The Shimabara Rebellion and Christianity in Japan

I. Christianity at the Edge of Asia

The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 and 1638 was the last major armed conflict in Japan before the long peace of the Tokugawa period. It was a rising of peasants and masterless samurai on the Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands in the west of Kyushu, regions where Christianity had been widely adopted in the previous century. The rebels, led by a youth known as Amakusa Shirō, fought under Christian banners, and after their defeat the Tokugawa shogunate intensified its suppression of Christianity and closed the country to Portuguese traders.

The rebellion was the culmination of nearly a century of Christian presence in Japan. Christianity had been brought to Japan by the Jesuits in 1549, and within fifty years it had attracted several hundred thousand converts, including a number of the regional lords, the daimyo. The mission was closely connected with the Portuguese trade, described in Portugal in the Indian Ocean, and it was directed from the Jesuit headquarters at Goa, the seat of the tribunal described in The Goa Inquisition.

The causes of the rebellion have been much debated. Some historians emphasise the economic grievances of the peasants, who suffered from heavy taxes and famine, while others emphasise the role of Christianity in uniting and inspiring the rebels. The rebellion is best understood as a combination of the two, a rising of a population that had been both economically oppressed and religiously persecuted.

II. Francis Xavier and the Jesuit Mission

Francis Xavier, a Navarrese nobleman and one of the founders of the Society of Jesus, arrived at Kagoshima in southern Kyushu in August 1549, accompanied by two other Jesuits and a Japanese convert, Anjirō, whom he had met at Malacca. Xavier spent two years in Japan, preaching in Kagoshima, Hirado, Yamaguchi and Kyoto, and he founded a small Christian community before leaving for India and China. He died in 1552 on the island of Shangchuan off the coast of China.

Xavier and his companions faced the difficulty of translating the Christian message into Japanese. At first they used the Buddhist term Dainichi, the name of the cosmic Buddha of the Shingon school, for God, and they discovered that this led to confusion with Buddhist teaching. They then adopted the Latin word Deus, rendered in Japanese as Deusu. The Jesuits continued to use Portuguese and Latin terms for many Christian concepts, such as Kirishitan for Christian and Zenchiyo for a heathen.

The Jesuit mission grew under Xavier's successors, especially Cosme de Torres and Francisco Cabral, and under the Visitor Alessandro Valignano, who came to Japan three times between 1579 and 1603. Valignano advocated the adaptation of the mission to Japanese culture. He insisted that the missionaries should learn Japanese and follow Japanese customs, and he founded seminaries and colleges for the training of Japanese clergy. He also brought a printing press to Japan in 1590, which printed books in Japanese and Latin, including catechisms, devotional works, dictionaries and a Japanese version of Aesop's fables.

III. The Christian Daimyo

The success of the mission owed much to the conversion of several daimyo in Kyushu. Ōmura Sumitada, lord of the Ōmura domain, was baptised in 1563, taking the name Bartolomeu, and became the first Christian daimyo. In 1570 he opened the port of Nagasaki to Portuguese ships, and in 1580 he ceded Nagasaki and the nearby port of Mogi to the Society of Jesus. Arima Harunobu, lord of the Shimabara peninsula, was baptised in 1580, and Ōtomo Sōrin, lord of Bungo, in 1578.

The motives of the Christian daimyo were mixed. The Portuguese ships brought silk from China, firearms and saltpetre, and the daimyo who welcomed the missionaries hoped to attract the trade to their ports. Yet many of them also became sincere Christians and supported the mission with great generosity. In 1582 Valignano sent four young Japanese nobles from Kyushu on an embassy to Europe, the Tenshō embassy, which was received by Philip II in Madrid and by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome and returned to Japan in 1590.

Some Christian daimyo ordered the destruction of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in their domains and the conversion of their subjects. In Ōmura and Arima the Buddhist clergy were expelled and their temples burned, and the population was baptised in large numbers. By the end of the sixteenth century there were perhaps three hundred thousand Christians in Japan, concentrated in Kyushu, though there were also communities in Kyoto, Osaka and other cities.

