Hara Castle: The Rebellion That Closed Japan for Two Hundred Years

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The shogun's army could not get into a single castle; inside there were neither soldiers nor walls, only peasants about to starve to death. And those castle walls were shelled by the Dutch, who wanted to trade with Japan. The door of a country that would stay shut for two hundred years slammed there, that winter.

In the southwest of Japan, there is a peninsula that hangs down from the coast of the island of Kyushu toward the Ariake Sea, built on the slopes of a volcanic mountain. Its name is Shimabara. Its soil is fertile, but it is not wide enough; the wind that blows off the sea is salty, the mountain is called Unzen, and near its summit there are pits where scalding water gushes up out of the ground as if boiling. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, this peninsula was one of the most Christianized corners of Japan. The lords of the peninsula, the Arima family, had been baptized, had opened their doors to the missionaries, and churches and seminaries had been established in the villages. By some estimates, the greater part of the peninsula's population had embraced the faith brought by the Portuguese Jesuits.

Then everything was turned on its head. In sixteen fourteen, the shogunate banned Christianity across the whole country, sent the missionaries into exile, and had the churches torn down. In sixteen sixteen, the Arima family was removed from the peninsula and transferred to another province. The man who came in their place was Matsukura Shigemasa.

The territory that fell into Shigemasa's hands was, on paper, a domain of sixty thousand koku — that is, a place capable of producing sixty thousand measures of rice a year. For a samurai house, this was a middling income. Shigemasa, however, had no wish to be a middling man. In sixteen eighteen, on the flat ground along the seashore, he began building a castle that far exceeded the means of his own domain. It took seven years. When it was finished, the circuit of the walls reached three thousand nine hundred metres, the walls in places rose fifteen metres high, moats between thirty and fifty metres wide encircled the castle, and sixteen towers had been set at the key points. The five-storey main keep was visible from every part of the peninsula. According to the reckonings of the time, the cost of this castle was twice what the domain could bear.

The difference was taken out of the peasants. Tax rates were raised so high that they bore no relation at all to the domain's real productive capacity. New items were added on top of the rice tax: a hearth tax, a window tax, a tax for every child born, a burial tax for every person who died. For those who could not pay, the penalty was not a fine. According to the records of the period, a peasant unable to pay his taxes would be dressed in a straw raincoat, his arms bound behind him, and the raincoat set alight; this torture was given the name "the straw raincoat dance," after the movements of a man writhing in the flames. The wives and daughters of those who could not pay were hung upside down and plunged into icy water in the middle of winter.

Taxation and religious persecution were joined in the same hand. From sixteen twenty-seven onward, the Matsukura family began throwing those who refused to renounce Christianity into the boiling waters of Unzen. Those who were caught would be taken up the mountain, held for days in the stench of sulphur, and brought one by one to the edge of the pit to make them give it up. Some were crucified, some were burned alive. Nor was Shigemasa content with that; believing that the source of Christianity had to be dried up, he drew up a plan for an expedition against the island of Luzon in Spanish hands — that is, the north of what is today the Philippines — and the cost of this expedition, too, he demanded from his peasants. The expedition never took place. Shigemasa died in sixteen thirty, in a hot spring town.

He was succeeded by his son, Matsukura Katsuie. He did not change a single line of his father's policy.

Meanwhile, in Nagasaki, to the north of the peninsula, a new practice had begun. From sixteen twenty-nine onward, the people of the city were ordered, once a year, to step on a medallion or a plaque placed before them. On the plaque was an image of the Virgin Mary or of Jesus. This was called "the trampled picture." Merchant, monk, samurai, woman, child; they would line up, lift a foot before the eyes of an official, step on the image, and pass on. Whoever stepped was cleared; whoever hesitated was written down on a list. This method, which set out to measure a human being's inner world by the movement of a foot, was the beginning of a system of screening that would last in Japan for more than two hundred years.

Then came the famine. A run of bad harvests in the middle of the sixteen thirties drove both the Shimabara Peninsula and the Amakusa islands on the opposite shore into starvation. The peasant's granary was empty, his seed grain eaten, and the tax collector was at the door. Requests for tax relief were turned down. The domain's collectors went on making their rounds from village to village.

On the seventeenth of December in the year sixteen thirty-seven, in the village of Arima in the south of the peninsula, the district tax collector Hayashi Hyozaemon found himself surrounded by peasants and was killed. This did not remain merely the news of a murder. Word spread across the peninsula within a day, and the next day the neighbouring villages rose up as well. The peasants who brought out the spears, axes and sickles they had hidden along the coast were joined by former warriors who had lost their masters thirty years earlier and had lived by farming ever since. The uprising began as a tax revolt. Within a week, it had turned into something else.

