In the year 1638, a brave mob of impoverished
peasants in the far west of Japan, led by a 16-year-old boy, rose
against their cruel Samurai overlords, openly defying one of the most powerful warriors
in the world. Making their stand in an abandoned castle, these farmers-turned-insurrectionists
cloaked themselves in baptismal white garb and sang hymns to Jesus and Mary, for they were
followers of Deus, the one true God. Welcome to our video on the history of Christianity in
Japan, culminating in the great Catholic Shimabara rebellion, the war that would close the land of
the Rising Sun to the world for over 250 years. Once that wait was over, Japanese
produce could be sold to the world, and we’ve a perfect example in our
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five dollars off your first order. Our story begins in the early 1540s, when the
Portuguese, having been given dominion over all non-Christian lands on the right side of a
line drawn by the Pope, had rounded cape horn, penetrated into the Indian ocean, and emerged
upon the South China sea into Kyushu isle. Generally speaking, the haughty Samurai
thought little of these newcomers, who they called “southern Barbarians”. Nevertheless, the
Portuguese had arrived in Japan at an opportune time. For nearly a century, the entire country had
been fractured as a patchwork of independent fiefs ruled by Samurai warlords called Daimyo
regularly clashed against one another in a bloody and endless battle royale.
Before long, the Portuguese found a niche for themselves. The matchlock arquebuses they
introduced became a game changer in local warfare, while the Chinese goods they exported out of their
lease port in Macau was the only way the Japanese could obtain fine silk and other luxuries out of
an otherwise strictly isolationist Ming Dynasty. By the 1560s, Portuguese ships were
a regular sight in Japanese harbours. In particular, the port city of Nagasaki
became a hub of Catholic activity, and in 1580, was ceded to the Jesuit Order by the Christian
Daimyo, Ōmura Sumitada. Indeed, the expansion of Portuguese colonial influence came part-and-parcel
with the expansion of the Jesuit Priestly order. Consequently, Christianity made remarkably fast
inroads into a nation whose religious landscape had traditionally been dominated by Buddhism,
Confucianism, and indigenous Shinto animism, a process greatly expedited by the conversion
of powerful Kyushu Daimyos, like Otomo Sorin, the aforementioned Omura Sumitada, and Arima
Harunobu, the lord of Shimabara Peninsula. However, in the ensuing decades, the Church’s
position became increasingly turbulent. The unification of the land began with
the underdog warlord Oda Nobunaga, but ended with his upstart peasant
general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In 1586, Hideyoshi became Kampaku, and
later Taiko of a newly reunified Japan. Hideyoshi was intensely suspicious of the
southern Barbarian’s foreign religion, and these suspicions were amplified when he was
fed reports of Christian converts destroying Buddhist and Shinto temples, Jesuits buying
Japanese citizens as slaves to export for labour elsewhere in the Portuguese Empire, and Christian
Daimyos forcing their subjects to convert. Thus, upon completing his conquest of Kyushu in
1587, Hideyoshi issued an edict banishing all Jesuit Padres from the isle. Furthermore, Nagasaki
was seized from Jesuit control a year later. However, the expulsion edict wasn’t enforced, for
Japan had become heavily dependent on Portuguese trade, and priests were hard to separate from
the traders. So, off the record, Hideyoshi turned a blind eye to the Jesuits as they quietly
continued their missionary work in secret. However, Hideyoshi’s lingering reservations about
Christianity flared back up 1593, when Franciscan Friars arrived in Kyoto from Spanish Manila and
began to openly and loudly proselytize to the locals, ignoring the pleading of the Jesuits to be
subtle and secretive about their missionary work so as not to provoke Hideyoshi into
actually enforcing his expulsion edict. This, among other things, provoked Hideyoshi
to revisit his edict in full force. On February 5th, 1597 he enacted terrible
persecution, torturing and crucifying twenty-six prominent Catholic leaders, both
European and native Japanese, for all to see in Nagasaki. Afterwards, Taiko surely intended
to wipe out the foreign faith entirely, but he never got the chance, for a year later, he
died after an ill-fated attempt to conquer Korea. As a still-recently united Japan fell
under the control of a regency council of the lands’ five most powerful Daimyos,
the persecution of Catholicism abated. However, the Jesuits would soon
have other problems to contend with. In 1600, the Dutch ship Liefde made landfall in
Bungo. At present, the Protestant Netherlands were embroiled in a fierce religious war with
the dual Spanish-Portuguese monarchy, and their presence in Japan was a serious threat to the
Catholic foothold in the country. Meanwhile, two of the late Taiko’s regents, Ishida Mitsunari and
Tokugawa Ieyasu, started a massive civil war which ended with the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, when
