticism of the game is directly aimed at Black people, appropriating Anglophone culture-war nomenclature—“kyanseru karuchā” (キャンセル・カルチャー; cancel culture),” “pori-kore” (ポリコレ; political correctness), and “kokujin yūgū” (黒人優遇; pro-Black affirmative action)—to couch its objections. Moreover, this discourse claims that the game is motivated by, or may even give rise to, anti-Asian hate because it propagates the notion that African slavery was supported and even spearheaded by Japanese, a belief that, as previously noted, is unsupported by anything in the released trailer. Nonetheless, such a discourse does feed into the narrative perpetuated by American media that since the COVID-19 pandemic, Blacks are the principal perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes. Even though this is a myth and it was disproved by FBI (2021–2022) and other studies (Wong 2021) that show the majority of perpetrators to be white, it continues to be spread by Japanese media which, sourcing American media reports, explicitly refers to the race of attackers when they are Black.
Figure 5: Compilation of news articles in Japanese that highlight Black attackers in incidents of anti-Asian violence. Compilation courtesy of John G. Russell.
In both Anglophone and Japanese-language media, critics claim to be offended by the violent depictions in AC:S promotional videos of Yasuke mowing down Japanese samurai and have argued that such scenes contribute to anti-Asian sentiment because his victims are Japanese men. We do not downplay any visceral reaction to this gameplay among Asian individuals given the rise in anti-Asian hate in recent years. However, we wish to draw attention to how this reaction may also be a symptom of anti-Blackness or a selective negotiation of the vectors of race and gender. As YouTube user “Cotton” put it, “The problem isn’t that he’s Black, but that the creators of the game are using Blacks to discriminate against Japanese (kokujin ga mondai nan janakute seisakusha ga kokujin o tsukatte Nihonjin sabetsu shiteru no ga mondai nan’ya de),” adding that she felt “disgust” and fear toward Yasuke because he is portrayed in the game as a murderous “oni (devil) a “stranger run amok,” and “stupid foreigner with no sense of propriety” (こっとん@石川きぬ, 2024).
Still, it is notable that similar concerns were not expressed following the release of Nioh, in which Japanese are killed by a white samurai, William, who is loosely based on William Adams, the seventeenth-century shipwrecked-Englishman-turned-samurai of Shōgun fame. Like his fellow Briton James Bond, William (whose nationality in the game has inexplicably been changed to Irish) has a license to kill. Yasuke, on the other hand, is apparently allowed no such imprimatur. Writes one “Asian” Reddit poster, “The culture is wrong, the Japanese will not bow to Yasuke, even if he is a samurai. And even [if] Yasuke is a samurai, he has no right to kill another samurai” (emphasis added). If true, this not only makes one wonder what all those jidai-geki were about and why no one has demanded they be banned for historical inaccuracy—or do they mean that it is not his right because he is a Black samurai, although he is not considered to be one?
“The Ultimate Feminist Fantasy”
As previously mentioned, Ubisoft’s selection of Yasuke and Naoe as protagonists is being thrust into conservative opposition to DEI measures in Anglophone media. Here, we see contemporary context at play, as DEI initiatives and measures are being banned in certain institutions and states. In Anglophone media, users have argued that in casting Yasuke as a playable protagonist, the game denies Asian representation. It is understandable that several gamers—especially Asian and Asian American fans of AC—are disappointed by the lack of an Asian male protagonist. What is concerning, however, is the subset of critics who use the issue of representation as a basis for hate speech and comments that are anti-Black and misogynist. In writing on the issue of Asian male representation in AC: Shadows for IGN, Korean American game critic Matt Kim supports the casting of Yasuke and remarks that it is “hypocritical and laughable” that users are only now discussing the need for an Asian protagonist. Kim states that better Asian representation will not be found in another samurai—a subjectivity that is overrepresented in media and collapses Asian identity into a monolith. He states:
“The main grievance I have as an Asian American in games in regards to representation isn’t the lack of it…but rather is the lack of diversity therein. I’ve reported previously in a story about Asian American game devs [developers] and representation, we are not a monolith and I, a Korean-American, don’t gain a sense of representation by seeing a Japanese samurai, or a Japanese ninja, or a kung-fu master or ancient gray-haired mystic for that matter” (Kim 2024, paragraph 7).