The person who took charge of the crowd was sixteen years old.

His name was Masuda Shiro Tokisada, but history remembers him as Amakusa Shiro. His father, Masuda Jinbei, had once served a Christian lord; after that lord was destroyed, he was left a warrior without land, and he raised his son on the Amakusa islands, in a world shaped by missionaries. The boy was baptised with the name Jerome. He could read and write, he spoke well, and in the first days of the uprising he became both the rebels' council of command and their symbol.

It was not talent alone that carried him to that position. For years a prophecy had passed from mouth to mouth across the peninsula: one of the exiled missionaries, it was said, had foretold that twenty-five years after the persecution began a youth would rise in the land, that he would be sixteen years old, and that he would gather the people. The arithmetic fitted. To a population worn down by hunger and torture, this boy was more than a commander. By some accounts, stories circulated around him that miracles came from his hands. Whether or not they were true hardly mattered to the course of events; the people believed, and that belief was a stubbornness sufficient to hold out for three months against an army of a hundred and twenty thousand.

The rebels' first move was to march on two castles. At Shimabara they laid siege to the five-storey castle raised with the blood and labour of the peasants. They could not take it. There was no way to capture a structure with walls fifteen metres high and moats fifty metres wide using farm tools and a handful of muskets. On the opposite shore they besieged Tomioka Castle on the Amakusa islands; at one point they were almost inside, and then reinforcements from the domain's forces arrived and they were forced to fall back. Not a single castle had been won. Meanwhile the shogunate's order to the domains of Kyushu — raise troops at once and crush the rising — had long since gone out.

And it was at that point that the rebels made one of the most obstinate defensive decisions in history: instead of looking for a castle they could take, they chose to shut themselves inside a castle nobody wanted.

On the southern coast of the peninsula, on a hill looking out to sea, stood an abandoned ruin. Its name was Hara Castle. It had been founded in fourteen ninety-six by Arima Takazumi of the Arima family, and at the end of the sixteenth century it was rebuilt from top to bottom by Arima Harunobu. In that work Harunobu drew on the castle architecture he had seen during the Korean campaigns, ringing the inner keep with stone walls; Jesuit records confirm that the stone ramparts of the main inner keep were raised between fifteen ninety-nine and sixteen oh four. But when the Arima family left the region in sixteen sixteen the castle was emptied: the roofs caved in, the timber fittings were stripped away, grass grew up between the walls. For twenty years it was a heap of stone no one came near.

The rebels poured into it. The villagers of the Shimabara Peninsula, and those who crossed by boat from the Amakusa islands, climbed the hill — first with their families, then with their livestock, and finally with everything they could carry. All together, counting women, the old and the children, there were some thirty-seven thousand of them. Of these, perhaps a third could bear arms.

Within three weeks they turned that ruin into a fortress. They shored up the collapsed walls with earth and with planks torn from village houses, they cleared the moats, they drove palisades into the paths leading up the hill. The sheer face above the sea they left as a natural rampart. They counted the rice they had brought inside and put it on ration. This was the most critical calculation of the siege, and though no one said it aloud, the sum was bad: for thirty-seven thousand people, the stores were measured in months.

They also made a banner. The man who painted it was named Yamada Emosaku, an artist who had learned painting from European missionaries and knew how to prepare pigments. At the centre of the standard he hung on the castle walls he set a chalice and two angels, and above them he wrote a sentence in Portuguese: praised be the Most Holy Sacrament. That banner is today one of the most striking objects preserved in Japan to have survived the siege. And the story of the man who painted it would arrive at an unexpected place in the castle's fall.

On the shogunate's side, the matter was being taken seriously. The government in Edo ordered every domain in Kyushu to put troops in the field and placed an official named Itakura Shigemasa in charge of suppressing the rising. Towards the end of January, the whole stretch of land on the castle's landward side was covered with army camps. The siege formally began on the twenty-second of January, sixteen thirty-eight.

Itakura Shigemasa underestimated what stood in front of him. He asked himself how many days a crowd of mostly farmers, crammed into a ruined castle, could last against regular forces gathered from some of the greatest domains in Japan, and he reckoned the answer at "not many." On the third of February he launched the first assault.

The plan failed. The rebels had narrowed the castle's few points of access, arranging their defences so that an attacker could advance only along a narrow front. The forces climbing the hill were met with stones, logs and boiling water hurled from above; among the defenders, musketeers opened fire at close range. The first assault was broken. Itakura tried again on the fourteenth of February. The combined toll of the two attacks was more than six hundred men lost, and not a single breach opened in the walls. In the course of the second assault, the commander himself was shot, and died. The first supreme commander the shogunate had sent to the peninsula had lost his life before a peasant uprising, on the slope of a ruin.

