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Updated: May 7, 2025
The Japanese missions began in 1549, and their history ends with the Shimabara slaughter in 1638, about seven years before the first Papal decision against the tolerance of ancestor-worship. The Jesuit mission-work seems to have prospered steadily, in spite of all opposition, until it was interfered with by less cautious and more uncompromising zealots.
It has been shown that the Shimabara revolt finally induced the Bakufu Government to adopt the policy of international seclusion and to extirpate Christianity. In carrying out the latter purpose, extensive recourse was had to the aid of Buddhism.
On the coast of the Shimabara peninsula they seized an abandoned castle, at a place called Hara, and there fortified themselves. The local authorities could not cope with the uprising; and the rebels more than held their own until government forces, aggregating over 160,000 men, were despatched against them.
We find him making frequent donations of 5000 kwamme of silver to the citizens of Kyoto and Yedo; constructing the inner castle at Yedo twice; building a huge warship; entertaining the Korean ambassadors with much pomp; disbursing 400,000 ryo on account of the Shimabara insurrection, and devoting a million ryo to the construction and embellishment of the mausolea at Nikko.
At the close of 1637, there occurred a rebellion, historically known as the "Christian Revolt of Shimabara," which put an end to Japan's foreign intercourse for over two hundred years. The Gulf of Nagasaki is bounded on the west by the island of Amakusa and by the promontory of Shimabara.
What would have happened to all the English and Dutch in Japan, if the Portuguese and Spanish clergy could have got full control of government, ought to be obvious. With the massacre of Shimabara ends the real history of the Portuguese and Spanish missions. After that event, Christianity was slowly, steadily, implacably stamped out of visible existence.
In spite of all these deterrents, however, the Portuguese continued to send galleons to Nagasaki until the year 1637, when their alleged connexion with the Shimabara rebellion induced the Japanese to issue the final edict that henceforth any Portuguese ship coming to Japan should be burned, together with her cargo, and everyone on board should be executed.
Conspicuously active in this cause were two governors of Nagasaki, by name Mizuno and Takenaka, and the feudal chief of Shimabara, by name Matsukura. To this last is to be credited the terrible device of throwing converts into the solfataras at Unzen, and under him, also, the punishment of the "fosse" was resorted to.
The Amakusa insurgents passed over from that island to Shimabara, and on the 27th of January, 1638, the whole body numbering, according to some authorities, twenty thousand fighting men with thirteen thousand women and children; according to others, little more than one-half of these figures took possession of the dilapidated castle of Kara, which stood on a plateau with three sides descending one hundred feet perpendicularly to the sea and with a swamp on the fourth side.
Be that as it may, the persecution at last either provoked, or helped to bring about a Christian rebellion in the daimiate of Arima, historically remembered as the Shimabara Revolt. Their banner bore a cross; their leaders were converted samurai. They were soon joined by Christian refugees from every part of the country, until their numbers swelled to thirty or forty thousand.
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