According to the personal recollection of Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘ historical culture consultant Professor Sachi Schmidt-Hori, Asian male players living in the West than were far more outraged and offended by Ubisoft’s various cultural missteps than anyone actually living in Japan, with many seeing the game as yet another attack on “Asian masculinity”.
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Prof. Schmidt-Hori, who currently holds a position as the Associate Professor of Japanese Culture and Literature at Dartmouth and served as the game’s “Consultant in Premodern Japanese Culture and Language”, reflected on her experience both working on Shadows and weathering its discourse during a recent post-release interview given to Eurogamer Editor-in-Chief Tom Phillips.
Speaking to her contributions to Yasuke and Naoe’s adventure, Schmidt-Hori began by admitting how “Initially I think they didn’t know how useful I would be,” particularly as she “didn’t know any of the background, the back stories”.
“They just asked me to conduct some research and I agreed to do it,” she said, recalling that her time with the Ubisoft team began with her being assigned to “small projects”, usually fact-check related. “Sometimes they’d send me photos of Buddhist temples that exist in today’s Japan and ask me to verify if something similar could have existed in the 16th century. Or they’d ask me about, like, how certain groups of people were treated in the period. It was the kinds of things you cannot just Google”
After proving herself knowledgeable, Schmidt-Hori was eventually asked to revise Shadows‘ script for, per Phillps, “historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies, as well as anything that could be deemed culturally insensitive.”
To this end, the professor admitted that “Sometimes we had to compromise,” though she claimed this usually only happened in regards to less glaring details.
For an example of such a compromise, Schmidt-Hori pointed to Naoe’s father, Fujibayashi Nagato, and revealed, “Nagato is not his name,” but rather “Nagato is the province of which he was the governor, so his real name would be Fujibayashi Nagato-no-kami, something something.”
From there, the academic and her host turned the conversation to the backlash leveled towards both the game itself and its individual staff – herself included, as she was explicitly featured and named in Ubisoft’s initial pack of press materials – over both Shadows‘ mishandling of its setting and its featuring of Yasuke as a playable lead.
“As soon as the materials came out…I became a very easy target,” said Schmidt-Hori. “You could look me up, my email address, my office location in a non-secure building of our campus, multiple social media accounts.”
“I was just so surprised,” she said. “But now, looking back, I can kind of understand what happened.”
Expanding on her thoughts, the professor asserted, “There were, like, multiple factions among the people who were complaining about the game, each with different motivations or reasons to be upset with the company, or the game, or me. Which was interesting.”
“One of the major groups who were upset were male gamers living in the west, of Asian descent. There were many, many robust, reddit communities – not just for gamers, but Asian masculinity communities – mad at me because, in their eyes, I’m like a sellout,” she continued. “Which is a very different reaction to that of people living in Japan – they didn’t have that kind of reaction.”
“But for Asian men living in the West, this game perfectly fitted their narratives – including that Asian females in the Western world are complicit in erasing the existence of Asian men. And because of my last name they assumed I was married to an Anglo-American.”
Clarifying “Well, he’s actually biracial,” she then recalled, “Still, they would post on Reddit and say things like ‘oh my god, this b–ch, she has the gall to prioritise her white husband’s last name over her maiden name.”
“It’s something that only Asian men would really pick up on, and it’s very interesting,” the professor noted. “I mean, the real reason why my name is hyphenated this way is when I tried to do it as Hori-Schmidt it just sounded like ‘holy s–t’. So I decided I would just do the other way.”
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For her part, Schmidt-Hori told Phillips that rather than either clam up completely or lash out, she did make attempts to reach out personally to some of her and Ubisoft’s critics, some of which were successful and some not.
“I tried to contact many people through Reddit,” she told her host. “But with one person, we actually had a Zoom meeting for one hour. Later we became Facebook friends, and he agreed to be interviewed by my friend who is making a documentary about this.”
“Another person, I messaged and he was defensive in the beginning – he just repeated something similar, like, ‘Asian women like you have it so much easier than us, and by contributing to this game you have contributed to the ongoing erasure of Asian males from global media’. Well, [I told him] that this is the kind of stuff I teach in my classes, that I’m a faculty member in the Asian Studies Department, I talk about Asian masculinity.”
“[I asked him] ‘Why are you attacking me? I’m trying to educate the general public about people like you.’ And then eventually he apologised and took down his post.”