IV. Hideyoshi's Edict of Expulsion

The unification of Japan under Oda Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late sixteenth century changed the position of the Christians. Nobunaga had been friendly to the Jesuits, partly as a counterweight to the Buddhist monasteries that opposed him. Hideyoshi at first continued this policy, but in July 1587, during his campaign in Kyushu, he issued an edict ordering the expulsion of the missionaries within twenty days.

The reasons for Hideyoshi's change of policy were complex. He had learned of the destruction of temples and shrines by the Christian daimyo and of the cession of Nagasaki to the Jesuits, which appeared to him to threaten his authority. He may also have been influenced by reports of the sale of Japanese people as slaves by Portuguese merchants. The edict declared that Japan was the land of the gods, shinkoku, and that the propagation of the Christian law was harmful.

The edict was not strictly enforced, since Hideyoshi wished to preserve the Portuguese trade. Most of the Jesuits remained in Japan, keeping a low profile, and the number of Christians continued to grow. Hideyoshi took Nagasaki under his direct control, and the Christian daimyo were pressed to give up their faith or their lands. Takayama Ukon, a Christian daimyo who refused to renounce his faith, was deprived of his domain.

V. The San Felipe Incident and the Martyrs of Nagasaki

In 1593 Franciscan friars from the Philippines, led by Pedro Bautista, came to Japan as envoys of the Spanish governor of Manila and began to preach openly in Kyoto, in contrast to the discretion of the Jesuits. The rivalry between the Jesuits, who were associated with Portugal, and the Franciscans, who were associated with Spain, was a feature of the mission in Japan for the following decades.

In 1596 the Spanish galleon San Felipe, sailing from Manila to Acapulco, was wrecked on the coast of Shikoku. Its cargo was confiscated by Hideyoshi's officials, and according to the Japanese and Jesuit accounts, the pilot of the ship boasted that the king of Spain conquered countries by first sending missionaries and then soldiers. Whether or not the remark was made in this form, Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of the Franciscans and their converts in Kyoto and Osaka.

The prisoners, twenty-four in number, had part of their left ears cut off and were marched from Kyoto to Nagasaki in the winter of 1596–1597. Two more joined them on the way. On 5 February 1597, the twenty-six were crucified on the hill of Nishizaka at Nagasaki. They included six Franciscans, among them Pedro Bautista, three Japanese Jesuits, among them the preacher Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese laymen, including three boys. According to the Jesuit accounts, Paul Miki preached from the cross and forgave his executioners, in the manner of Jesus in Luke 23:34.

The martyrs of Nagasaki were canonised by the Catholic Church in 1862. Their deaths made a deep impression in Japan and in Europe, and accounts of their martyrdom were printed in many languages. The Jesuits and the Franciscans each blamed the other for the persecution.

VI. The Tokugawa Ban

After the death of Hideyoshi in 1598 and the victory of Tokugawa Ieyasu at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the new shogunate at first tolerated the missionaries, while seeking to develop trade with the Spanish in Manila and with the Dutch and English, who arrived in Japan in 1600 and 1613. The Dutch and English, as Protestants, had no missionary interests and warned the shogunate of the political ambitions of the Catholic powers.

In 1612 the Okamoto Daihachi incident, in which a Christian official of the shogunate was found to have been involved in a bribery scheme with the Christian daimyo Arima Harunobu, led the shogunate to ban Christianity in its own domains. In January 1614 Ieyasu issued an edict, drafted by the Zen monk Ishin Sūden, expelling the missionaries from the whole of Japan. The edict declared that the Christians had come to Japan to spread an evil law and to overthrow the government, and that they were the enemies of the gods and the Buddha.

In November 1614 most of the missionaries and many prominent Japanese Christians, including Takayama Ukon, were deported to Macao and Manila. Takayama died in Manila in 1615. Some missionaries remained in Japan in secret, and others returned in disguise, and the persecution of the Christians who remained intensified over the following decades.

VII. The Great Martyrdoms

Under the second and third Tokugawa shoguns, Hidetada and Iemitsu, the persecution of the Christians became systematic. On 10 September 1622, fifty-five Christians, including missionaries and Japanese laypeople, men, women and children, were executed at Nagasaki, some by burning and others by beheading, in what became known as the Great Genna Martyrdom. In 1623 fifty Christians were burned at Edo. Thousands of Japanese Christians were executed in the following decades.