Tokugawa Ieyasu vanquished his foe. Henceforth the Tokugawa Shogunate, the polity that would rule
Japan for the next 250 years, was established. The first Tokugawa Shogun was initially friendly
to the Jesuits, signing three letters patent allowing Jesuit missionaries to spread their
faith openly once more, which more or less revoked Hideyoshi’s expulsion acts of 1587. For a
few scant years, Christianity boomed in southern Japan, with the number of believers in the entire
country swelling to 750,000, and Nagasaki becoming a veritable “Rome of the Far East.” This, however,
was not to last, as soon, Ieyasu’s opinion on Catholicism began to sour. The reasons for this
were manyfold: the Shogunate likely feared how rapidly their subjects were converting, and like
Hideyoshi before them, feared how the Jesuits might empower their Christian Daimyo vassals
to rise against him. Increasing opposition to Christianity by the Buddhist, Confucian and Shinto
establishments contributed to major social unrest. Finally, in a poetic symmetry with the Emperors
of Rome over a millennia ago, there was also the concern that Christians’ highest loyalty was
not to the Caesar of the land, but to their God. With all that considered, perhaps the
most significant influence on Ieyasu’s increasingly anti-Catholic sentiment were those
other Christians. Indeed, in 1609 the Dutch had been permitted to set up a factory on the small
island of Hirado. Soon, the Shogunate realized these new red-headed Barbarians could fill the
same foreign trade niche the Portuguese did, and were willing to do so without imposing the
intervention of their missionaries and priests. Thus, the Catholics were no longer a necessary
evil in the eyes of the Tokugawa regime, and soon, the Sword of Damocles began
to fall upon their necks. Between 1612 and 1614, Ieyasu weaned
his nation off the Iberian trade, confining the Portuguese to Nagasaki. He then
outlawed the Christian faith among his subjects, and ordered the expulsion of all
foreign missionaries from the realm. However, eradicating Christianity was more complex
than simply expelling the foreign priests, due to the hundreds and thousands of natives who now were
believers. Thus, despite being banned from public life, Catholicism endured as an underground
faith in its traditional Kyushu strongholds. Moreover, while most European missionaries
were indeed deported to Macau and Manila, a small number managed to stay in the country and
continue to administer their flocks in secret. Nevertheless, the Shogunate continued to
ruthlessly root out any secret believers. Villagers in formerly Christian-dominated
towns were forced to register with local Buddhist temples, and by 1631, peasants were made
to tread upon holy images to prove their apostasy, and tortured if they refused to do
so. By the time Ieyasu’s grandson, Tokugawa Iemitsu, came to power, it became
clear that the eradication of Catholicism had become a permanent policy for the Tokugawa
regime. It is here, finally, that the stage is set for the Shimabara Rebellion- the revolt that
would close Japan to the world for 250 years. At its core, the Shimabara Revolt was not
actually born as a Christian movement, but rather, was a peasant insurrection against
the economic tyranny of their Samurai overlords which took on a distinctly Christian character.
Its roots are found in centralization policies implemented by the Tokugawa bakufu. In order
to keep the only recently vassalized Daimyos dependent on the central government, many of
them were made to leave their personal domains and live in the capital of Edo. Unfortunately for
the Daimyos, they were expected to foot the bill for this mandatory airbnb stay. Naturally, this
financial strain was then passed down the social ladder to the peasants in the villages, from whom
the Daimyos brutally squeezed out precious rice, which was the currency of the day,
to pay their dues to the Shogun. Perhaps the most despotic of local overlords
was Matsukura Shigemasa, Daimyo of the Shimabara domain. The Shimabara peninsula had come
under the rule of the Matsukura clan in 1615, after the expulsion of its former overlords, the
Arima clan, over their Christian faith. Indeed, Christianity had deep roots in Shimabara,
something the Matsukaras’ acknowledged with brutal persecutions and mass executions. Beyond
that, one of Lord Matsukura’s first order of businesses was the construction of a brand new
fortress, Shimabara Castle, to replace the old and obsolete Hara Castle as his local seat of
power. This was an extremely expensive endeavor, so between the construction costs and the
Matsukara’s financial obligations to the central government, the peasants of Shimabara endured
policies that amounted to forced starvation. In 1630, Matsukura Shigemasa was succeeded by
his son, Matsukara Katsuie, who was every bit the tyrant his father was. Under his auspices,
peasants in Shimabara were regularly rounded up and brutally tortured until they surrendered the
rice they had hidden from the local authorities so as not to starve under
their extortionate policies. To the local peasantry, life had become unlivable.