While there is not an Asian male protagonist, there is an Asian female protagonist: Naoe. Therefore, the insistence that there is no “Japanese protagonist” hints at an imagining of Asian identity that has to be also male. The relative lack of discussion and advertising of Naoe, compounded with the assertion that there is “no Japanese protagonist” in AC:S, is indicative of the larger dynamics of gendered erasure and misogyny within the controversy.
As we have demonstrated, in both Anglophone and Japanese media, AC:S is being framed as part of a “woke” or “political correctness” campaign touted by large corporations. A recent Japan Times article characterized Yasuke as a latest target of the “culture wars.” Within online messaging boards such as r/AsianMasculinity and Reddit more broadly, we also see anxieties about the game promoting a “liberal” agenda. Several critics have asserted that the casting of Yasuke and Naoe is a direct result of the hiring of “liberal” women. Consequently, many hateful comments were directed at the game’s narrative directors and writers, especially Brooke Davies, Alissa Ralph, and Sachi Schmidt-Hori. The hostility towards the women directors and writers is best embodied by a post from an X/Twitter user that has since been liked by over 3,000 users: “Three liberal women are working on Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Story…forget Yasuke. This game is the ultimate feminist fantasy [skull emoji].”
Here, we turn to an examination of misogyny in the controversy. Anxieties pertaining to “feminist fantasies” and “liberal agendas” have been prevalent in gaming communities even before this particular controversy, evident in our discussion of Gamergate and Gamergate 2. What is most concerning in spaces such as X/Twitter and online forums such as the Reddit thread r/AsianMasculinity are the misogynist comments directed against Sachi Schmidt-Hori, a professor of premodern literature at Dartmouth College who served as the narrative consultant for the game. Schmidt-Hori has experienced harassment due to her involvement, including doxxing of her family. Hateful comments on Schmidt-Hori have claimed that she is “self-hating” or “anti-Asian” because of her involvement in the franchise and her last name (which indicates she is married to a non-Japanese). Some commenters even question Schmidt-Hori’s ethnicity, despite the fact that she is a Japanese woman born and raised in Japan. While we cannot confirm the racial and ethnic identities of the Reddit users, we believe that the comments against Schmidt-Hori highlight the dynamics of ethno-nationalism and misogyny discussed in this article.
After receiving countless hateful emails, instant messages, and threats, Schmidt-Hori began to interact with those who had posted hateful comments about her in spaces such as r/AsianMasculinity or had sent her hostile messages. In speaking to these users over Zoom and exchanging messages, Schmidt-Hori invited the individuals to ask her any questions or share any of their grievances with her. In all but one case, Schmidt-Hori’s conversations resulted in users apologizing for their hateful speech and endangering her physical and emotional wellbeing (and the one anti-DEI influencer who did not apologize nonetheless stopped spreading hateful lies about her). The user who had posted a thread on r/AsianMasculinity that condemned Schmidt-Hori as a “self-hating Lu”—a derogatory term used in referring to Asian women who date or have relationships with men who are not Asian (typically white men) and thus purportedly “look down” on Asian men—swiftly deleted the thread after exchanging messages with her, as he realized the harm it had caused her and her family. Another subreddit author not only took down the thread but he and Schmidt-Hori also became Facebook friends after two hour-long conversations on Zoom.
The faculty of her home department at Dartmouth College, the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages, issued a statement in support of Schmidt-Hori in June. As we write this piece in late summer of 2024, Schmidt-Hori has told us that she knows her decision to invite her antagonists to have a non-combative conversation with her was the right one, despite her friends and family members’ advice to ignore the haters. She plans to continue interacting with aggrieved strangers.
