The Shimabara Uprising, 1637 to 1638

Shimabara had once been the domain of the Arima lords; Hara Castle itself had been rebuilt by the Christian lord Arima Harunobu: a Jesuit report of the years 1599 to 1604, cited by the city, describes him building a new castle, stronger and better sited than his old seat at Hinoe, after the wars in Korea. Its main enclosure had stone walls in the style of Hideyoshi's time.²In 1617, by Murdoch's account (1616 in the national designation text), Matsukura Shigemasa was moved into the fief, and according to the Japanese records he was sent there expressly to root out Christianity.¹His son Katsuie, who succeeded him in 1630, was in Murdoch's words a man of a very different stamp from his father: a man raised in peace, and a hard master.¹

Pagès, who drew on the letters of the Portuguese captain Duarte Correa, then a prisoner in Ōmura, lists the taxes: on rice, on houses, half the leaves of every tobacco plant and a share of every eggplant; soldiers on the frontier had to gather firewood for the salt pans in their spare time.³Farmers who could not pay were cruelly treated, their wives taken as hostages; some pregnant women, Correa says, were plunged into icy water and died.³The Minamishimabara city survey names the same causes in modern words: excessive taxation, forced labour, the thorough suppression of Christianity, and famine.²(Correa was not an eyewitness of these events, as Murdoch points out.)¹

The Japanese account that Murdoch translates begins with a picture. In the village of Fukae, a Christian named Kizaemon had an old painting of "Deus" that he kept hidden in a chest. One night, the story goes, it was found mysteriously furnished with the border he had long wanted for it, and the villagers flocked to his house to see and venerate it. On the 25th day of the tenth month, the village governor, Hayashi Hyōemon, burst in, beat some of them, tore down the picture and burned it. The villagers beat him to death on the spot.¹By the National Astronomical Observatory's tables, that day was 11 December 1637.⁴Correa's version puts the spark on 17 December, when a farmer whose daughter had been stripped and burned with brands killed the governor and thirty of his men.¹³

Within days the whole south of the peninsula was in arms. The lord's men were shut up in Shimabara Castle and the town was burned.³Across the water in Amakusa the villagers rose too, and on 27 December they cut to pieces a force of three thousand sent by the Terazawa; the victors' war cry, Pagès writes, was "Jesus Maria".³The account Murdoch quotes has the Christians of Amakusa calling on a youth, Shirō, son of a farmer named Jinbei, a boy said to understand all learning without study, who could call a bird down to his hand. "Let every one, disregarding the prohibition of the Government, espouse the cause of Jesus," they said.¹

The government in Edo heard of the rising on the 9th of the eleventh month and sent Itakura Shigemasa as its commissioner.¹He reached Shimabara in the middle of January 1638.¹³The rebels drew together in the old castle of Hara, abandoned when the Matsukura moved to Shimabara, on its plateau over the Ariake Sea. The castle's circuit was about four kilometres, with the sea on the east and south and marsh on the west and north.²By Murdoch's figures some 20,000 fighting men and 17,000 women and children were behind its walls by late January, though he notes that the German historian Riess thought the true number under 20,000.¹Pagès gives thirty five thousand.³

Not all of them were of one mind. Murdoch tells of Yamada Emonsaku, who commanded some eight hundred men and tried to open the castle to the besiegers. His letters were found out and he was imprisoned; when the castle fell, his wife and children had been killed, and he himself was freed and pardoned by the shogun's commissioners.¹The defenders, Murdoch notes, relied less on the sword than on the musket, and as long as their powder lasted they were terrible marksmen.¹

Itakura attacked twice and was thrown back each time. In the second assault, on the Japanese New Year, 14 February 1638, he was shot dead.¹³Matsudaira Nobutsuna, who had been sent to replace him, chose to starve the castle out.¹⁵The head of the Dutch factory at Hirado, Nicolaes Koeckebacker, was required to bring his ship De Ryp to bombard the castle from the sea; it did so from late February until 12 March 1638, when the Dutch were thanked and dismissed.¹³Pagès, a Catholic writer, compares Koeckebacker to Pilate.³

From inside the walls came arrows with letters tied to them. One, dated the 11th of the first month of Kan'ei 15, which Murdoch converts to 17 February 1638, was addressed to the attendants of the commissioner:

By spring the defenders had run out of food and powder. A night sortie on 4 to 5 April failed to break through to the besiegers' stores.¹³The besieging army, by the Japanese figures Murdoch thought trustworthy, numbered 100,619 men.¹

The final assault began at noon on the 27th of the second month, when the Nabeshima troops of Hizen broke into the outer works against orders, and the Hosokawa of Higo followed them.¹Before dawn the next day the Kuroda men of Chikuzen stormed the innermost wall, and the whole army poured in.¹By the National Astronomical Observatory's tables those days were 11 and 12 April 1638.⁴The defenders fought on with stones, beams and their rice pots. Pagès writes that the third ditch filled with the dead and the wounded, who fell alive onto the bodies below and suffocated there.³

Murdoch says that 37,000 people were put to death and only 105 taken prisoner; Pagès, thirty five or thirty seven thousand, "not counting the women and children".¹³Riess, as Murdoch reports, thought not more than half that number died.¹The government counted its own killed and wounded at about 13,000.¹The head of the young leader was searched for among the dead, and when it was found it was carried to Nagasaki and set up there.³The castle was razed. Excavations since 1992 have found the deliberately destroyed gateways and walls, human bones, and crosses, medals and rosary beads, which the city calls direct evidence of the faith of the Christians who held the castle.²

Matsukura Katsuie lost his domain and, Pagès writes, his life.³Pagès adds that the rising, and the deaths it caused, put an end to all trade with the Portuguese; the embassy from Macao that arrived that spring was harshly turned away.³

Was Shimabara a Christian rising or a peasants' revolt? The question is old. Murdoch noticed that the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Church historians alike, each for their own reasons, insisted that it was caused by taxation, not religion.¹He himself concluded that "if not Christian in origin", it soon became a professedly Christian movement.¹Nadia Kreeft, in a Leiden thesis of 2011, argues that Western scholars have played down the Christianity of the rebels by asking whether it fitted a European definition, instead of asking what the faith meant to the people at Hara and how both sides used it.⁵

What the sources agree on is the picture at the end: hungry families on a windy plateau, crosses on their flags, and a letter tied to an arrow saying that they would rather die than give up the Lord of Heaven.