Seems like we've hit a turning point in Japan's tolerance of western cultural meddling.

A couple of years ago, I don't think the Japanese public would have even blinked at AC: Shadows, but right now it seems like Ubisoft is scrambling to downplay Yasuke as much as possible, particularly for the Japanese audience.

As a westerner myself, I've gotten the sense that our recent push for cultural sensitivity in games does not extend to Japan. We've had multiple of instance of westerners on twitter harassing Japanese artists for drawing their own characters the wrong color, we've had a major credit card company arbitrarily shut down transactions for an otaku dating site (a decision I believe they reversed after scrutiny from the Japanese parliament), and for years now we've had Sony of America in charge of what Japanese playstation games are allowed to have on screen, censoring the same sort of content that they allow in western AAA games.

Back to Ubisoft, the upcoming AC Shadows release has had at least two cultural sensitivity failures, including the broken torii gate with the Yasuke miniature, and the current release date coinciding with the anniversary of a major terrorist attack (the latter of which probably wouldn't have raised eyebrows had it not been for the former).

In a studio like Ubisoft where you would get the sense that they would value something like cultural sensitivity reviews, there have been a number of instances with ACS where it seems like they just didn't bother, and I suspect that that's just as evident to most Japanese gamers as it is to me.

Just to add: I suspect a lot of people reading this think that cultural sensitivity is inherently a bad thing. It's not -- it's just been twisted by people here in the west to use insincerely as a weapon, like that incident where an American girl wore a Cheongsam to prom and everyone got offended on behalf of the Chinese because another American got offended by it (which is a very American thing to do). Actual cultural sensitivity, on the other hand, could have saved Ubisoft from accidentally making light of a national tragedy.