The shogunate employed increasingly cruel methods to force the Christians to apostatise. Christians were thrown into the boiling hot springs of Unzen on the Shimabara peninsula, and from 1633 the authorities used the torture of the pit, ana-tsurushi, in which the victim was suspended head downwards in a pit. The Jesuit provincial Cristóvão Ferreira apostatised under this torture in 1633, took a Japanese name, Sawano Chūan, and wrote a refutation of Christianity, the Deception Revealed. His story was the basis of the novel Silence by Shūsaku Endō, published in 1966.

The shogunate also introduced the practice of fumi-e, in which suspected Christians were required to tread on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary to prove that they were not Christians. Those who refused were arrested. The Christians who trod on the images to save their lives often did so with great anguish, recalling the warning of Jesus that whoever disowns him before men he will also disown before his Father, in Matthew 10:32-33, and the example of Peter, who denied Jesus three times and was restored, in John 21:15-17.

Many Japanese Christians drew strength from the accounts of persecution in the Scriptures. The Jesuit devotional works printed in Japan, such as the Exhortation to Martyrdom, Maruchiriyo no susume, cited the words of Jesus that those who are persecuted for righteousness are happy, in Matthew 5:10, and the words of the apostles that they must obey God as ruler rather than men, in Acts 5:29.

VIII. Shimabara and Amakusa

The Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands, separated by a narrow strait in western Kyushu, had been among the most Christian regions of Japan. Shimabara had been part of the domain of Arima Harunobu, and the Amakusa islands had been ruled by Christian lords under the Christian daimyo Konishi Yukinaga, who was executed after the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 for having fought against Ieyasu. Konishi, as a Christian, refused to commit ritual suicide.

After the fall of the Christian lords, the two regions were given to new rulers. In 1614 the Arima family was transferred to another domain, and in 1616 Shimabara was given to Matsukura Shigemasa, who built a large new castle at Shimabara and imposed heavy taxes on the peasants to pay for it. Amakusa was given to the Terasawa family of Karatsu. Both Matsukura Shigemasa and his son Katsuie, who succeeded him in 1630, persecuted the Christians with great severity.

The peasants of Shimabara and Amakusa suffered from heavy taxation, poor harvests and the harsh methods of the tax collectors. Contemporary accounts describe peasants who could not pay their taxes being wrapped in straw raincoats that were set on fire, a punishment called the mino-odori, the straw-coat dance, and the wives and daughters of defaulters being held as hostages. In the years before the rebellion a series of bad harvests and famine increased the suffering of the population.

Many of the inhabitants of the two regions were Christians or former Christians who had been forced to apostatise. There were also many masterless samurai, rōnin, who had served the Arima and Konishi families and had remained in the region as farmers after their lords were removed. These rōnin, many of them Christians, provided the military leadership of the rebellion.

IX. Amakusa Shirō

The leader of the rebellion was a youth named Masuda Shirō Tokisada, known as Amakusa Shirō, who was about sixteen years old in 1637. He was the son of Masuda Jinbei, a former retainer of Konishi Yukinaga and a Christian. Shirō was said to have been educated in Nagasaki and to have been unusually gifted, and stories circulated that he could work miracles, such as walking on the sea and calling down birds from the sky.

According to a prophecy said to have been made by the Jesuit Marcos Ferraro, who had worked in Amakusa, before his expulsion in 1614, a heaven-sent youth would appear twenty-five years later, when strange signs would be seen in the sky and the earth, and the people would be saved. The prophecy, which survives only in later Japanese accounts, may have been composed after the event, and its reckoning of twenty-five years does not fit the dates of the rising exactly, but it appears to have circulated among the Christians of Shimabara and Amakusa before the rebellion and to have been applied to Shirō. Its form recalls the apocalyptic signs described in Luke 21:25-28.

Shirō's role in the rebellion has been debated. Some historians regard him as a figurehead chosen by the rōnin leaders to inspire the peasants, while others believe that he exercised real religious authority. He was presented to the rebels as a messenger of heaven, and he wore white garments and carried a cross. His followers believed that he would lead them to victory and to paradise.

