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Even if true, which I doubt, it’s by the standard of the day erasure. The first Japanese centered AC storyline doesn’t feature a Japanese lead. Imagine the uproar if the first AC set in Africa didn’t feature a black African man as the lead. And really I don’t see Yasuke as that famous. He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020. This despite Anime and Japanese gaming being huge and samurai being second only to ninjas in the part of Japanese mythology exported globally. I find this impossible to take seriously. If he were that famous in Japan, surely he’d have shown up before the current mania for making visible minorities star in every piece of media made. I suspect that what really happened is that the production team went to Japan and went through the archives looking for a Black Man who they could make the star of their game and then polite Japanese archivists agreed that of course the Black Samurai was super famous and of course was a bad ass until the white people left and they laughed behind their back.
Yasuke appears in Nioh, a 2017 game developed in Japan, as a boss. But the context to this is...
Yasuke is a factoid about the Sengoku period. Nioh's plot is framed around a long string of factoids about the Sengoku period. Quite similar to how Assassins Creed plots work, except with Youkai instead of Assassins and Templars. You even play as William Adams, who is another Sengoku factoid. Koei Tecmo practically specializes in games about random Sengoku factoids in general, so even having relatively obscure ones show up is not particularly notable.
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