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Under
the Fallen Cherry-Blossoms, Buried History
In
the Japanese village of Minami Arima, every spring at cherry-blossom time, two
mortal foes march their little armies up the castle road. One is a leathery old samurai in armor and
the other a pony-tailed teenager in a flowery red cape, with his face painted
up like a geisha's. The man is the
Shogun's general; the boy is Amakusa Shiro.
At road's end their armies will have mock combat, eliciting laughs from
the crowd.
Beyond
the cherry trees, overlooking the sea, stands a very different Amakusa
Shiro: a stout young man in prayer with
two swords in his belt. This statue is
truer to history, more like the young samurai who stood here awaiting the
holocaust in that horrific cherry-blossom spring of 1638. Here thirty-seven thousand souls would offer
up their starving flesh, writing their testament in blood into this sacred soil. Here was Hara Castle, the grave of the
Shimabara Rebellion, the dying gasp of old Catholic Japan.
The
Shimabara Peninsula had boasted seventy Catholic churches in her prime, and the
nearby Amakusa Islands had been staunchly Catholic too; but since 1612 the
Shoguns had been tightening the vise and all faithful Catholics now faced death
by torture. The current Shogun, Iemitsu,
demanded Christ's extinction. Iemitsu
was a sadist, a pederast, a drunkard, a tyrant and a paranoiac, and he feared
Christ as a demon would.
To
top this off, the lords of Shimabara and Amakusa were practicing
tax-extortion. There had been three
years of drought and starvation, but these two profligates demanded exorbitant
payments from their peasants, or else.
Some defaulters were tied up in coats made of straw and set alight. One sheriff seized a farmer's wife—nine
months pregnant—stripped her and put her into a cage in an icy stream to make
her husband pay up. She and her baby
died in the cage.
Then
there was the torture of another tax-defaulter's only daughter, a beautiful
virgin. The sheriff stripped her naked
and burnt her artfully with torches; enraged, her father killed him. Perhaps this sheriff’s atrocity was the spark
for the Shimabara Peninsula’s explosion into rebellion. Thousands attacked their cruel master's fortress
in the town of Shimabara, brandishing a banner that proclaimed: We were
timely born to die for the Faith.
It
did seem like the end of time: there
were burning, vermilion skies, and flowers blooming out of season. And down in Amakusa there was a prodigy. Fifteen-year-old Shiro was the son of an old Catholic
samurai named Jimbyoei. Jimbyoei and his
cronies had concocted a phony prophecy by a mythical missionary of old that “foretold”
Shiro's coming to liberate the downtrodden Christians; and then they acclaimed the
boy as their prophesied redeemer in a public ceremony.
Thus
was the rebellion seeded. After the explosion
in Shimabara, closet-Christians in the nearby Amakusa Islands flocked to
Shiro's flag to wage war on their own oppressors; meanwhile, entire villages throughout
the Shimabara Peninsula were vowing in writing to obey Shiro to the death. After an unsuccessful attempt to take their despotic
feudal lord’s fortress at Tomioka, Shiro’s Amakusan army sailed to Shimabara
with him to join their Shimabaran brethren, and all barricaded themselves and
their families inside the disused fortress called Hara Castle, in the south of
the Peninsula.
On
Christmas Day the Shogun learned of the rebellion and commissioned a general,
Itakura Shigemasa, to go down south to Shimabara and wipe out the despised Catholics.
His army—thrown together with units from
various feudal clans—didn't wait for his orders but attacked as soon as they
had arrived at Hara Castle, expecting an easy victory: the Christian marksmen atop the castle walls mauled
them. Enlightened, they withdrew to lick
their wounds and prepare themselves for real warfare.
Reinforcements
came, but the rebels repulsed Itakura's second, bigger assault. Now he had to save his honor: he ordered an all-out attack on Japanese New
Year's Day (Feb. 14, 1638). Many
contingents fought bravely, but the determined rebels exhausted them, and when Itakura
tried to rally his army for a last, grand effort, all the mustered units
refused to budge. Now Itakura must save
face: grimly leading only his own little
band of vassals, he charged the fortress. A hail of bullets killed the men on his left
and right, but he made it to the wall and died trying to scale it alone, shot
through the chest.
Now
a new, veteran general—Matsudaira—arrived with orders from the Shogun to stand
clear and starve the Christians out. He
surrounded the fortress with over 125,000 men and backed them up with
cannon-fire from both the government camp and a 20-gun Dutch merchantman
anchored offshore.
That
winter was severe, and inside Hara Castle the cold and hunger did its
work: what had been a triumphal juggernaut
transformed into a purgatory. By March they
had run out of rice and some were eating the empty sacks; nor was there any
more drinking-water or firewood, nor gunpowder.
The Shogun's vise was pinching their Christian kingdom and their very
bellies, while cannonballs came screaming in to crunch flesh and bone. One went through Shiro's sleeve and killed
four or five of his companions.
Matsudaira
masterfully played his hand once he had tightened the vise. He tempted the Christians with promises: rice and homes and land and tax-relief, if
only they would leave their fortress and abandon the Faith. These tempting lies dropped out of the sky, delivered
as letters wrapped around arrows shot over the castle walls. Some nonbelievers, dragged into the rebellion
against their will, did defect, but the Christian stalwarts shot testimonies
back to the besiegers: they wanted only
to worship Christ; that denied them, they would just have to die, they
declared. Letting them live as
Christians, of course, was not an option, for the Shogun, trapped in his
private darkness, viewed the Faith with terror.
By
spring the rebels were desperate. In a
sudden night-sortie in early April they tried to rob food and ammo from the
government camp, but were repulsed with heavy losses: the Christians had made
the mistake of setting fire to enemy tents and thus illuminated themselves,
perfect targets for massed musketry.
After the raiders’ retreat into the fortress, the government troops cut
open the stomachs of Christian dead and found they had been eating only leaves.
The
Shogun's hour had finally arrived. On
the Eleventh of April, 1638, his horde swarmed over the outermost wall of Hara
Castle, having first sent down a rain of fire-arrows. The wasted defenders fought with anything at
hand—empty guns, cooking-pots—while their Christian kingdom burned all around
them. The innermost wall, the wall of
the citadel at the mountaintop, was stormed on the morning of the Twelfth, and
the fighting ended at noon, when the last rebel combatant was dead. Those taken prisoner—the elderly, the ill,
mothers and their children—they beheaded, without exception. "Even the little girls," one
observer lamented.
The
Shogun's army ringed the burnt-out Hara Castle with 10,860 impaled Christian
heads; they sent 3,300 more to Nagasaki as a lesson to that town's surviving
Catholics. As a warning to the
Portuguese there—who had brought the Catholic Faith to Japan—they stuck four heads,
including Shiro's, onto stakes at the foot of the bridge to the island where the
Portuguese were now confined. Soon the
Portuguese would be banned from Japan entirely, and all Japanese required to
appear before a magistrate annually and tread on a Christian sacred image to
prove their loyalty to the Shogun.
Today
only three Catholic churches can be found in the Peninsula, frequented by
perhaps three dozen souls; but every spring at cherry-blossom time, the
villagers of Minami Arima do remember the holocaust of the 37,000 with a
Buddhist memorial service in the evening, and the next day with a parade, with
Amakusa Shiro made up like a dainty geisha, and the Shogun's general a proper
man.
Perhaps
the Shogun really won.
Copyright
© 2005, 2013 by Luke O’Hara
(Originally
published, in an earlier version, in Our Sunday Visitor)
