Shimabara Rebellion (1637-1638): Japan's Christian Revolt

The Shimabara Rebellion was an uprising of peasants, masterless samurai and Japanese Christians in western Kyushu that lasted from December 1637 to April 1638. Led in name by a teenager, Amakusa Shiro, the rebels held the ruined Hara Castle against an army of more than 100,000 men until they were overwhelmed and almost all killed. The revolt was the last major armed conflict in Japan for more than two centuries and hardened the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy of isolating the country from Catholic Europe.

Background: Christians, lords and taxes

Christianity had spread rapidly in Kyushu after the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549. The Shimabara Peninsula had been ruled by the Christian lord Arima Harunobu, and the nearby Amakusa Islands by another Christian lord, Konishi Yukinaga. Many of their subjects were Catholic.

After the Tokugawa shogunate took power, both families lost their lands. Konishi was executed in 1600 and Arima in 1612, and their retainers became farmers or masterless samurai (ronin). The shogunate banned Christianity nationwide in 1614, and persecution grew steadily harsher.

The new lord of Shimabara, Matsukura Shigemasa, built an expensive castle and hunted down Christians with great cruelty, including torture in the boiling volcanic springs of Mount Unzen. His son Matsukura Katsuie continued the persecution and imposed taxes far above what the land could bear. Amakusa, held by Terazawa Katataka of Karatsu, suffered similar burdens. Poor harvests in the mid-1630s made the situation desperate, and accounts tell of peasants tortured or killed for failing to pay.

Amakusa Shiro

The rebels rallied around Masuda Shiro Tokisada, better known as Amakusa Shiro, a youth of about 16 whose father had served Konishi Yukinaga. He was well educated and charismatic, and stories circulated that he performed miracles and was a heaven-sent leader foretold by a departed missionary.

Historians doubt that Shiro directed the fighting himself. Experienced former samurai organised the defence, while Shiro served as a religious figurehead who gave the revolt unity and hope.

The uprising begins

The revolt broke out in December 1637, in the tenth month of the Japanese calendar, when villagers in the Arima area killed a local tax official. It spread quickly across the southern part of the peninsula. Rebels burned temples and shrines, attacked officials and besieged Matsukura’s Shimabara Castle, but could not take it.

At the same time Christians in Amakusa rose, defeated troops from Karatsu and laid siege to Tomioka Castle, which also held out. Facing approaching government forces, the two groups crossed to the Shimabara Peninsula and occupied Hara Castle, an old Arima stronghold on a sea cliff that had been abandoned some years before.

The rebels repaired its walls and moved in with their families. Estimates of the number inside range from about 27,000 to 37,000, including many women and children. They flew banners with Christian symbols, and excavations at the site have since found crosses and religious medals.

The siege of Hara Castle

The shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu first sent Itakura Shigemasa to crush the revolt with troops from neighbouring domains. His assaults failed, and he was killed leading an attack on the first day of the Japanese new year, in February 1638.

Command passed to Matsudaira Nobutsuna, one of the shogun’s senior councillors, who gathered an army usually estimated at more than 120,000 men from the lords of Kyushu. Rather than storm the walls again, he blockaded the castle and waited for hunger to do its work. The famous swordsman Miyamoto Musashi is recorded among those who served on the government side.

The shogunate also asked the Dutch East India Company for help. The Dutch chief at Hirado, Nicolaes Couckebacker, sent the ship De Rijp, which fired several hundred rounds at the castle from the sea over about two weeks. The bombardment did little damage, and Japanese commanders, embarrassed to depend on foreigners, soon asked the Dutch to stop.

By April the defenders were starving. In a general assault in mid-April 1638 the besiegers broke into the castle and set it on fire. Almost all the defenders were killed in the fighting or executed afterwards, and Amakusa Shiro’s head was displayed at Nagasaki. Tradition holds that only one defender survived, the painter Yamada Emosaku, who had been in secret contact with the besiegers.

Aftermath and punishment

The shogunate punished the lords whose misrule had provoked the revolt. Matsukura Katsuie was condemned to death and beheaded in 1638, an unusual fate for a daimyo, who would normally have been allowed to take his own life. Terazawa Katataka was stripped of his Amakusa lands. The emptied villages of southern Shimabara were later resettled with migrants from other parts of Japan.

Officially the rebellion was treated as a Christian conspiracy, and that interpretation shaped policy. In 1639 the shogunate banned Portuguese ships from Japan, suspecting the Portuguese of encouraging the faith. In 1641 the Dutch, who had shown their loyalty at Hara, were moved to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour.

The hunt for Christians intensified. Every household had to register with a Buddhist temple, informers were rewarded, and the practice of making people tread on Christian images, a test known as fumi-e, was used more widely. Christianity survived only in secret among the Hidden Christians (Kakure Kirishitan) of the Nagasaki region.

By the numbers

Religious revolt or tax revolt?

Modern historians stress that the uprising was not purely religious. Its immediate triggers were famine, taxation and brutal local government, and some participants were not Christian. Yet Christian faith clearly united many rebels and gave them the will to resist to the end. The rebellion is best understood as a peasant revolt in which Christianity provided the language of resistance.

Key people

• Amakusa Shiro (c. 1621–1638): the young Christian figurehead of the revolt, killed when Hara Castle fell.
• Matsukura Katsuie (died 1638): lord of Shimabara whose taxes and persecution provoked the uprising; executed by the shogunate.
• Itakura Shigemasa (died 1638): the shogun’s first commander, killed in a failed assault on Hara Castle.
• Matsudaira Nobutsuna (1596–1662): senior councillor who blockaded the castle and directed the final assault.
• Tokugawa Iemitsu (1604–1651): the third Tokugawa shogun, under whom the anti-Christian and maritime restrictions were completed.

A banner believed to have been carried by the rebels, showing a chalice flanked by two angels, survives in a museum in Amakusa. In modern Japan Amakusa Shiro has become a romantic figure in novels, films and comics, far removed from the grim reality of the siege.

Timeline

• 1614: The Tokugawa shogunate bans Christianity throughout Japan.
• 1637, December: Villagers kill a tax official near Arima; the revolt spreads across Shimabara and Amakusa.
• 1637, December – 1638, January: Rebels fail to take Shimabara and Tomioka castles.
• 1638, January: The combined rebel forces occupy Hara Castle.
• 1638, February: Itakura Shigemasa is killed in a failed assault on the castle.
• 1638, February – March: Matsudaira Nobutsuna blockades Hara; the Dutch ship De Rijp shells it.
• 1638, mid-April: Hara Castle is stormed and its defenders are killed.
• 1639: Portuguese ships are banned from Japan.
• 1641: The Dutch trading post is moved to Dejima.

Why it matters

The Shimabara Rebellion convinced the Tokugawa rulers that Christianity was a threat to the state and pushed them to complete the restrictions later known as sakoku. Hara Castle’s ruins are now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, a reminder of both the violence of the revolt and the faith that survived it in secret.