Joy Keys chats with Scholar Thomas Lockley about the African Samurai

Thomas Lockley is an associate professor at Nihon University College of Law in Tokyo, where he teaches courses concerning the international and multicultural history of Japan and East Asia. He authored the first academic paper on the life of Yasuke, which led to the release of a Japanese-language book on the historical figure and now to African Samurai, a narrative history co-written with thriller and speculative fiction author Geoffrey Girard that relays Yasuke’s story in a cinematic, endlessly fascinating fashion.

African Samurai,discusses the remarkable life of history’s first foreign-born samurai, and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society.When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world.