This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
By the winter of 1637, the peasants of the Shimabara peninsula and the neighboring Amakusa islands in southern Japan had endured years of famine and the crushing tax demands of the daimyo Matsukura Katsuie, who had bankrupted his domain building a new castle and passed the cost on to farmers already reduced to selling their families into servitude. Many of these same communities had been converted to Catholic Christianity two generations earlier by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, and had continued to practice their faith in secret after the Tokugawa shogunate outlawed Christianity and expelled foreign priests in the early 1600s.
The uprising that broke out that winter united economic desperation with religious grievance under an unlikely commander: Amakusa Shiro, a charismatic sixteen year old the rebels regarded as a chosen leader foretold by Christian prophecy. Tens of thousands of rebels, joined by masterless samurai, fortified themselves inside the ruined Hara Castle on the Shimabara coast, where they withstood a shogunate siege that grew to include roughly 200,000 troops, the largest military force Japan had assembled in decades.
The castle fell in April 1638 after its defenders, cut off from supplies, were finally overwhelmed. Amakusa Shiro was killed and beheaded, and the shogunate's forces killed the surviving defenders almost without exception, a toll variously put at 37,000 to 40,000 dead. It was the last large scale armed conflict in Japan before the long Tokugawa peace, and its final act of resistance came from the very population the shogunate would go on to treat as its most dangerous enemy.