There isn’t much to explain — while most samurai were Japanese, for obvious reasons, there have been a small number of foreign samurai in Japanese history.
People online are complaining right now because the latest Assassin’s Creed features a black samurai. There are all these memes floating around how it isn’t “realistic”. But it is… he’s literally a real dude, who really existed. He spoke Japanese, arrived with Portuguese Jesuits and was a skilled warrior who the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga held in high esteem. This is something samurai did from time to time — they saw a particularly impressive man, a strong and strapping lad with a different skin color, and they’d be amazed, rather than appalled. And decide: “I want this guy to serve with my army!”
If you were to time-travel to feudal Japan, and a daimyō (feudal warlord) took a liking to you and felt you could be an asset to his cause, there is a pretty good chance you would be made a samurai, if only just for the novelty of it. You could be European, African, Korean or Native Hawaiian and it wouldn’t have mattered — Japanese folks were remarkably pragmatic.
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