African Samurai Is Bad, But Not Because It's 'Woke'
It's doing what plenty of other pop histories of Japan do, unfortunately
Thomas Lockley and Geoffrey Girard’s 2019 African Samurai claims to tell the life of an African man named Yasuke who came to Japan in 1579 and entered the service of a major warlord of the day. This alone would probably have been enough for certain sections of the internet to term it ‘woke’ or criticize it for ‘doing DEI’ on Japanese history. Lockley and Girard themselves were certainly aware of this context when they wrote the book, since in it Lockley writes about how he sees Yasuke’s story as:
an alternative view of history which does not place white European males at its center, but tells a soaring success story of a non-European, without placing them as a victim.1
It’s easy to draw a link between African Samurai’s apparent politics and the raft of serious problems that the book contains, and plenty of people have done so. But the exact same issues that plague African Samurai can be found across a whole range of other pop histories of Japan that have no obvious agenda at all. Looking through these other histories, most of which are ‘ninja’ books, there seems to be a set of unspoken assumptions about what you can and cannot do with Japanese history for popular audiences. Lockley and Girard just followed those assumptions, as far as I can see.
Go Ahead, Include Your Own Fiction
So you’ve got an advance book contract for a history of the ‘ninja,’ and you’ve just realized that the historical sources you have aren’t very interesting. You’ve got hundreds of pages to fill, and you sure as hell can’t do it with the actual history. What are you going to do?
Easy. Make shit up. Write your own stories and stick ‘em in there.
This is what Lockley and Girard appear to have done, and it’s bad, but they weren’t really doing anything that their predecessors in the pop-history field hadn’t done already.
We know that Lockley and Girard used Stephen Turnbull’s 2003 book Ninja: AD 1460-1650 as one of their major sources for accounts of supposed ‘ninja’ activity in medieval Japan. A few pages on from the accounts that Lockley and Girard used in AD 1460-1650, we read this:
An Assassination Attempt
Reference was made earlier to the house in Kyoto called Nijo jinya that exhibits several protective measures against ninja assassinations. Let us examine these using a hypothetical attempt on the life of its owner, Ogawa Nagatsuka.
The group of three ninja sent to kill him are operating as a team, and even if only one of their number survives to land the final blow, their task will have been accomplished […]2
And so on in like vein for another page and three-quarters.
Did you catch the word “hypothetical” in the second sentence? I hope so, because unless I’ve really missed something this two-page vignette, which comes in a section recounting supposed historical ‘ninja’ assassinations, is Turnbull’s own fictional creation. I’d imagine Turnbull realized the ethical can of worms he’d be opening if he tried to present this episode as something that actually happened, and was intelligent enough to stick the word “hypothetical” in there so as stay out of trouble. Including your own fiction is still a weird thing to do, especially as in the book’s intro Turnbull declares his intention to:
‘play it straight.’ Any references to ninja that could fly will be identified as the myths they are. Quotations from written accounts of ninja exploits will be confined to chronicles that are respected for their accuracy.3
So basically, both African Samurai and AD 1460-1650 are padding their pages with fiction; the only difference between them is that one key word “hypothetical.”
Martial artist and author Donn Draeger’s best-selling 1971 Ninjutsu also contains some of its author’s own creative fiction, once again (I assume) to fill space:
[Y]ou have had occasion to take to the field of battle many times in the service of your lord. Each time you resolutely faced death with a state of mental calmness not only expected of a man of your honorable profession but required by the samurai warrior’s sacred ethical code. Numerous enemy warriors had found your razor-sharp sword always ready, your swordsmanship terrifyingly efficient. Never had you experienced uncertainty as to the outcome of such combat.4
As awesome and manly as “you” are, “you” are still no match for the ‘ninja,’ as we find at the end of the book:
You try desperately to call out, to warn the others. But that is impossible now. Your blood pounds hard and hot at your temples and you begin to lose consciousness. You realize then that you too have fallen victim to the dreaded ninja. What will happen to your beloved lord? You will never know - for you will sleep forever.5
I actually find Draeger’s purple prose fairly entertaining for sheer kitsch value, and I doubt anyone would read it as depicting real events. It shows, though, how willing ‘ninja’ authors are to bulk out their supposedly historical treatises with their own fiction. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t something you do if you have lots of good-quality historical evidence to work with.
It’s All Storytelling in the End
It’s not just Draeger and Turnbull, either. Consider The Elite, a book about military special forces by the British soldier and explorer Ranulph Fiennes, a fairly well-known figure in the UK. This was published in 2019, the same year as African Samurai.
Regrettably, The Elite contains a section about the ‘ninja,’ in which we find a description of a supposed attempt by the thief Ishikawa Goemon to kill Oda Nobunaga. Lockley and Girard mention this episode too, though it almost certainly never happened.6 What’s relevant here is how Fiennes describes the moments after the failure of Goemon’s mission, as he tries to make his getaway:
With the alarm raised, Goemon knew his mission had failed. All he could do now was to try to escape the palace alive using all of his Ninja skills. As guards gave chase, he threw small steel spikes, known as caltrops, on the floor. This slowed some of his pursuers but the samurai bodyguard still gave chase. Reaching into his pockets, Goemon grabbed a handful of shuriken Ninja stars and launched them at his enemy. The pointed ends embedded themselves in his pursuers’ flesh and sent them writing in agony to the ground.
Yet Goemon was still not safe. As he turned a corner, he appeared to have entered a dead end. Hearing the ever-nearing footsteps of the samurai, and knowing he couldn’t fight them all, he took out a special mix of gunpowder, threw it to the floor, and lit it. Soon the area was a sea of smoke, and Goemon was able to creep past the samurai undetected, and finally make good his escape.7
Yeah, no. This whole passage is horseshit. I reckon I’ve read damn near every account of this supposed “assassination” ever printed, and none of them say anything about Goemon using caltrops, shuriken, or smoke bombs. I can tell you for certain that none of the texts listed in Fiennes’ bibliography mention these details, and I strongly suspect that they’re Fiennes’ own inventions (or possibly those of his ghostwriter, if he used one).8
The audience for the kind of military history Fiennes believes himself to be writing, the audience that would pick up a book subtitled “From Ancient Sparta to the War on Terror,” is pretty far from being ‘woke.’ And yet Fiennes here appears to be doing exactly what Lockley and Girard did. He’s taking an account of ‘ninja’ action from an unreliable English-language source, sexing it up with his own fictional embellishments, and allowing the reader to think that the embellishments are historical events. The only difference is that in Fiennes’ case, nobody seems to have noticed.
In a certain sense, then, Lockley and Girard were simply unlucky. The problems with their book got noticed because they picked a topic that was likely to draw a lot of attention, but they weren’t doing anything dramatically outside of the debased standards of pop histories of Japan.
Some of my readers may perhaps be wondering how an author could expect to get away with this kind of thing. Surely there’s some system out there for catching this stuff, or at least for calling out the more egregious cases? The short answer is that there isn’t, and I suspect that at least some pop authors know that there isn’t. So, that’s what we’ll look at in the next post.
Lockley and Girard, African Samurai (2019 ed), pp. 397-98.
Turnbull, Ninja: AD 1460-1650 (2003), pp. 41-42.
Turnbull, Ninja: AD 1460-1650, p. 4.
Draeger, Ninjutsu (my ed., 1989), p. 15.
Draeger, Ninjutsu, p. 143.
African Samurai, p. 224.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes, The Elite: The Story of Special Forces – from Ancient Sparta to the War on Terror (Simon and Schuster, 2019), pp. 163-164. Capitalization of ‘ninja’ is in original.
Fiennes, The Elite, p. 348.