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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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He wasn’t featured in any media or historical documentaries or video games or anything else prior to 2020.

Yasuke appears in Nioh, a 2017 game developed in Japan, as a boss. But the context to this is...

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.

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.