It's Pretty Simple: Don't Write Your Own Fiction and Call it a "True Story"
African Samurai's 'Iga rifle ambush' isn't what it seems
(The second part of my piece on Yasuke is up at The Sundial - please check it out. The below is a significantly more detailed version.)
In the previous post we looked at the sources from which Lockley and Girard seem to have derived their action-packed account of a ‘ninja’ ambush in their 2019 African Samurai. It is, if you believe the book’s account, Yasuke’s first taste of combat in Japan, as he cuts down a young ‘ninja’ boy in the melee that follows the rifle-fire.
As we saw last time around, Lockley and Girard’s immediate source was Stephen Turnbull, which is never a good sign. Turnbull’s source in turn was a 17th-century historical chronicle named Iranki. I translated the relevant passage of the Iranki here, if you want to refresh your memory as to what it says. Remember, also, that the Iranki is not a terribly reliable source, but we’re choosing not to address that for now.
Was Yasuke Even There?
The first thing you probably noticed is that neither Turnbull nor the Iranki mention Yasuke. It’s possible that Yasuke was in Iga at the time - he could well have been traveling in Nobunaga’s retinue - but it’s equally possible that he was somewhere else. So right away, Yasuke’s presence at the time of the supposed ambush is entirely speculative, because we don’t know if he was there in the first place.
As a few critics have noted, African Samurai contains a lot of speculation about things that Yasuke might have done or could have been involved in. This isn’t terribly surprising, because the primary source evidence concerning Yasuke is pretty thin, so there are large gaps in terms of what we can reasonably prove about him. The degree of speculative content in African Samurai may be annoying to some, but I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. Lockley speculates, for instance, that Yasuke may have had a sexual encounter with his lord Nobunaga:
Perhaps one of the clues to his swift rise is that he submitted to Nobunaga’s advances. Had Nobunaga attempted any kind of sexual relations, it is unlikely Yasuke could have resisted…If it occurred, however, one wonders what Yasuke would have thought of it.1
As you might expect, this drew some online outrage (“they made Yasuke gay!”), but in defense of Lockley it was a common trope in Edo-period pop media that Nobunaga had had a sexual relationship with his young male page Mori Ranmaru, and we know that plenty of medieval samurai had sex with other men. So although speculative, the idea isn’t totally implausible, and in this case at least Lockley’s language makes clear to the reader that he is speculating (“Perhaps,” “if it occurred”).
That’s the key point. If you’re going to speculate, you have to make it crystal clear to the reader what you’re doing.
And there’s the problem, because there’s no indication anywhere in the Iga rifle ambush chapter that Yasuke’s bloody duel with the ‘ninja’ is Lockley (or Girard’s) own speculation as to what might have happened. If you’re a non-specialist with no way to access the Japanese-language evidence, like virtually all of African Samurai’s readers, you’re going to come away with the impression that Yasuke’s duel is supported by historical sources. And as far as I can tell, it isn’t.
It’s possible that I’m wrong, of course, and that there is a source somewhere that tells of Yasuke’s duel in Iga. If so, and someone can bring it to my attention, I’ll be happy to be corrected.
An Accumulation of Speculation
So this would appear to be the point at which African Samurai’s approach crosses the boundary from “maybe a bit inane but basically allowable” to “deeply problematic.” If Lockley and Girard had written something like, “We don’t know if Yasuke was there, but if he was it’s possible that he came to Nobunaga’s aid and helped his wounded comrades,” then I’d probably give them a pass. But obviously, that doesn’t get you four pages of thrilling ‘ninja’ action.
If you read the Iranki passage in the previous post, though, you may have noticed something else toward the end of the account:
The three men, having unexpectedly failed to kill their target, pointed toward [the village of] Otowa and fled like birds taking to the wing. Nobunaga’s men took up their bows and arrows and went after the attackers, but being uncertain of the terrain they could not strike the three men down.
Contrast this with what happens in African Samurai:
Tossing smoking large-bore guns, they drew their swords. Iga men who’d been hiding among the headless villagers. These were not the walking dead, they were ninja….
Yasuke swiped and missed one man who danced under a horse and onward.
So in Iranki the attackers flee as soon as they realize that they have failed to kill Nobunaga. Unlike in African Samurai there’s no mention of anybody hiding among the corpses of the slain, or that the attackers “drew their swords,” or of melee combat. On the contrary, Iranki explicitly says that Nobunaga’s men could not catch the fleeing attackers. So no secondary melee, no way for Nobunaga’s warriors to be “cut down by the enemy after the explosion had thrown them from their horses,” and no chance for Yasuke to kill a ‘ninja’ and become a “blooded samurai of the Oda.”2
It’s bad to present speculative content as fact. It’s worse when the main primary source clearly says your speculation didn’t happen.
This is why I wrote in the previous post that Lockley and Girard would actually be on firmer ground if they hadn’t read Iranki. The details of the melee episode in African Samurai suggest either that Lockley and Girard didn’t read Iranki, or that they did read it, but then decided to ignore what it says and invent their own, more exciting content. Both of these would be bad, but the second would be worse.
Problems All the Way Down
There are so many layers of bad scholarship here. Let me count the ways:
Lockley and Girard probably didn’t read the Iranki, the primary source underpinning the ‘rifle ambush’ episode, getting their account from a poor quality secondary source in English (Turnbull) instead.
Iranki is not a reliable source, so there’s a good chance the ambush never happened.
Even if we take Iranki as reliable, it doesn’t say Yasuke was there and says nothing about the attackers hiding among corpses.
Lockley and Girard don’t indicate to their readers that the bits about Yasuke and the attackers hiding among the dead are their speculation.
The speculative episode is contradicted by the available primary source, which clearly says there was no hand-to-hand combat.
In fairness, Lockley isn’t a ‘ninja’ writer in the strict sense - he isn’t claiming to write a history of the ‘ninja’ as such, and you could easily have removed the ‘ninja’ episodes from his book without losing anything. The reason I’ve devoted so much attention to African Samurai is that it’s very much of a piece with ‘ninja’ history, because it suffers from exactly the same set of endemic flaws that have rendered English-language ‘ninja’ writing so unreliable for nearly sixty years now.
The fact that this keeps happening - the same mistakes being repeated over and over, with the same outcomes - suggests that this isn’t an isolated problem. So it’s not just one writer getting sloppy; there’s something structural and fundamental to the way English-language pop histories are being written, and whatever that is, it’s not getting better over time.
In the next post, then, I’ll try to offer a diagnosis of what’s going wrong here, and why it keeps happening.
African Samurai (2019 hardback ed.), p. 208. This whole section causes one reviewer on Goodreads to complain about the book’s “LBGTQ+ advocacy.”
For what it’s worth, most serious historians of premodern gender and sexuality tend to avoid using the term “gay” in a medieval or Edo-period context, because it’s perceived as anachronistic, a modern Western concept that doesn’t automatically make sense in pre-modern Japanese culture. This is why you will see translations like “male love” rather than “gay.”
African Samurai, pp. 233-34.