>>122630810This. Everyone acts like being a Samurai is cool until you put a black guy in the role, then suddenly the whole "total submission to the will of your lord" thing is icky because every example of servitude in history now has to be filtered through "muh american slavery."
Yasuke certainly didn't become a more liberated, free individual going from the servant of a missionary to the samurai of a powerful warlord, but he did gain quite a bit of agency. A samurai may be an instrument who's idealized form is total obedience and loyalty to one's lord, but being recognized as one of the men in Japan allowed to carry a weapon mean Yasuke could have very well run around decapitating villagers for small slights if he really wanted and not really faced any consequences. Not saying he did that, just that being a Samurai isn't so cut and dry as "DO WHATEVER YOU WANT" or "YOU ARE A SOULLESS VESSEL OF OUR LORDS WILL."
It's why the concept is so fascinating to me. What would it have been like to go from a world you've only just come to understand in the eyes of a black man in a white world, to a world no black man had ever seen before?
To become a retainer, a samurai, and be both a man capable of exercising unprecedented authority, while being expected to offer up your life wholeheartedly to the man you serve, in a place that has never seen anyone like you before? That's an experience that can only happen once in history, and it's why people are so enamored with the story of Yasuke.