X. The Rising

The rebellion broke out in the Shimabara peninsula in December 1637, when peasants in the village of Kuchinotsu and neighbouring villages killed the local tax official, and spread rapidly across the peninsula. The rebels attacked Shimabara castle, burned the town and killed many of Matsukura's officials, but they were unable to take the castle. A few days later the peasants of the Amakusa islands also rose, and they besieged the Terasawa castle at Tomioka, but again failed to take it.

The rebels destroyed Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines and killed Buddhist monks, and some of those who had apostatised declared that they returned to the Christian faith. They called on the population to join them in the name of the Christian God. Those who refused to join them were sometimes killed. The rebellion thus took on the character of a religious war, though it had begun as a rising against oppressive taxation.

In January 1638 the rebels from Shimabara and Amakusa gathered at Hara Castle, an abandoned fortress of the Arima family on a cliff overlooking the sea on the southern coast of the Shimabara peninsula. They repaired the walls and fortifications, and about thirty-seven thousand people, including women and children, took refuge in the castle. The number is given in the Japanese sources and may be exaggerated, but modern estimates generally range between about twenty-seven thousand and thirty-seven thousand.

XI. The Siege of Hara Castle

The shogunate sent Itakura Shigemasa to command the forces of the Kyushu daimyo against the rebels. Itakura's first attacks on the castle, in January and February 1638, were repulsed with heavy losses. Itakura was killed in a failed assault on 14 February 1638, and he was replaced by Matsudaira Nobutsuna, one of the senior councillors of the shogunate, who assembled an army of more than one hundred and twenty thousand men and laid siege to the castle.

Matsudaira asked the Dutch, who had a trading post at Hirado, for help. The head of the Dutch trading post, Nicolaes Couckebacker, sent the ship de Ryp, which bombarded the castle from the sea for about two weeks in February and March 1638, and the Dutch also provided cannon for the besieging forces on land. The bombardment did little damage, and the Japanese commanders sent the ship away, apparently because some of the besiegers were ashamed to rely on foreigners. The rebels sent messages to the besiegers mocking them for depending on the help of foreigners.

The rebels within the castle sent letters to the besiegers explaining their cause. One letter, shot into the besiegers' camp on an arrow, declared that they had risen not because of a desire for land or wealth but because of the prohibition of their religion, and that they were willing to die for their faith. Other letters complained of the oppression of the Matsukura and Terasawa. The letters, preserved in Japanese records, show the combination of religious and economic grievances that drove the rebellion.

As the siege continued, the defenders ran out of food and gunpowder. The besiegers found that the bodies of rebels killed in sorties had only seaweed and grass in their stomachs. On 12 April 1638 Matsudaira's forces launched a general assault on the castle and took it after two days of fighting. Almost all the defenders were killed, including women and children, and Amakusa Shirō was killed and beheaded. His head was displayed at Nagasaki. The castle was destroyed so that it could not be used again.

XII. The Banners of Hara Castle

Among the few objects that survive from the rebellion is a banner of the rebels, preserved in the Amakusa Christian Museum. It depicts a chalice with a host above it, flanked by two kneeling angels, with an inscription in Portuguese, Louvado seia o Santíssimo Sacramento, praised be the most holy Sacrament. The banner, which is believed to have been carried by Amakusa Shirō's forces, shows the importance of the Eucharist in the devotion of the Japanese Christians.

The rebels also used crosses and Christian names, and some of them called out the names of Jesus, Mary and the saints in battle. Their religion was the Catholicism of the Jesuit mission, shaped by the absence of priests for more than twenty years and by the influence of Japanese religious traditions. Their devotion centred on the sacraments, the rosary and the prayers they had learned from the missionaries, rather than on the reading of the Scriptures, which had never been translated in full into Japanese.

