The Tokugawa Bakuhu was made up of many domains, more or less. They had to govern their territory harmoniously because any social unrest was not allowed. The rebellion in Shimabara Aurelian was a massive social unrest so it had to be suppressed. So the government sent Lord Ju, Matsudayda Novutzna and asked the Dutch to help them - which they did. And then some rebels start firing arrows out from Harakasil into the Tokugawa forces. In the end, how you can probably imagine it comes down by the beginning of April 1616 is one of Japan's most famous battles.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Christian uprising in Japan and its profound and long-term consequences.
In the 1630s, Japan was ruled by the Tokagawa Shoguns, a military dynasty who, 30 years earlier, had unified the country, ending around two centuries of civil war. In 1637 a rebellion broke out in the province of Shimabara, in the south of the country. It was a peasants’ revolt, following years of bad harvests in which the local lord had refused to lower taxes. Many of the rebels were Christians, and they fought under a Christian banner.
The central government’s response was merciless. They met the rebels with an army of 150 000 men, possibly the largest force assembled anywhere in the world during the Early Modern period. Once the rebellion had been suppressed, the Shogun enforced a ban on Christianity and expelled nearly all foreigners from the country. Japan remained more or less completely sealed off from the rest of the world for the next 250 years.
With
Satona Suzuki
Lecturer in Japanese and Modern Japanese History at SOAS, University of London
Erica Baffelli
Professor of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester
and
Christopher Harding
Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh
Producer Luke Mulhall