One of the most hotly anticipated video games of recent times was finally released last month, after being twice delayed and beset by controversy. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise features historical action-adventure set in various places and times from Egypt to the Crusades to Victorian-era London. The latest instalment is Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. It is set in Japan’s famously bloody Sengoku jidai, or ‘era of warring states’ (c. 1467-1600). This was a time when authority in Japan had broken down and the country had become a patchwork quilt of feuding provinces. It was the heyday of the samurai and featured, towards the end of the period, first contact with Europe: Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries began to arrive, in search of fortunes and souls.

Assassin’s Creed: Shadows first attracted controversy when it was revealed that one of two main characters would be Yasuke: an African slave brought to Japan by the Jesuits in the mid-1500s. Little is known for certain about Yasuke’s life, but he appears to have risen to become a trusted retainer of Oda Nobunaga – the era’s best-known warlord, thanks to a series of epoch-making victories in the second half of the 16^th century that began the process of reunifying Japan.

Critics charged that it had taken Assassin’s Creed long enough to get to East Asia. And yet when it did, in place of a Japanese man Ubisoft decided to feature an African samurai whose real role and importance in Sengoku Japan is shrouded in mystery. That the second main character, Naoe, is a female Japanese shinobi (ninja), appeared not to be enough. There was talk of ‘cultural erasure’ and of Ubisoft ‘going woke.’

No sooner had the furore over Yasuke began to abate than a second source of anger in Japan emerged. Trailers for the game appeared to show that players would have the chance, if they were so inclined, to smash up a Shintō shrine – a shrine, moreover, that exists in real life and whose administrators had apparently not been consulted over the use of its name in the game.

Leaving aside the legalities of using this particular shrine in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, the outpouring of anger over the destruction of a shrine was remarkable both for its intensity and for the way that it appears to ignore history. The controversy went as far as the Japanese parliament, where Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru found himself forced to condemn what he had heard of this aspect of the game. ‘We will not’, he declared, ‘tolerate any acts that do not respect the culture and religion of a country.’

Ishiba is famous for his nerdy embrace of Japanese pop culture. Through some combination of this, his history lessons back at school and the sheer fact of living in a country so deeply aware of its past, it is reasonable to assume that Ishiba has a pretty good grasp of the Sengoku period: a colourful and much-dramatised epoch. Perhaps he simply felt cornered by the questions that were being asked in parliament, and felt he had no choice but to add his voice to the chorus of criticism that was being raised of the game.

It is otherwise hard to see how contemporary versus historical standards when it comes to violence – including violence against sacred buildings – could have become so confused. Smashing up religious architecture was one of the main things that samurai in the Sengoku era got up to. Amongst the most grievous and persistent offenders was none other than Oda Nobunaga. Alongside secular enemies, Nobunaga found some of Japan’s most powerful Buddhist sects ranged against him in his quest to unite the country under his rule. He did not hesitate to show them who was boss.

After the Tendai Buddhist sect came out against Nobunaga in 1571, he sent 30,000 men to surround Mount Hiei. Overlooking the city of Kyoto, it had been the sect’s home for centuries by this point. Its 3,000 temples had long made up a hallowed centre of learning, ritual, art and pilgrimage. And yet Nobunaga was willing to send his men up the mountain, killing everyone who stood in their way – not just Tendai monks but the men, women and children who called the mountain home. They then looted the temples and set them on fire. When Nobunaga had finished with Mount Hiei, it was a barren wasteland, carpeted in ash, across which it was said that only badgers and foxes now moved.

A decade later, Nobunaga turned his attention to the Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist sect, whose home was a great fortified temple complex at what is now Osaka. Nobunaga laid siege to it, and when that siege was broken by Jōdo Shinshū allies supplying them by sea he had ships made – perhaps the first ironclad warships the world had ever seen – to help reestablish his stranglehold on the complex. His enemies inside eventually surrendered and Nobunaga prepared to enter in triumph – only to find that a member of the sect had set fire to it, as a means of denying Nobunaga his full victory.

One needn’t glory in this kind of killing and destruction to appreciate the basic fact that in the Sengoku period, religious institutions were not always neutral. Many were wealthy, influential and deeply involved in Japan’s turbulent politics – some, like Tendai, to the point of training and deploying ‘warrior-monks.’ Warlords like Nobunaga knew this only too well, and were not prepared to make special allowances.

Nobunaga himself found out, to his very great cost, that he was not the only warlord prepared to attack a temple. In the summer of 1582, while he and some of his men were staying overnight in the Honnō-ji temple, traitorous members of his own retinue launched an attack. They fired on the temple and then stormed in, killing large numbers of Nobunaga’s men and leading Nobunaga himself – who was critically injured – to take his own life by performing seppuku. As he did so, the temple burned to the ground around him.

It is possible that sensitivity in present-day Japan to the idea of religious buildings being attacked has roots of a kind in what happened to the country in the years after Nobunaga’s death. He was succeeded by a man named Hideyoshi Toyotomi. Where Nobunaga’s great religious enemy had been Buddhism, Hideyoshi’s was Christianity. By the 1580s, the Jesuits had made remarkable progress in converting warlords and ordinary Japanese alike, especially on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Word reached Hideyoshi that some of these converts had become involved in destroying Shintō shrines. Hideyoshi was furious, and he eventually became known in Europe for his harsh and bitter persecution of Christianity.

It is tempting to suggest that Ubisoft’s inclusion of violence against a Shintō shrine has been read in Japan as yet another instance of foreigners either misunderstanding or deliberately disrespecting Japanese culture. One can see their point, and perhaps on balance they were right to remove the shrine-smashing scene from their game, as they are reported to have done. At the same time, given the extraordinary power of video games to immerse people in the past and whet their appetite for history, it would be a great shame if we find ourselves being presented with sanitised versions of the past. Confusion about who we have been risks feeding confusion about who we are now.