Yasuke already spoke some Japanese and the two men got on well, according to academic Thomas Lockley, who has written a book on Yasuke. Yasuke met Nobunaga shortly after his arrival in Japan and he piqued his interest, the filmmakers say, by being a talented conversationalist. “Samurais often began their training in childhood.” “It would have been impossible for Yasuke to rise to the rank of a samurai in just a year without a warrior background,” DeSnoo said. Webb believed that because of his command of the Japanese language, Yasuke would have been viewed favorably. Floyd Webb and Deborah DeSnoo, filmmakers working on a documentary about him, believe assertions that he was a slave to be speculative at best.
Some experts say he was a slave, but it is hard to say. What is known, however, is that Yasuke arrived in Japan with an Italian Jesuit named Alessandro Valignano on an inspection tour, and appears in recorded history only between 15. Most historians say he came from Mozambique but some have suggested other countries such as Ethiopia or Nigeria. There are no records of Yasuke’s date or country of birth. The average height of a Japanese man in 1900 was 157.9m (5 feet 2 inches) so Yasuke would have towered over most Japanese people in the 16th Century, when people were generally shorter due to worse nutrition. “His height was 6 shaku 2 sun (roughly 6 feet, 2 inches)… he was black, and his skin was like charcoal,” a fellow samurai, Matsudaira Ietada, described him in his diary in 1579. Before long, he was speaking Japanese fluently and riding alongside Nobunaga in battle. Within a year, Yasuke had joined the upper echelons of Japan’s warrior class, the samurai. In 1579, his arrival in Kyoto, the capital at the time, caused such a sensation that people climbed over one another to get a glimpse of him with some being crushed to death, according to historian Lawrence Winkler.
Known as Yasuke, the man was a warrior who reached the rank of samurai under the rule of Oda Nobunaga – a powerful 16th Century Japanese feudal lord who was the first of the three unifiers of Japan.
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