Edo's response to this news was a change of method. Matsudaira Nobutsuna was appointed in Itakura's place. The new commander did the exact opposite of his predecessor: he stopped attacking. He had ditches dug around the castle, breastworks raised, watchtowers erected, and mine tunnels driven beneath the walls. With soldiers flowing in from the surrounding domains, the strength of the camp passed one hundred and twenty-five thousand. He lined boats along the seaward side of the castle. Now he had only one aim: that nothing at all should get inside.

He also asked for cannon. Japan had cannon, but what Nobutsuna wanted was firepower heavy enough to pound a hilltop, and the nearest source of that was the Dutch trading post on the island of Hirado, north of the peninsula. The Dutch wanted to strengthen their position against the Portuguese, the only other Europeans permitted to trade in Japan; refusing a request from the shogunate was simply unthinkable. Nicolaes Couckebacker, the man heading the Dutch East India Company at Hirado, first sent cannon and powder ashore; these were formed into a battery on the coast. Then the shogunate asked for a ship.

Couckebacker personally took the twenty-gun sailing ship named de Ryp — the Ryp, for short — out to the waters off Hara Castle. The ship took up position on the twenty-fourth of February and bombarded the castle for fifteen days, until the twelfth of March. In that time it fired roughly four hundred and twenty-six rounds.

The result was very nearly nothing. The castle stood atop a steep hill overlooking the sea, and most of the shot fired from the ship's deck sailed over the target and fell behind the hill — into the camp of the very Japanese army conducting the siege. No serious breach was opened in the walls. The rebels, for their part, returned fire at the ship; two Dutchmen standing watch at the Ryp's lookout mast were shot and killed.

But the greatest damage the Ryp did to the siege came not from the shot it fired, but from its mere presence. The rebels lowered mocking messages from the walls to the besieging army. The gist of them was this: are there no brave men left in this country to fight us, that you must call foreigners to your aid? For an army of one hundred and twenty-five thousand samurai that had come to put down a rebellion, this was a question that touched the tenderest spot of all. The Japanese commanders asked the Dutch to withdraw. The Ryp weighed anchor and left. For the remainder of the siege, no foreign gun fired on the castle walls again.

Once the foreign ship was gone, what remained was Nobutsuna's real weapon. That weapon was the siege itself, and it was working in silence.

Through the month of March, nothing much happened on the walls of Hara Castle. What was happening was inside it.

Thirty-seven thousand people, on a hilltop sealed off from every direction but the sea, were living on rations they had calculated back in January. In the middle of March the rice ran out. Then the animals left to slaughter ran out. Then the grasses on the hill were pulled up and the bark was stripped from the trees. In the end they began climbing down the steep face of the castle to gather seaweed from the rocks the tide had left bare. The besiegers could see this; they watched the people coming down from a distance, and they knew what they were collecting.

At the beginning of April the rebels attempted a night sortie. A detachment came out of the castle and raided the siege lines; the aim was both to seize provisions and to disrupt the siege works. The raid was broken, and a large part of those who came out died at the lines. And it was over those dead that the coldest scene of the whole siege took place.

Matsudaira Nobutsuna ordered the bellies of the corpses opened. The point was not revenge, but intelligence. The commander wanted to know how far the starvation inside the castle had gone, and the surest way to learn that was to look inside the enemy's stomach. In the stomachs they opened there was no rice, no meat, no grain. There was only seaweed, grass and tree bark.

That single finding answered every question Nobutsuna had. The castle's provisions were exhausted; inside, the number of people with any strength left to fight was falling by the day. Preparations for the final assault began.

Before the preparations were complete, one more name entered the story. Yamada Emosaku, the painter who had drawn the castle's banner, made contact with the besieging army. He informed the besiegers of the situation inside the castle, which point was weak, and how the defence was coming apart. When the rebels realised this, they seized him to be put to death; the man was awaiting his execution as the castle fell.

On the twelfth of April, sixteen thirty-eight, the final assault began. Even its beginning was unplanned: a fire that broke out along the siege line, or a signal misread, dragged one domain's forces up the slope before their time, and when the others refused to be left behind, line after line marched for the hill. What emerged was not the orderly assault Nobutsuna had designed, but a scattered and tangled rush. This time, though, what faced them was a defence that had been living on seaweed for months. The outer lines of defence fell on the first day.

Inside, they fought for three days. Pressed in among the walls, using the last of their musket powder and the last of their stones, they resisted street by street. The forces that broke into the castle found, alongside the fighters, women, the old and children. The sources do not describe those three days in detail; the numbers describe them. The siege army's losses across the whole siege, dead and wounded together, come to around twenty thousand. Of the thirty-seven thousand people inside the castle, almost no one survived the battle and the executions that followed it.