So, naturally, the mood grew treasonous. Then, on December 17th, the pregnant daughter
of a village headman was seized and tortured due to his fathers’ tax debts. The father, thrown
into a rage, rallied a mob and attacked the local magistrate responsible, killing him. According
to traditional accounts, this event was the spark which quickly fanned into the roaring flame
of revolution. The fate of Shimabara was now on the line, and on an even grander scale, the
fate of Christendom in the land of the Gods. In the beginning, the revolt
was highly spontaneous, as the entire populations of almost every village
across the Shimabara peninsula rose up in violent catharsis against their local magistrates
in reprisal for the decades of economic and religious persecutions they had endured. Alongside
the peasants in Shimabara, the smallfolk of the island of Amakusa also rioted against their
equally cruel overlord, Terasawa Katataka. As often it is with revolutions, a leader was
needed to rally around. In this case, the battered peasantry found it in a sixteen-year-old boy
named Amakusa Shirō. Little is known about Shiro, other than that his baptismal name was Jerome,
and he was born to secret Catholic parents. Allegedly, Shirō was the product of a divine
prophecy which stated that, twenty-five years after the foreign Padres had been expelled from
Japan, God would return to the isles in the form of a sixteen-year-old boy and save the people
of the true faith. Indeed, at the outbreak of the rebellion in 1637, 25 years had passed since
Ieyasu first issued his expulsion of the Priests, and Amakusa Shirō was in fact sixteen years
old. With that said, Jerome was likely just a symbolic figurehead. True power likely lay in
a gang of five local rōnin: masterless former Samurai who had been stripped of their warrior
status for being on the wrong side of Sekigahara. Before long, disparate peasant rebel bands began
coalescing together into larger armies. At this time, the Lord Matsukara was in Edo, and had left
the governance to his subordinate Okamoto Shinbei, castellan of Shimabara castle.
[AMBUSH] Underestimating the severity of the
threat, Shinbei sent a token detachment of 300 musketeers and fifteen mounted Samurai out of
the castle to Fukae, where he had heard reports of the rebels gathering. There, the professional
Matsukara bannermen were taken by surprise. Rather than riding down a disorganized peasant
rabble, they were themselves ambushed by a coordinated force of over a thousand men, not
just with farmers’ pitchforks and scythes, but experienced ronin armed with matchlock arquebuses.
[SIEGE] After taking heavy losses, the Matsukara forces
retreated back to Shimabara castle and holed themselves up within its walls. Okamoto Shinbei
could do nothing but watch in horror as the rebels rounded up before the castle and began vengefully
burning down the town outside its walls, defiling two Buddhist temples in the process.
By now, over 12,000 men and women had taken up a Christian cause, shaving crosses into their
hair, cloaking themselves in baptismal white, shouting the warcry ‘Santiago!’ and waving banners
inscribed with bible verse in the Portuguese language. By and large, the rebels now dominated
the Shimabara countryside, but did not have the artillery to storm the castle. A similar situation
existed in Amakusa, where rebels had killed over 2,800 of Lord Terasawa’s foot soldiers in an
open battle near Hondo castle, and then laid siege both to that castle and Tomioka castle, but
had trouble breaching those fortified positions. According to sources of the time, Jerome portrayed
these early improbable victories as triumphs won through the will of God and the judgment of
heaven. However, the fact was that despite them, the initial blitzkrieg of the Christian
rebels had been halted, for try as they might, their attempts to storm the castles of Shimabara
and Amakusa came to naught. Furthermore, the Daimyos of neighbouring realms in Kyushu had begun
assembling their forces, meaning the rebels would soon be outmatched on the open field. Without
other recourse, the rebel bands in Amakusa linked up with the ones in Shimabara, pooling their
manpower to make one strong force. From there, Jerome made a tactical withdrawal into Hara
Castle, the old fortress of the Arima clan, left abandoned by Lord Matsukara in favour
of building his new Shimabara castle, which had cost his peasants so much in blood
and suffering. Anywhere between 25,000 to 37,000 rebels, men and women alike filtered into
Hara Castle, and by January 27th, 1639, a giant crucifix had been raised above its
ramparts. Here they would make their stand. By now, reports of the rebellion had flooded
into Edo, and Tokugawa Iemitsu was furious. In the eyes of the Bakufu, this was
exactly the type of Christian revolt, no doubt born of Portuguese meddling, that
they had been afraid of. Nevermind that this had all been brought on by the cruelty
of his own vassal lords. Either way, these insolent peasants in the backwater dregs of
Japan had to be crushed utterly to set an example. In the beginning of February, a sea of Samurai
had appeared before the rebel stronghold. Its spearhead was a 50,000 strong contingent of
Shogunate forces led by the 50 year old general Itakura Shigemasa, complemented by contingents
of vassals, including the personal levies of the Terazawa and Matsukura clans, on whose lands
the rebellion took place. It was a force that numbered in the hundreds of thousands assembled
to crush a band of peasants a fifth their number. Nevertheless, Jeromes’ rebels had been preparing.
