Shimabara uprising
The Shimabara Rebellion or Shimabara Rebellion ( Japanese 島 原 の 乱 , Shimabara no ran ) was a rebellion by Japanese peasants, many of them Christians , in the early days of the Tokugawa Shogunate 1637-1638.
The rebellion broke out (according to the western calendar) on December 17, 1637, when farmers from Shimabara and Amakusa rose against their daimyo Matsukura Katsuie . While many of the peasants were baptized Christians, the excessive tax burden triggered the collection. Only in the course of the fighting did religious traits come to the fore.
The rebels consisted of about 23,000 peasants and abandoned samurai ( rōnin ), including many women. The survey took place in fiefdom Shimabara on the Shimabara Peninsula in the province of Hizen and the nearby Amakusa Islands under the leadership of Amakusa Shirō (also Masuda Tokisada called), who led the baptismal name Jeremias instead. Both areas had previously been proselytized by the Jesuits under the previous Christian daimyo Konishi Yukinaga .
Terazawa Hirotaka , governor of the nearby Nagasaki Empire , sent 3,000 samurai to Amakusa, who were repulsed on December 27, 1637. The only 200 survivors withdrew to Nagasaki and the governor asked the shogunate for reinforcements. In the battle of January 31, 1638, warriors of the shogunate defeated the rebels, who lost around 1,000 men. They then withdrew to Shimabara. There the rebels besieged Shimabara Castle and occupied the Hara fortress .
Hirotaka had already set out for Shimabara on January 2nd with 500 samurai and received another 800 men from Ōmura . They camped half a mile around Shimabara Castle and began bombarding it with naval artillery from Japanese and Chinese ships. They also asked the Dutch East India Company for assistance. The head of the Dejima branch was forced to send a ship in front of the fortress. But after several cannonades, the Dutch withdrew again. The apparent ineffectiveness of cannons in the struggle for Japanese fortresses sparked intensive Japanese studies on the use of mortars in the following decades .
Shogunate troops arrived, but the rebels at Hara Fortress withstood the siege for months and caused heavy losses. For both sides it was heavy fighting in wintry conditions. On February 3, 1638, the rebels killed 2,000 warriors from Hizen during a sortie. However, the besieged slowly ran out of food, ammunition and other supplies.
On March 10, the forces of the shogunate began to rally in Shimabara and by April 30,000 rebels had already faced 200,000 shogunate soldiers. The rebels attacked them on April 4th but were forced to withdraw. Survivors captured in the process told the besiegers that there was a lack of food and gunpowder in the fortress.
On April 12, 1638, warriors from Hizen stormed the fortress and took the outer defensive posts. The rebels continued to fight, causing heavy losses until they were finally defeated on April 15. By then the shogunate had lost around 10,000 soldiers. For the warriors of the Tokugawa troops it was particularly shocking that an opponent who was predominantly peasantry could withstand the samurai in such a way.
Afterwards, shogunate troops beheaded an estimated 37,000 rebels and sympathizers. Amakusa Shiro's head was brought to Nagasaki and the Hara Fortress was destroyed.
The shogunate suspected that Western Catholics were involved in the spread of the rebellion. In 1639 the last Portuguese (southern barbarians, nanbanjin ) remaining in the country were expelled. Among the Europeans, only the Dutch were tolerated, but their trading post was moved to Nagasaki in 1641. Christianity only survived underground ( kakure kirishitan ). Figures of Mary were disguised as Kannon deities ( Maria-Kannon ), Christian graves were provided with hidden symbols.
Although there were occasional riots among the rural population afterwards, there were no major battles in Japan until the 1860s. In the next ten generations of the Edo period, the samurai worked mostly as a kind of official elite.
The battles for the Hara Fortress were widely spread in historical narratives such as the Shimabara-ki (Shimabara Record). Engelbert Kaempfer , who collected information on the uprising from 1690 to 1691, brought a copy to Europe.
literature
- Matthew E. Keith: The logistics of power. Tokugawa response to the Shimabara rebellion and power projection in seventeenth-century Japan , Ohio State University, 2006.
- Ludwig Riess : Der Aufstand von Shimabara , in: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens , Vol. 5, Issue 45 (January 1891), pp. 191-214.
- Roland Habersetzer : Amakusa Shirō - God's Samurai : The uprising of Shimabara. Historical novel. Palisander Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-938305-19-5 .
- Roland Habersetzer: The Warriors of Ancient Japan - Famous Samurai, Rōnin and Ninja . Palisander Verlag, 1st edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-938305-07-2 . Contains an extensive narrative of the Shimabara Uprising based on historical sources.
- Toda, Toshio: Amakusa, Shimabara no ran - Hosokawa-han shiryō ni yoru. Tōkyō, Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 1988.
- Reinhard Zöllner : Avengers, Martyrs, Victims: Violence in Japanese Religions , in: Christoph Bultmann, Benedikt Kranemann; Jörg Rüpke (ed.): Religion, violence, non-violence. Problems - Positions - Perspectives. Münster: Aschendorff 2003, pp. 183–197.