XIII. The Aftermath in Shimabara

The shogunate held the rulers of Shimabara and Amakusa responsible for the rebellion. Matsukura Katsuie was found guilty of misgovernment and was executed in 1638, by beheading rather than by the ritual suicide normally permitted to a samurai of his rank, a punishment that made him the only daimyo of the Tokugawa period to suffer this fate. Terasawa Katataka was deprived of his lands in Amakusa, which were placed under other administrators, and he later took his own life.

The Shimabara peninsula had been largely depopulated by the rebellion and the massacre at Hara Castle. The shogunate resettled the region with peasants brought from other parts of Japan, and it reduced the burden of taxation for a time to encourage settlement. The new rulers of Shimabara and Amakusa were careful to avoid the excesses of their predecessors, and the shogunate appointed officials to oversee the administration of the region. The local Buddhist temples were rebuilt and given responsibility for the religious registration of the new population.

The rebellion also had consequences for the relations between the shogunate and the daimyo. The difficulty of suppressing a rising of peasants had shown the weakness of the armies of the Kyushu lords, and the shogunate drew the lesson that misgovernment could provoke rebellion. The rebellion was cited in later Tokugawa discussions of government as a warning against oppressive taxation, as well as against Christianity.

XIV. The Scriptures in the Jesuit Mission

The Jesuits in Japan did not translate the whole Bible into Japanese. Missionary reports mention translations of parts of the Gospels made in the sixteenth century, but no copy survives and none appears to have been printed. The Jesuit press printed a selection of readings from the Gospels for the Sundays of the year, and catechisms and devotional works containing extensive quotations from the Scriptures.

The most important devotional works of the mission included the Doctrina Christiana, printed in several editions in Japanese, the Spiritual Guide, Guía do pecador, a translation of the Spanish devotional work by Luis de Granada, and the Contemptus Mundi, a translation of the Imitation of Christ. These works, printed in Japanese in Latin letters or in Japanese script, were read by the Christians of Kyushu and survived among the hidden Christians in manuscript copies.

The first translation of a book of the Bible into Japanese to survive was made in the nineteenth century by the German missionary Karl Gützlaff, who translated the Gospel of John with the help of three Japanese castaways in Macao, and published it in Singapore in 1837. The first complete Japanese Bible was published in 1887, after the end of the ban on Christianity.

XV. The Closing of the Country

After the Shimabara Rebellion the shogunate took further measures to eliminate Christianity and to control contact with foreigners. The Portuguese, whom the shogunate suspected of supporting the rebels, were expelled in 1639, and Portuguese ships were forbidden to come to Japan. When an embassy from Macao arrived in 1640 to ask for the resumption of trade, its members were executed, except for a few sailors who were sent back to report what had happened.

The Dutch, who had helped the shogunate during the siege, were allowed to continue trading, but in 1641 they were moved from Hirado to the small artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour, where they were confined for the next two hundred years. Chinese merchants were also allowed to trade at Nagasaki. Japanese subjects were forbidden to travel abroad, and those who returned from abroad were to be executed. These policies, later called sakoku, the closed country, remained in force until the 1850s.

The shogunate also established a system of religious registration, terauke, under which every Japanese household was required to register with a Buddhist temple and to obtain a certificate that its members were not Christians. The office of the inquisitor of Christians, the shūmon aratame yaku, was established in 1640 under Inoue Masashige, a former Christian, who organised the detection and interrogation of suspected Christians. Rewards were offered for the denunciation of priests, brothers and Christians, and the descendants of Christians were kept under surveillance for several generations.

XVI. The Hidden Christians

Despite the persecution, Christian communities survived in secret in parts of Kyushu, especially in the villages around Nagasaki, the Gotō islands, Ikitsuki and Hirado, and the Sotome region. These hidden Christians, the kakure kirishitan or senpuku kirishitan, outwardly practised Buddhism and Shinto, while secretly preserving the prayers, baptism and feasts they had learned from the missionaries. They had no priests and could not celebrate the mass, but they baptised their children, observed a church calendar and recited prayers in a mixture of Latin, Portuguese and Japanese, called orasho, from the Latin oratio.