During their enemies’ approach, they had fortified the derelict Hara castle into an impregnable
redoubt as holes in the walls were plugged up and local bamboo forests were cleared to
build new watchtowers along the battlements. Hara Castle was positioned well, protected
by marshy wetlands on its front facing side, and the Pacific Ocean on its back. For
these reasons, General Itakura held his troops back from wholescale assaults, instead
focusing on fortifying his position by building yagura siege batteries which ultimately proved
ineffective at breaching the Castles’ walls. Meanwhile, he also ordered his labourers to
begin digging a tunnel directly under the castle, but this was thwarted when the
defenders heard the sound of digging, and flooded the tunnel with feces and urine,
forcing the besiegers to abandon the project. A few weeks later, General Itakura
heard some distressing news. The Edo government was sending him
reinforcements led by Lord Matsudaira Nobutsuna. Itakura knew he would be disgraced if he could not
defeat these peasants without outside aid, so he kicked his forces into gear. On February 3rd, they
ordered a preliminary assault on the fortress, but this was repelled by the well-entrenched
rebels, largely due to the deadly accuracy with which they fired their matchlock arquebuses. Then,
on February 14th, Itakura ordered another attack, this time with himself at the head. This
would be the last poor decision he ever made, for alongside 4,000 of his own men, the
general was killed. The attackers were forced once more to retreat to the taunting of
the rebels, who accused the Samurai of being better suited to shaking down impoverished
farmers than taking on armed opponents. A few days later, general Matsudaira arrived
and assumed general command. Matsudaira shifted back towards a more cautious doctrine,
abstaining from more direct attacks and instead building a network of palisades and ditches
to blockade the rebels and starve them out. Meanwhile, he had word sent to the Dutch factory
in Hirado, asking the Hollanders for aid, which was ironic, given that the banning
of Christianity had been enacted largely to prevent Europeans from meddling in Japanese
affairs. In any case, the Dutch acquiesced, and sent the 24 gun frigate, De Ryp, under
the command of Nicolaes Couckebacker, to bombard Hara Castle’s seaward side. Despite
reluctance to fire upon fellow Christians, albeit Roman Catholics, the De Ryp unloaded
hundreds of shells into the castle, but the defenders held out still, and even managed to kill
a Dutch sailor with a well-placed matchlock shot. On March 12th, De Ryp withdrew back to
Hirado, having accomplished little to nothing. Despite this, Matsudaira’s blockade
was beginning to bear fruit, for the defenders within were beginning to
starve and grow desperate. On April 4th, Jerome personally led a night-time sortie which
took the attackers by surprise and inflicted heavy casualties on the Kuroda division before being
forced to retreat back behind the castle walls, where all they could do was
continue to succumb to starvation. On April 12th, a signal fire was lit by
mistake, and against Matsudaira’s wishes, the Nabeshima contingent read it as a
go-ahead and charged the castle walls. They were quickly joined by other divisions, who
wouldn’t allow themselves to be divested of glory at the Nabeshima’s expense. What followed was
an orgy of violence, as a tidal wave of Samurai swamped Hara’s outer walls, not only pushing back
the rebels, but also fighting among themselves. Despite the disarray of the Shogunate advance,
Jeromes’ faithful were utterly emaciated, and also now lacked ammo for their matchlocks, which had
been crucial in repelling the earlier assaults. Regardless, they held the line for two days, but
on the 14th, the defenses began to crumble and the castle began to burn. By the 15th, the battle
had turned into a mass execution. The rebels, man, woman and child alike, were cut down to the last.
The boy-messiah too, was found and slain. His head would later be displayed on a pike in Nagasaki, a
warning to all other Christians left in the realm. The Shimabara rebellion would remain the single
biggest conflict within the borders of Japan until the modern age, and the political and social
ramifications it had on the realm were enormous. Broadly speaking, it was the event which closed
Japan to the world for the next quarter-millennia. Although Europeans probably had little to no
role in the revolt, Shogun Iemitsu was absolutely convinced that the Christian peasants had been
spurred on by the Portuguese, so, in 1639, every single Portuguese was expelled from Japan, ending
their near century-long presence in the land of the Rising Sun. The Dutch, in due part to their
aid during the rebellion, were allowed to stay, but were confined to a tiny artificial island,
Dejima, so they could not spread any dangerous foreign ideas into Japan proper. For the next
250 years, until Commodore Matthew Perry forced the country open in 1854, the Hollanders would
be Japan’s only lifeline to the outside world. As the land of the Rising Sun closed its doors,
so too did its age of Christianity end. At least, so it seemed. Despite being completely banned
from public life, secret Christian communities, remarkably, survived underground for over 200
years, passing on their clandestine faith from generation to generation, despite being totally
isolated from the rest of the Christian world. Then, when Japan re-emerged onto the
world stage during the Meiji revolution, these hidden Christians were free to finally
emerge from the shadows, and prove that the legacy of the rebels at Hara castle had never truly died.
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