On June 27th, 2024, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot briefly expressed his concern about the malicious attacks on the AC:S team in an interview posted on Ubisoft’s website. On July 23rd, Ubisoft released a statement on the X account for AC. “The Assassin’s Creed Shadows team has a message for our Japanese community,” the post begins. The post then features four images with white text against a red backdrop—combined, the images constitute a set of explanations, disclaimers, and acknowledgment regarding aspects of the game’s development. The team discusses the casting of Yasuke as a samurai, addressing critiques of historical accuracy. Of interest to us, however, is their acknowledgment of their consultants:
“We also want to clarify that while we have been consulting with many people throughout the development process, they are in no way responsible for the decisions that are taken by the creative teams in the interests of gameplay and entertainment.”
While Ubisoft finally acknowledged the harassment faced by members of their creative team, this acknowledgment does not go far enough in condemning the harassment of members such as Sachi Schmidt-Hori or protecting their members. It seems that the negative press for AC:S has worked to the advantage of Ubisoft’s efforts to advertise the game, at the expense of individuals like Schmidt-Hori. Ubisoft’s initial silence regarding the anti-Blackness in users’ responses and the harassment of its women developers speaks volumes. Ubisoft has been dealing with multiple cases of sexual harassment at the workplace, with five executive members of Ubisoft arrested for workplace harassment. Critics’ parochial focus on Yasuke and Blackness obscures the gendered dynamics of the controversy while also exacerbating the gendered harassment that is taking place. This speaks to the very essence of what the layman believes to be “DEI” or “woke,” in that both companies and the ones denouncing “wokeness” use Blackness as their point of measure. Rather than being embraced, the manifestation of Blackness in media is merely conflated with “DEI campaigns” and a corporate agenda. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Yasuke’s appearance in AC:S led Yves Guillemot to make the following statement to investors in late September 2024: “I want to reaffirm that we are an entertainment-first company, creating games for the broadest possible audience, and our goal is not to push any specific agenda. We remain committed to creating games for fans and players that everyone can enjoy.”
Ironically, the conflation of Blackness with “DEI campaigns” and corporate agendas has meant that Blackness, a force that for so long has been unwelcomed in corporate America, gaming or otherwise, has now become a signifier for when a company means to pander or take advantage of the sensibilities of their consumers. There is not enough space in this commentary to fully examine the insidious nature of this revelation. We include a preliminary observation: in acknowledging that Blackness has become the benchmark for those wishing to denounce diversity, it means that Blackness cannot be separated from its political associations and movements. This then opens Blackness to further scrutiny as it can be leveraged or attacked from multiple angles, such as claiming Blackness obscures or takes away opportunities from other disenfranchised people by becoming the marker for diversity or DEI.
Figure 6: A meme depicting Yasuke shielding Naoe from racist insults in the form of arrows. Image taken from the Reddit thread r/AssassinsCreed Memes, in a post from user “Blerd Without Fear.”
In this way, Blackness and by extension, Yasuke, became the shield and target which obfuscated not only Naoe but the machinations of those seeking to utilize Black and Asian tension. This resulted in not only Black individuals receiving hatred, but also Asian individuals who dared to voice their excitement or involvement with the game like Sachi Schmidt-Hori. While AC:S is but one game caught in a post-Gamergate and Gamergate 2 news cycle, it is imperative to understand how Blackness is being targeted and utilized to further anti-Black speaking points and agendas. It becomes ever more pressing that one comes to understand the nebulous topic of Blackness as best as they can, or risk falling prey to misleading notions that define Blackness as a threat.
Conclusion: Video Games and Social Media as Frontier
Q, a Black serviceman who had recently returned from training, approached Hassel about the controversy in early June. He had heard from his partner that Hassel was in the process of writing a commentary on the controversy. Q recalled his initial excitement upon seeing the AC:S trailer on YouTube—the protagonist was not only Black but was also a samurai! However, his excitement disappeared once he viewed the comments. “It’s such a shame,” he stated, recalling his disappointment upon seeing the rampant anti-Blackness in the comments. Q’s disappointment confirmed Hassel’s concern that the AC:S controversy will negatively impact Black fans of Japanese popular culture, as the controversy is a sign of exclusionary attitudes pertaining to Blackness, Japanese popular culture, and Afro-Japanese encounters.
