I think the best line in it comes directly after the headline: “For a Samurai to be brave, he must have a bit of Black blood.” — Japanese Proverb. I had originally thought that this was a reference to Onis, and so my knee-jerk reaction was: Imagine appropriating a Japanese proverb about demon blood to make a point about African representation in ancient Japan. Then I looked into the origin of the “proverb”, which you might be able to tell from the scare quotes, wasn’t actually a proverb, it is attributed to a relatively obscure French racist, Georges Maget, by M. De Quatrefages in “Bulletins et mémoires” By Société d’anthropologie de Paris in the late 1800’s. Page 53, if you can read French. Maget is described as having written a letter in 1877 that described the Japanese as a mixture of Malay “Negritos” and the Ainu, and using that heritage to paint them as mixed-race sub humans. A copy of Japan’s Weekly Mail from the same year skewered him, very politely, for not having a fucking clue what he was talking about: “A good deal has been already said and written about the origin of the Japanese race Kaempffer makes them out to be Assyrians. and traces their route from the Tower of Babel with as much minuteness as if he had himself been an eyewitness of their journey, while other writers have in turn identified them with the Chinese, the North-American Indians, the ancient Peruvians, and the lost tribes of Israel. A plausibly written article from the pen of Dr. Maget, of the French man-of-war Cosmao, which has been lately reproduced in two of the Yokohama journals, endeavours to prove that the Japanese are chiefly of Malay origin, and as he refers somewhat contemptuously to the theory of “the peopling of the Nipon Archipelago by emigrations which with too great complacency are fancied to have started no from China, now from Korea, now from Manchuria,” he cannot complain if some of those who with more or less ‘complacency’ hold this view, at least in so far as Korea is concerned, should do their best. to combat his arguments.” So to tie that all up: In order to make the point that there should have been black people in a movie set in ancient Japan, Spivey quoted a 150 year old quote from a French Racist who fabricated the ancestry of Japanese people to make the point that Japanese people were sub-human by relation. Take a fucking bow.
—Humble Talent