However, other than Western-based Asian males, Schmidt-Hori found that perhaps her most vocal group critics were “general anti-DEI people,” who she believed “just seized the opportunity and utilised the lament of the Asian men”.
“It’s white supremacist, nationalist ideology couched as being sympathetic. White supremacists tend to use Asians or Asian Americans as a tool to oppress Black people, Latinos.”
“It’s very, very typical. And it’s unfortunate that some Asian Americans also become sympathetic to white supremacy [through this].”
While she did try to reach out to some of these “anti-DEI” individuals, the professor admits that she did not attempt to argue over the historical veracity of the ‘Yasuke was a Samurai’ claims, as she believed a majority of the discourse was based in emotion rather than logic and therefore ultimately futile.
“I could make a perfect argument to prove something is correct, and they will still use something else to complain about the game or society,” she affirmed. “The reasoning doesn’t matter, they’re unhappy and need to blame it on someone else.”
Yet, Schmit-Horii says she faced more resistance from this group than the other due to their belief that she was “someone who promotes child molestation”.
“I wrote a research book about trans-generational male-male love in medieval Buddhist monasteries, and they must have felt like they just dug up a gold mine,” she explained. “In the US, a favourite denouncement of the far-right is that the left, including people like Hilary Clinton, run child molestation rings. And here I was, this woke so-called academic who wrote this book.”
(While Schmidt-Horii’s book, Tales of Idolized Boys: Male-Male Love in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Narratives, does in fact explore “a nuanced historicization of social constructs” related to the medieval Japanese concept of ‘chigo’ – wherein a samurai would enter into a sexual teacher-student relationship with a young apprentice while teaching him the ways of combat – it should be noted that not only is she far from the first scholar to ever approach the subject, but also that research into the topic goes back decades, with significant texts relating to its study being published in 2007, 2003, 1994, and 1990.)
But despite the anti-DEI group’s increased hostility, she still made an effort to bridge the gap, albeit one that proved less successful than its predecessor.
Speaking to an instance where an unidentified online personality wrote an article about her work, Schmidt-Hori asserted, “He is a professional troll. He has a media company dedicated to anti-DEI activities. So I emailed him and said ‘you wrote an article about me, and because of that I’ve been receiving threats, my life is inconvenienced, it’s very difficult to attend to my family, my students, my courses, and what do you think of what you did?’ I requested a Zoom conversation, but then he said ‘oh, we can do it on my platform’.”
“I said, ‘no, no, I don’t want your fans to be there cheering for you. This is just between you and me as two individuals. And I just want you to realise what you did was so much more than you probably intended. Imagine your wife receiving hundreds of death threats and her picture is all over the internet. You’d be worried about her, right? Well, that’s my husband.’”
“He didn’t reply,” she concluded her anecdote, “but he took it down, so that was good enough for me. I was like, good job, white supremacist.”
But far from having an issue with just ‘the gamers’, Schmidt-Hori also notes that she was not a fan of the fact that, upon receiving allegedly genuine threats from the public, Ubisoft advised her to either ignore it or do her best to minimize her online presence.
“When this chaos started, naturally I contacted them thinking that they might do something – I don’t know what.”
“But all they did was tell me to ignore it and suggest I take down my social media profiles. That made me really, really upset.”
“They never prepared me or warned me beforehand. I was completely blindsided, and they knew that my profile was just out in the open. I had done video interviews to be circulated online, and of course, I had agreed to do them. But yeah, I think they could have easily imagined that I’d become a target.
In regards to said “death threats and threats of violence”, Schmidt-Horii told her host that Ubisoft “would just ask me ‘do you think they’re actually going to do it?’ And I’d say, ‘maybe not’. And they’d say, ‘once something becomes credible, and if you’re actually worried about your safety, we’ll send security personnel’.”
When pressed for comment on Schmidt-Horii’s frustrations, a Ubisoft spokesperson told Phillips, “We do not condone harassment or bullying in any form. Unfortunately, some members of our teams and close partners have faced online harassment.”
“We are committed to creating a supportive and collaborative environment and we’re constantly learning how we can improve this process,” they concluded. “We commend and appreciate Sachi Schmidt-Hori for addressing these topics directly and are grateful for her approach and expertise.”
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