On September 25th, 2024, a message from Marc-Alexis Côté on behalf of the AC:S team was posted to the official AC account on Twitter/X. This message revealed that the release date of the game will be postponed to February 14th, 2024, rather than November. This news was met with several comments from users stating that Ubisoft should spend the extra time redesigning the whole game “with an actual Japanese samurai.” Many speculate that the game may be delayed due to fundamental issues with its design or gameplay, but others assume more nefarious rationales such as Ubisoft wanting the game’s release to line up with Black History month. Whatever the reason, this delay has put AC:S in direct competition with another recently announced game Ghost of Yōtei, a sequel to Ghost of Tsushima, which features a female Japanese leading samurai. While Ghost of Yōtei has received some negative comments due to their new female protagonist, the game has already garnered comparisons to AC:S and has been swiftly weaponized as another tool to further denounce the use of Yasuke. Although Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has come forward to say that there is room for two open world games taking place in Japan according to IGN writer Kat Bailey, there has been a clear difference in the response towards both games.
The controversy over AC:S provides instructive lessons on the culture wars, or more specifically, on transpacific anti-Blackness, the Black presence in Japan, small as it was and is, looming over the Japan discourse as ominously as the shadow of the franchise’s subtitle and which seemingly belies the “assassin’s maxim” that serves as the epigraph to this commentary. What was initially perceived in the West as the adverse Anglophone Pavlovian response to Black representation in spaces historically deemed “non-Black” has proven to be far more complex, revealing that culture war rhetoric has found a receptive niche in Japan, particularly, though not exclusively, among netto uyoku.
Given the timeline of responses—namely, the initial uproar in Western Anglophone media followed by uproar among nationalist Japanese users of social media—one cannot help but wonder if white supremacists provided the fodder for transnational anti-Black, ethno-nationalist, and misogynist comments. As Russell (2020) has explained, the wedding of white supremacy and Japanese ethno-nationalism is not uncommon. The appeal of Japan to white supremacists, in particular, is the “myth of Japanese homogeneity” (3). It seems that with Japanese popular culture, the most vocal opposition to diverse and inclusive representation consists of Japanese ethno-nationalists, white supremacists, and misogynists. For example, media studies scholar Aurélie Petit (2022) has drawn attention to the misogyny directed against female fans of anime on online messaging boards. Reiterating our previous point, such opposition speaks to an underlying desire to control or “gatekeep” representations of Japan and consumption of Japanese popular culture. In her research on transnational Black digital networks and Japanese popular culture, Hassel has noted that even celebratory representations of Black otaku culture—evident in the popularity of Megan Thee Stallion, a Black American rapper who openly embraces and celebrates anime in her music and performances—are accompanied not only by anti-Black comments but also by questions of “authenticity.”
The adjudication of historical accuracy is torturously selective. Few Japanese complained about historical accuracy in novelist Yoshikawa Eiji’s 1935 treatment of Miyamoto Musashi or during the halcyon age of “Japan as Number One,” when Miyamoto was celebrated in the West as the patron saint of Japanese management style. In the wake of U.S.-Japan trade friction during the 1980s and 1990s, while the historical and cultural inaccuracies of Hollywood films about or featuring Japan as Gung Ho (1986), Back to the Future II (1989), Black Rain (1989), Mr. Baseball (1992), Rising Sun (1993), and Robo Cop 3 (1993) were frequently the topic of Japanese mainstream media punditry, they were not condemned as dishonoring Japan or its people. Those of Lost in Translation (2003) and The Last Samurai (2003) were noted and simply chalked up to the unfathomability of Japan to foreign observers. Although FX’s new Shōgun (2024) miniseries has worked to correct the errors of its predecessor, neither James Clavell’s novel (1975) nor its 1980 television adaptation were threatened with boycotts. Even Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), which was severely criticized for its depiction of geisha, was spared such intense attacks, although the most vociferous attacks focused on its casting of Chinese actresses to play the heroines. No petitions circulated calling for James Clavell, Edward Zwick, Tom Cruise, or Rob Marshall to be fired or demanding a government response to these assaults on national honor. At best, their errors were attributed to the “inherent inability” of foreigners to understand Japan and were not regarded as malicious.