The hidden Christians kept images of Mary disguised as the Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon, known as Maria Kannon, and other sacred objects concealed in their homes. They also preserved a text, Tenchi hajimari no koto, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth, an account of the creation, the fall, the flood and the life of Christ, which drew on the Scriptures and the catechisms of the mission, but which had been transformed by two centuries of oral transmission and the influence of Japanese folklore. Its account of the creation recalls Genesis 1:1-3, and its account of the flood recalls Genesis 7:11-12, though in a very different form.

Over the centuries the beliefs and practices of the hidden Christians diverged from those of the Catholic Church. Some communities came to venerate their own martyrs and ancestors as much as the figures of the Christian tradition. When the Catholic Church returned to Japan in the nineteenth century, some of the hidden Christians rejoined it, while others preferred to keep their own traditions, which survive in a few communities to this day.

XVII. The Discovery of the Christians

In 1859, after the opening of Japan to foreign trade by the treaties with the United States and the European powers, French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society came to Japan to minister to the foreign residents. In 1865 they built a church at Ōura in Nagasaki, dedicated to the twenty-six martyrs. On 17 March 1865 a group of villagers from Urakami came to the church, and one of them, a woman named Isabelina Sugimoto Yuri, told the missionary Bernard Petitjean that they had the same faith as he did. They asked to see the statue of Mary.

The discovery of the hidden Christians was celebrated in the Catholic world as a miracle of preservation. But when the Christians of Urakami began to refuse Buddhist funerals and to declare their faith openly, the shogunate and then the new Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, arrested them. In 1867 and the following years more than three thousand Christians from Urakami were exiled to various domains in western Japan, where many were tortured and several hundred died. The persecution was known as the fourth Urakami persecution, Urakami yoban kuzure.

The persecution provoked protests from the Western governments, and the Iwakura mission, which visited the United States and Europe in 1871–1873 to negotiate the revision of the unequal treaties, found that the treatment of Christians was an obstacle to its negotiations. In February 1873 the Meiji government removed the public notice boards that prohibited Christianity, and the exiled Christians of Urakami were allowed to return home. Christianity was not formally legalised until the Meiji Constitution of 1889 granted freedom of religion within limits.

XVIII. The Rebellion in Historical Memory

The Shimabara Rebellion has been remembered in different ways. In the Tokugawa period it was presented as a revolt of evil Christians, and it served as a justification for the prohibition of Christianity. Popular accounts, such as the Shimabara ki, described Shirō as a sorcerer who used Christian magic to deceive the peasants. In the modern period, historians have emphasised the economic causes of the rebellion and the oppression of the Matsukura and Terasawa, and some have regarded it primarily as a peasant revolt.

The Catholic Church has not regarded the rebels of Shimabara as martyrs, since they died in armed rebellion rather than for refusing to renounce their faith. The Japanese martyrs beatified and canonised by the church, including the twenty-six of Nagasaki, the two hundred and five martyrs beatified in 1867 and the one hundred and eighty-eight beatified in 2008, were people who died without taking up arms. The distinction reflects the teaching of Jesus to Peter to put away his sword, in Matthew 26:52, and the counsel of Peter himself to suffer patiently for doing good, in 1 Peter 2:20-21.

In 2018 a group of sites associated with the hidden Christians in the Nagasaki region, including the ruins of Hara Castle, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Excavations at the castle site since the 1990s have uncovered the remains of the defenders, crosses, rosary beads and medals made from melted bullets, which provide material evidence of the faith of the rebels and the violence of the siege.

XIX. Japan and the Other Wars of Religion

The history of Christianity in Japan offers a comparison with the other conflicts described in this series. In the Spanish Philippines, described in The Spanish–Moro Wars, Christianity arrived with the power of an empire, and the conflict was between Christian rulers and Muslim subjects or neighbours. In Japan Christianity was the religion of a minority under rulers who came to regard it as a threat, and it was suppressed by a strong central state.

In China, a generation later, the Jesuits faced similar questions about the adaptation of Christianity to local culture, and in the nineteenth century the arrival of Protestant missionaries and the Bible in Chinese contributed to the great conflicts described in The Taiping Rebellion and its Bible and The Boxer Rebellion. The Japanese experience of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the response of Japan to Christianity in the nineteenth century, when the memory of Shimabara was invoked by those who opposed the lifting of the ban.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.