Race, Cultural Appropriation, Political Correctness, and the Assassin's Creed Shadows: How Can We Learn about Medieval Japan from Transnational Video Games?

Assassin's Creed is a popular action game series starring assassins, and the latest title, Assassin's Creed Shadows, due for release in November 2024, is the first in the series to be set in medieval Japan and features a real-life black man Yasuke and a fictional kunoichi Naoe as the protagonists. The series touts the high quality of its recreations of the regions and periods in which they take place. However, in this work, the period research is noticeably crude, with landscapes, some architectures and tools that are not from medieval Japan, as well as some objects that are upside down and left to right, so it can be frowned upon by Japanese history fans. There were also black people brought to medieval Japan as slaves of missionaries from Europe, but they were extremely few and rare. In the first place, although Yasuke was a vassal of a Sengoku lord Nobunaga Oda, there are few primary historiographies on Yasuke, and opinions differ as to whether Yasuke was a samurai or not. Some historians have complained that it is excessive political correctness to make Yasuke the protagonist. Recently, this work has attracted a great deal of attention in Japan, with a petition drive calling for its release to be stopped and the Diet taking up the issue, out of concern that false historical culture could be spread around the world through the game. While history games have immense learning benefits, there is a risk of spreading prejudices and stereotypes that differ from historical facts if the fictional nature of the games is not recognised. Using Assassin's Creed as a case study, this presentation discusses critically the effects of learning medieval Japan through history games in Japan and the world from the perspective of Japanese medieval history and racial and cultural political correctness.