It goes without saying that the tempered response to the aforementioned works owes in large part to the absence of the internet and social media echo-chamber. Here, we conclude with a discussion on the digital as a frontier for pressing social issues. Indeed, contributing to the problem is the toxicity of internet discourse, though in ways not customarily suspected when the matter of hate speech is raised. That is, Japanese social conservatives and netto uyoku have seized upon the reaction of Anglophone critics to buttress their own objections and vice-versa, with the two producing a self-feeding, ouroborosian singularity of masturbatory anti-Black vituperation. This has been facilitated by the advent of online machine translation that now enables netizens to create sites exclusively devoted to uploading and commenting on machine-translated texts of foreign reactions to a wide variety of topics ranging from, in the case at hand, Black cosplayers to Westerners reading of Japanese anime characters as white to the “Blackwashing” of those characters by Black creatives. In many cases, toxic Japanese commentary largely echoes what is expressed in the original Anglophone texts. Similarly, online Anglophone sites cull Japanese sites, translating and compiling those that support their position and presenting them as fodder for further discussion.
The co-mingling of anti-Blackness both in the U.S. and abroad displays the importance of reflecting on seemingly disparate events like the AC:S controversy. At stake is the very understanding of how Blackness might exist both within Anglophone media, Japanese media, and beyond. Blackness has become both the tool and target for those looking to return gaming to the white boys’ club, as it has stereotypically been perceived. This becomes especially important when racist motives are shrouded by using the anti-Black rhetoric of non-white individuals. Video games are not the first battleground for these issues. Indeed, recently in the U.S. context, Asian frustrations have been weaponized by conservatives to attack affirmative action. Within a post-Gamergate and Gamergate 2 landscape, video games have become a hotbed for activity within both Anglophone and Japanese media. It is thus imperative to continue these conversations, as Blackness is in constant struggle with pop culture and the fantastical. One must ask: whose imagination decides who can be a samurai? Or a wizard? Or a gamer? Why do some individuals insist that these identities are incongruent with Blackness? As demonstrated in the vignette at the start of this conclusion, representations of Blackness in gaming and popular culture more broadly are important for Black gamers like Q. The backlash towards Yasuke in the digital sphere sends a clear message: there is no place for Blackness in the world of gaming and popular culture. Such a message can have devastating effects on intergenerational gamers and consumers.
The AC:S controversy offers an opportunity to think deeply about the intersections of gaming, identity, and both historical and contemporary issues. Future studies of the controversy and Yasuke as a figure would benefit from an examination of the conditions that have led to erasure or denial of Yasuke as a historical figure, along with the ways in which fields such as Black Studies and Asian Studies can work to address and remedy these conditions. There is also room for the other discriminatory discourse that pervades the controversy, which includes anti-Black, anti-Korean, and homophobic discourse. Although not addressed in our commentary, a future article might address the controversy over players’ anxiety that the game’s protagonists will be queer, a topic of particular relevance considering the normativity of queer relations during the period in question and the fact that Schmidt-Hori has been attacked by blissfully somnolent homophobic online trolls for her research on the topic.
The controversy also serves as an opportune moment to think deeply about the need for mutual respect and open-mindedness when discussing issues or events that may be contentious. The affordances of the digital facilitate conversations on local and global scales, which ultimately can foster community and allow users to reach new insights. However, as we have seen in the hate speech and threats that have been set forth by some users anonymous and otherwise, the digital can create ruptures and serve as another site of harm. Our collaboration in publishing this commentary highlights the promise of bridging gaps and breaking barriers in academic disciplines—anthropology, Black Studies, and Asian/Japanese Studies—to engage with the general public on pressing issues in a way that considers multiple contexts (historical and contemporary, Anglophone media and Japanese media, and the like). We hope that our readers will be motivated to explore the nuances that underpin social issues and approach these issues in respectful, inquisitive, and open-minded ways.