Amakusa Shiro was killed during the assault. His head was cut off, carried to Nagasaki and displayed to the public on the point of a spear. The severed head of the sixteen-year-old boy who had become the symbol of the uprising was left at the entrance to the city for days, like a warning sign.

The castle fell completely on the fifteenth of April, sixteen thirty-eight. The stone walls were pulled down and the rubble was tipped into the ditches, leaving the site on the peninsula unusable ever again. The only person recorded as surviving the siege of Hara Castle was the painter Yamada Emosaku, who had drawn the castle's banner and then passed its secrets to the outside. The shogunate pardoned him. The flag he had painted was recovered from the rubble and preserved.

Once the castle had fallen, it was the turn of the side that had provoked the revolt to answer for it.

Matsukura Katsuie had not been on the peninsula during the uprising; as the shogunate's system required, he was in Edo. After the siege ended, the state of his domain was investigated, and the picture that emerged appalled the shogunate. In May of sixteen thirty-eight his domain was stripped from him; during the investigation, the discovery of a dead peasant inside his own residence was enough to document what had been said about his methods of tax collection. Katsuie was summoned to Edo, tried, and on the twenty-eighth of August, sixteen thirty-eight, beheaded.

This punishment has no equal in Japan's recent history. Across roughly three centuries of the Edo period there were many lords who fell from favour, lost their domains, were exiled; but a lord being put to death by beheading happened only once. A samurai, even for the gravest crime, was granted the right to cut open his own belly; that right was the last door left open to a nobleman's honour. For Katsuie, that door did not open. In this way the shogunate was declaring something: that a lord crushing his people hard enough to drive his own domain into revolt was, in the eyes of the ruling house, not an error but a crime. Shimabara was given to a new lord, Koriki Tadafusa, and the tax rates were brought down to a reasonable level.

But there was no one left on the peninsula to pay the tax. Most of the population had died at Hara Castle; the villages were empty, the fields unploughed. The shogunate resettled the peninsula by moving families to Shimabara from other parts of Japan. What mattered in choosing the newcomers was plain: they would come from regions that were not Christian.

Because this was the real conclusion Edo had drawn from the uprising. The shogunate read the people who had held out for three months on the walls of Hara Castle, feeding on seaweed, not as a tax revolt but as a problem of loyalty created by a foreign faith. It had seen that, as long as that faith remained in the country, its own subjects could hold out this long against its own army. And to remove that possibility, it closed the doors.

In sixteen thirty-nine, Portuguese merchants were banned from entering Japan altogether. The crew of one Portuguese delegation that tried to come despite the ban was executed. In sixteen forty-one, the Dutch — the only Europeans still permitted to remain in Japan — were taken from their settlement at Hirado and moved to an artificial, fan-shaped island built in the middle of Nagasaki harbour. The island was called Dejima, and it was about the size of a football pitch. For two hundred years, all of Japan's contact with the West passed across the bridge of that small island.

The annual ceremony of treading on the image, practised in Nagasaki, turned after the uprising from a local check into a nationwide routine. In the villages of Kyushu an official would come every year, lay the plaque on the ground, and have everyone, household by household, step on it in turn. Even so, the faith did not disappear: in these regions of Japan, communities left without priests, without churches, without books passed their prayers down from memory, generation to generation, and lived in hiding for more than two hundred years. When missionaries came to Nagasaki again in the middle of the nineteenth century, villagers stepped forward to introduce themselves.

The Shimabara Rebellion had one more consequence, and no one had planned it. The fall of Hara Castle turned out to be the last major armed conflict Japan would see for two hundred and thirty years. From sixteen thirty-eight until the civil war of eighteen sixty-eight, no war on that scale occurred again. Japan's famous long peace, in truth, begins on the slope of a ruin, with three days in which thirty-seven thousand people died. As for the doors that closed, they were forced open in eighteen fifty-three, when American warships dropped anchor in Edo Bay.

Today there is no castle on that hill. Because its rubble was dumped into the moats, the site was used as farmland for centuries. In nineteen thirty-eight the area was declared a national historic site, and then the excavations began. What came out of the ground gave a more tangible account of the siege than the written records did: musket balls, fragments of cannon shot, broken cooking pots, skeletons buried at the foot of the walls — and among those skeletons, medallions, crosses, rosaries. In an excavation in the year two thousand, the remains of one of the largest castle gates in Japan were uncovered. In twenty eighteen the site was added to the World Heritage list, along with other places belonging to the hidden Christian heritage of the Nagasaki region.

Anyone who climbs that hill looking out over the Ariake Sea today sees only grass, a line of stones, and the horizon. But to know that Japan's decision to close itself off from the world for two hundred years was set in motion from this silent slope changes the way you see the view.

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