The Teenage Messiah Who Rose Against the Shogun | Shimabara Rebellion 1637

Spring 1638: tens of thousands of starving farmers, fishermen, women and children hold an abandoned castle on a cliff above the sea, under banners marked with the cross.
Their leader is a boy of about sixteen, and they believe he was sent by heaven.

This is the story of Amakusa Shirō and the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638), animated in Japanese ink-painting style. It begins in 1549, when the Jesuit Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima, and Christianity spread through western Kyushu: Arima Harunobu, lord of the Shimabara peninsula, was baptized in 1580, Konishi Yukinaga ruled the Amakusa islands, Arima had a seminary and Amakusa a Jesuit printing press. Then came Toyotomi Hideyoshi's expulsion edict of 1587, Konishi's execution after Sekigahara in 1600, the fall of Arima Harunobu in 1612 and the Tokugawa ban on Christianity in 1614, with persecution, executions and the fumi-e test.

In Shimabara, Matsukura Shigemasa built a grand castle and crushed the farmers with rice taxes; his son Matsukura Katsuie kept squeezing, while the Terazawa did the same in Amakusa. After famine and failed harvests in the 1630s, a legendary prophecy of a heavenly child and the teenage Masuda Shirō Tokisada lit the fuse. In December 1637 the peninsula rose. The rebels of Shimabara and Amakusa occupied the abandoned Hara castle under Shirō's banner of the chalice and two angels. The shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu's commander Itakura Shigemasa was killed in a failed New Year's Day assault in February 1638; Matsudaira Nobutsuna, 'Chie Izu', then besieged the castle with an army usually put at about 125,000 men, even calling in the Dutch ship De Ryp from Hirado to bombard it. Starving defenders ate seaweed and leaves. On 12 April 1638 Hara castle fell, and almost all of its people were killed.

We follow the consequences: the execution of Matsukura Katsuie, the banning of Portuguese ships in 1639, the Dutch confined to Dejima from 1641, temple registration and sakoku, the closed country. And the hidden Christians, the kakure kirishitan, who prayed to Maria Kannon and passed down the orasho for some 250 years, until villagers from Urakami revealed their faith to Father Bernard Petitjean at Ōura church in Nagasaki in 1865. The ban notices came down in 1873; Hara castle is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage site (2018).

A note on sources: the main events and dates come from mainstream historical scholarship. Numbers vary widely between sources: about 37,000 people in Hara castle is the most commonly cited figure (estimates range lower and higher), and about 125,000 for the shogunate army. The prophecy of a heavenly child, Shirō's miracles (the bird's egg, walking on the sea), the defenders' mocking letter about the Dutch, and Yamada Emosaku as the only survivor are traditions or legends and are marked as such in the film; the lists of absurd taxes come from later accounts and may be exaggerated. Historians still debate how far Shirō himself led the revolt and how much it was a religious war or a tax revolt. The words of the Urakami woman are given as Petitjean recorded them. The scroll texts for the prophecy and the defenders' letter are illustrative paraphrases, not historical documents. No graphic violence.

Chapters:
0:00 Ships from the South
2:20 The Forbidden Cross
3:55 A Harvest of Hunger
5:19 The Child of Heaven
6:41 The Uprising
8:22 The Siege of Hara
10:44 The Fall of Hara
11:47 The Closed Country
12:51 The Hidden Christians

Japanese audio track available: Settings → Audio track → 日本語.

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