Acknowledgements:
The authors would like to thank Sachi Schmidt-Hori for generously sharing details about her experiences and providing feedback on the initial draft of our commentary. The authors would also like to thank Tristan Grunow for considering our piece for online publication in Critical Asian Studies and offering feedback on our commentary. Hassel would like to thank Fletcher and Russell for kindly agreeing to collaborate with her on this commentary, and Q for generously offering his own reaction to the controversy.
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Kimberly Hassel, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She is an anthropologist and digital ethnographer specializing in digital culture, youth culture, and identity in contemporary Japan. Her current book project examines the relationships between Social Networking Services (SNS), smartphones, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood in Japan, especially among young people. Her work on digital sociality in Japan has been published in Anthropology News and Mechademia. Hassel also specializes in diaspora studies, critical mixed race studies, and Afro- Japanese encounters. Her work on digital activism among Black Japanese youths has appeared in “Who Is The Asianist?” The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies. In an ongoing project, Hassel explores transnational Black digital networks in the context of Japan, including consumption of Japanese popular culture among Black Americans and Gen Z more broadly. For her second book project, she is examining the experiences of Dominican diasporic communities in Japan and Japanese diasporic communities in the Dominican Republic. Hassel received a PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University. Her dissertation was funded by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship and received the Princeton University Marjorie Chadwick Buchanan Dissertation Prize.
Akil Fletcher, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Council of Humanities and a lecturer in the Anthropology department at Princeton University. Fletcher’s work intersects the fields of Anthropology, African American studies, and Game studies. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from the City College of New York and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. His research examines how Black individuals create identity, community, and alternative forms of play within online games and gaming spaces. His dissertation, “Playing in Color: An Exploration of Black Gaming Communities and Practices,” engaged with how online Black communities use digital platforms to form selfhood and relationships in gaming spaces while circumventing forms of racism and anti-Blackness in games like Final Fantasy XIV and communication platforms like Discord. Multiple organizations have funded Fletcher’s work and he has won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships such as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSFGRFP), the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSFDDRIG), the UCI President’s Dissertation Year National Science Foundation, Based on two years of research funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP), a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (NSF DDRIG), and UCI’s President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship.
John G. Russell, Ph.D. is an Emeritus Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Gifu University. His research focuses on representations of race and gender in Japanese and American popular culture. His current research projects explore the discourse of “blackness,” “whiteness,” and “cosmopolitan Japaneseness” in Anglophone and Japanese online spaces, transracialism, and the impact of race in the imagining and creation of robots, A.I., and other real and imagined transhuman beings. Russell received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Harvard University. He is the author of Nihonjin no kokujin-kan [Japanese Perceptions of Blacks] (Shinhyōron, 1991), Henken to sabetsu ga dono yō ni tsukurareru ka [How are Prejudice and Discrimination Produced?] (Akashi Shoten, 1995). His most recent publications include: “Rethinking Japaneseness: Blackness, Whiteness, and the Discordant Discourse of Diversity in Japan,” in Kimiko Tanaka and Helaine Selin (eds.), Sustainability, Diversity, and Equality: Key Challenges for Japan (Springer, 2023), “Anaconda East: Fetishes, Phallacies, Chimbo Chauvinism and the Displaced Discourse of Black Male Sexuality in Japan,” in Tamari Kitossa (ed.), Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism (University of Alberta Press, 2021), and “Darkies Never Dream: Race, Racism, and the Black Imagination in Science Fiction,” CR: The New Centennial Review (2018).
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Kimberly Hassel, Akil Fletcher, and John G. Russell, “Stranger Than Fiction?: Yasuke and the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Controversy,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, October 1, 2024; https://doi.org/10.52698/SJMY2397.