Amakusa Shirō (about 1621 to 1638): The Boy under the Eucharistic Banner

Almost everything about Amakusa Shirō is uncertain. The historian Nakamura Tadashi, writing in two Japanese encyclopedias, says that his career and even his exact identity are "almost entirely unknown."¹²He was called by many names. From his father's surname he was Masuda Shirō; from the places he lived, Ebe Shirō or Ōyano Shirō; as leader of the rising, Amakusa Shirō Dayū Tokisada or Ama no Shirō Hidetsuna. His baptismal name is said to have been Jerónimo.¹²The French Catholic historian Léon Pagès, writing in 1869 from the account of the Portuguese captain Duarte Correa, calls him "Jérôme," "a young man of scarcely eighteen," born of noble parents and a native of Higo.⁴

Even his birth year is uncertain. The Digital Daijisen gives 1621; Heibonsha, Yamakawa and the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten give about 1623; the Nipponica gives 1623 or 1624.¹²The Kodansha dictionary and the Daijisen say he was sixteen when he died (Disputed; see below).¹

His father, Masuda Jinbei Yoshitsugu, came from Ōyano in Amakusa and had served the Christian lord Konishi Yukinaga. When Konishi fell after Sekigahara, Jinbei became a masterless samurai and settled as a farmer at Ebe village in Uto district, Higo.¹¹⁰Shirō's elder sister was married to the younger brother of the village headman of Ōyano.¹

In the mid 1630s, the encyclopedias say, Shimabara and Amakusa were close to famine under heavy taxes and repeated bad harvests.¹³Both lands had once been Christian domains, of Arima Harunobu and of Konishi Yukinaga, and many of the people were still secretly Christian.³Nakamura makes a sharp point: because the region had been a great centre of the Church, even ordinary demands for lower taxes were treated as religious resistance, and that charge was then used to justify more repression and more extortion.¹³Pagès lists the burdens: taxes on rice and houses, half the leaves of every tobacco plant, women taken as hostages and tortured.⁴

Ten years earlier, Shimabara had already given the Church true martyrs. In February 1627 the lord Matsukura had sixteen Christians, their fingers cut off, drowned in the Ariake Sea, among them the three sons of Paulo Uchibori Sakuemon, the youngest only five; a week later Paulo himself and fifteen others died at the hot springs of Unzen. "Father, let us thank God for so great a grace," the second son, Antonio, is remembered as saying. Paulo and his sons are among the 188 martyrs beatified in 2008.¹²¹⁵The rising of 1637 grew in the same soil, but it took a different path.

According to the encyclopedias, the real organisers of the rising were village headmen and masterless samurai, many of them former retainers of the Arima and Konishi.¹²³To bind together a great mass of farmers ready to die, they presented the fifteen- or sixteen-year-old Shirō as a saviour sent from heaven and staged a series of wonders around him.¹²Yamakawa's dictionary says that his brother-in-law Watanabe Kozaemon and others proclaimed him "Deus reborn."²From the first days of the rising the Shimabara domain itself saw him as the central figure, but Nakamura thinks it unlikely that he directed the fighting.¹²

The rising broke out in the tenth month of Kan'ei 14, in December 1637, with the killing of a village governor in the Arima district; our Shimabara page gives the details.³⁸In Amakusa the rebels attacked the castle of Tomioka before crossing to the Shimabara peninsula.²On the third day of the twelfth month of Kan'ei 14, which by the national observatory's calendar was 17 January 1638, Shirō is said to have entered the abandoned castle of Hara.¹²¹³

For about three months the defenders, more than twenty thousand men, women and children by Nakamura's reckoning (Pagès gives thirty-five thousand), held out against an army of more than a hundred thousand.¹⁴Nakamura writes that throughout the siege, the faith seen in "Shirō's banner" held them together, and he concludes that "his extraordinary qualities as a leader cannot be denied."¹Heibonsha calls him the symbol of their unity, who never showed his face.²

Our Shimabara page tells the siege: flags with red crosses on the parapet, and a letter tied to an arrow saying that the defenders had not risen for land but because "the Christian sect is not tolerated," and that those who would not change their religion were "tortured to death" for "their devotion to the Lord of Heaven."⁸Pagès describes the end. With the powder gone, the defenders fought with their rice pots; the third ditch filled with the dead and wounded, who fell alive onto the bodies below and suffocated.⁴The final assault came on the 27th and 28th of the second month of Kan'ei 15, 11 and 12 April 1638, and the defenders were killed to the last.¹⁸The Kodansha dictionary puts Shirō's death on the 28th, at sixteen.¹⁰

Among the heads, one taken by a samurai of the Kumamoto domain, Jinno Saemon, was judged to be Shirō's. It was sent to Nagasaki and exposed there, with those of his mother and others.¹²Pagès writes that the head of "Machoudano Chicô" was searched for a long time before it was found and carried to Nagasaki.⁴His father, Jinbei, died when the castle fell.¹⁰

The most moving relic of the siege is a banner. Its official name is "Standard with a painting of the Eucharist on figured silk," but it is known as the "battle flag of Amakusa Shirō."⁵It is a square of white Chinese silk damask, 108.6 centimetres each way, woven with a chrysanthemum pattern. In the centre is a great chalice, above it the Host marked with a cross, and on either side an angel with hands joined in adoration.⁵⁶Across the top runs a Portuguese inscription, which Amakusa Television renders in Japanese as "May the most holy Sacrament be praised."⁶Bloodstains and the marks of arrows and bullets remain on it.⁵

Who painted it is not known. Tradition names Yamada Emonsaku, a painter in the Western manner who was inside the castle, or says it was painted as a church banner at a seminary before the ban; Amakusa Television adds that there is no proof (Unverified).⁵⁶The city says that it was carried away from Hara as a trophy by the Nabeshima troops of Saga, and that it came down in a samurai family.⁵⁷In 1964 it was designated an Important Cultural Property, and it is now kept at the Amakusa Christian Museum in Amakusa city, which shows the original only four weeks a year and a replica otherwise.⁵⁷Each year the museum has held a memorial for the banner on its opening day, 1 August, at which, Amakusa Television reported, the priest of the Catholic church of Hondo prayed with the faithful for the souls of Shirō and the victims of the rising.⁶

The banner says what the rebels said in their arrow letter: what they held most dear was the faith they had been forbidden. Of the holy images of the Kirishitan century, almost none escaped the persecution; this one survived, the television report observes, by the irony of having been taken as spoil.⁶

Is Amakusa Shirō a martyr? The Catholic Church has not declared him one, and the Jesuit historian Kawamura Shinzō, asked this in 2016, explained why, answering a parishioner's question after a talk at a Tokyo parish. A martyr, he said, must fulfil three conditions: to die, to die because of faith in Christ, and to die without resisting. Shirō "resisted with weapons," and so does not count as a martyr. Kawamura added that some historians even doubt whether Shirō was the real leader at all, since the rising is said to have been raised by the former Arima and Konishi retainers, who may simply have borrowed his name.¹¹

That judgment does not make the people of Hara any less Christian, nor their deaths less tragic. After the rising, memorial stones were raised for the dead: the city's survey of the castle lists one erected in 1648 by Suzuki Shigenari, and the "Honekami Jizō" of 1766.⁹Excavations at Hara since 1992 have brought up crosses, medals and rosary beads from the soil, which the city calls direct evidence of the faith of those who held the castle.⁹¹⁴After Hara, the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten notes, the ban on Christianity grew stricter still, and the faith in the region survived only in hiding.³A boy of perhaps sixteen died there with the defenders, under a banner adoring the Blessed Sacrament.