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In Japanese history, there is a special term for something like the "peasant uprising": Ichiwa. The original meaning of Ichiwa was "unity", and the Japanese extended it to an armed group united, and most of the people who launched the uprising were peasants, merchants or religious believers.
Pictured: Ichigo in Japan
Today, let's talk about the largest rebellion in Japanese history: the Shimabara Rebellion, also known as the "Amakusa Ichisuke", which occurred in the early days of the Edo shogunate in Japan.
The Shimabara Peninsula and the Amakusa Islands are located in the northwest of Kyushu, Japan, and belong to today's Kumamoto Prefecture. The land was poor, so when Western missionaries brought Catholicism, countless islanders became staunch believers, even many samurai.
Photo: Geographical location of Shimabara and Amakusa
After Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified Japan, he began to severely ban Catholicism, killing about 300,000 Catholics in 20 years, and later the Tokugawa family, which later ruled, also persecuted believers. At that time, a system of "stepping on the painting" was popular, throwing the statue of Christ or the Virgin on the ground and asking everyone to step on it, and those who did not want to step on it were burned alive.
Pictured: The "stepping painting" of the persecution of Believers in God
In the fourteenth year of Kwanei (1637), Kyushu suffered a great famine, and the common people ate all the bark and grass roots, but the officials still severely tortured and forced taxes.
In October of that year, a tax incident occurred in Shimabara: an official stripped a peasant's daughter and burned her alive, which finally aroused the anger of the people, and the people killed the official and burned the official residence. The snowball of the riots grew louder and louder, and men, women and children of Shimabara and Amakusa enthusiastically participated in the riots, including farmers, fishermen, small craftsmen and ronin, almost all of whom were Catholics.
Pictured: During the Shimabara Rebellion, the head of Jizo Bodhisattva was destroyed
Among them, ronin with war experience became leaders, who turned out to be the vassals of Kumamoto Daimyo Konishi (who was also a Catholic), who was killed in the civil war, and they were stripped of their samurai status and reduced to ronin, dissatisfied with the shogunate.
The rebel army installed a 16-year-old boy as the "General General", this teenager named Amakusa Shizhen, also known as Amakusa Shiro, was the son of the head of konishi's family, richly dressed, handsome in appearance, and had also studied Western medicine.
Pictured: A portrait of Shiro Amakusa
Why choose a teenager as a leader? For twenty years ago, before the expulsion of a Western missionary named Max, he left a prophecy that a 16-year-old boy would appear in Shimabara, gifted, well-versed in doctrine, and would save the nations in the name of God.
Pictured: The image of Shiro Amakusa in the anime
Under Shimabara Castle, the rebels erected a banner with something similar to the Holy Grail painted on it, next to two angels with long wings kneeling. Under this unruly banner, 30,000 rebels (including women and children) were gathered, and they also had 3,000 iron cannons (the Japanese name for arquebusiers).
Pictured: The flag of the rebel army
The rebels began to attack Shimabara Castle, and the Shimabara defenders rushed around for help. At that time, the ruler of the Edo shogunate was the third shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, and when he received the news, he was shocked, because Japan had been in peace for a long time, had not fought a war for 20 years, and many generals who could fight in battle were dead, so they had to send an experienced military general, Itakura Shigemasa, to suppress the rebellion. Seeing the arrival of the shogunate army, the rebel army retreated into the old castle at the southern end of the island, Hara Castle, which was held to the death.
Pictured: The ruins of the original castle in the original city today
Itakura Shigemasa launched three general attacks, but all of them failed, and finally he was killed.
The shogunate then understood that the fighting power of the rebel army was extraordinary, and mobilized the troops of 18 clans in the country, a total of 130,000 people, with matsudaira Nobuyasu, the shogunate's chief minister, as the commander-in-chief. Matsudaira Nobuyasu was a courtier known as the "Wisdom Izu", and instead of attacking the city recklessly like Itakura Shigemasa, he let the large army surround the original castle and launch a brutal siege battle. At the same time, Matsudaira Nobutsune also took the initiative to collude with the Dutch, who were very happy to fight against the Catholic rebel army and sent warships to shell the original castle from the sea.
Pictured: Starvation was an ancient Japanese siege tactic
Beginning in the New Year of 1638, thirty thousand rebels held the isolated city for more than two months, and finally ran out of ammunition, so hungry that they could not even stand steadily, but driven by fanatical faith, they still shouted slogans and insisted. On February 17, the shogunate army launched a general offensive, and after paying the price of more than 10,000 casualties, finally captured Hara Castle.
Pictured: A painting depicting the last moments of the original castle
The remaining 20,000 people in the castle, from Amakusa Shiro and below, both men, women and children, were beheaded, and only one traitor named Yamada Uemonsaku survived, who was later taken to Edo for interrogation, leaving behind a lot of information about the rebel army. In the end, more than 30,000 bloody human heads were piled up under the castle, and the head of Amakusa Shiro was specially transported to Nagasaki and exposed to the public for 17 days.
Pictured: The siege of the shogunate during the Shimabara Rebellion
It is worth mentioning that the true identity of Amakusa Shiro is the illegitimate son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was killed by Tokugawa Ieyasu), so many people are very sympathetic to him, and there are still statues for people to see.
Pictured: Statue of Shiro Amakusa
After the Shimabara Rebellion, the Edo shogunate learned the tenacity of catholics and more firmly adopted a policy of locking countries, refusing any foreigner to enter Japan, and finally began the 200-year history of locking countries.