The Messiah came.
He came to a backwater nation — Japan; to a backwater part of Japan — Kyushu; to a backwater part of Kyushu — the Shimabara Peninsula. The year by the Christian calendar was 1637. It was a week before Christmas.
The Messiah came. He walked on water. He healed the sick. He rallied the troops. Troops? Peasants mostly, oppressed, half-starved, “rabble” in the eyes of real warriors — but here were those same real warriors stymied by that same “rabble” — such was the zeal inspired in them by the 15-year-old boy thought to be, if not the Son of God, the “heavenly child,” “heaven’s messenger.” Posterity knows him as Amakusa Shiro, from his birthplace, an islet in the Amakusa Sea off the Shimabara coast.
Like the “Messiah” better known to history, he met a tragic end; like him also, he surely knew that initial victories, stunning enough to suggest God taking a hand in things, were prologue merely to the crushing defeat inevitably to come. It was only a matter of time, so overwhelmingly superior — in terms of numbers, arms and skill — were the government forces massed against them. The ensuing slaughter was “one of the greatest in all Japan’s sanguinary history,” writes Ivan Morris in “The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan.”
Not the greatest? Some 37,000 were slaughtered in the final assault alone. “The nearby rivers and inlets were clogged with decapitated bodies; vast ditches were filled to overflowing with severed heads, and heads were strewn thickly over the fields” — in ghastly contrast to the lovely setting Morris evokes: “The beauty of the riant seascape, with its hundreds of rugged islets and its bright white sand bordering the clear waters of Shimabara Bay and Amakusa Sea, all set against a background of gentle, pine green hills...”
Thus was the “evil sect” exterminated — ruthlessly, mercilessly, even it seems with relish, the tortures inflicted so extreme and so imaginative as to suggest ... what? Morris uses the word “holocaust.” So it was: a holocaust without a Hitler, a Final Solution 17th-century-Japan-style. It forces on us the question of absolute evil. Is there such a thing? A bad so bad the word “bad” will not do? “Bad” is what we all are at times, what the world is often. “Evil” is something more, not of this world, not human, something other than human — what? “Hitler.” That’s one answer in our time, the name become noun, a synonym for, and quasi-explanation of, the mystery of inhuman, unhuman, subhuman, superhuman evil. “How could Hitler do what he did?” “Because he’s Hitler.” “No Hitler, no Holocaust,” to borrow the famous phrase of American essayist Milton Himmelfarb (1918-2006) — true perhaps of 20th-century Germany; not true everywhere and always, Shimabara seems to teach us.
The first Europeans to set foot in Japan were China-bound Portuguese sailors blown off course in a storm. The year was 1543. Six years later came the Christian missionaries. Francis Xavier, leading the way, saw delightful prospects ahead, finding the Japanese he encountered on landing in Kyushu “most desirous of knowledge. ... It seems to me that among unbelievers no people can be found to excel them.”
Here were souls to be saved, eager, it seemed, for salvation. Christianity was appealing. It offered eternal life in a better world, a God of love who asked only to be believed in. The feudal lords of Kyushu and southern Honshu — Japan was not then a unified country but a welter of independent fiefs interminably at war with one another — were friendly. They wanted trade and they wanted guns. Tangled motives defy untangling. True Christian feeling cannot be discounted. Some accepted baptism. Some forced conversion on their vassals. Some went so far as to burn down Buddhist temples “to extinguish totally the worship and veneration of idols,” applauded the Jesuit chronicler Luis Frois. Christian churches proliferated — some 200 serving 150,000 Japanese worshippers by 1582.
Then things got ugly. Trial by battle after battle in war after war was slowly confirming Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98) as the strongest of warlords, determined to forge and rule a unified country. He’d welcomed the missionaries at first as valuable allies. But were they valuable? Were they as they seemed? A tactless boast by a Spanish sailor seemed a thinly veiled warning: The Spanish empire was hungry, powerful, expanding and using the missionaries to soften Japan up for colonization. Suddenly Hideyoshi turned against the “pernicious doctrine.” The missionaries must leave the country within 20 days.
But then he seemed to forget about them. Preaching and conversion went on more or less as before. Ten years passed. His memory was stirred — by what precisely is unclear. His temperament was volatile, his rages sudden. An outburst of it in 1597 led to the crucifixion of 26 Christians, Spanish and Japanese. We should not rush to judgment. As George Sansom reminds us (in “Japan: A Short Cultural History”), “The behavior of Hideyoshi seems enlightened and tolerant in comparison with the cruelty of contemporary Europe. Those were the days of the Inquisition, of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, of Alva’s torture of the Netherlands and of the merciless slave trade.”
Kyushu in the last decades of the 16th century was more Christian than Buddhist. It was not to last. Christianity’s very success doomed it. How could an otherworldly faith promoted by foreign powers not arouse the suspicion of the infant central government in the infant capital, Edo (today’s Tokyo), its concerns very much of this world, first among them that of preserving and solidifying its infant power, won at such cost? Taking no chances, either with the next world or the outside world, it slammed Japan’s gates shut. Foreigners must leave. Christianity was banned. Defiance meant death — or worse: torture. Japan became a “closed country” (sakoku) — and remained one for 250 years.
Debate persists over the ultimate motivation behind the Shimabara revolt of 1638. Was it primarily religious or economic? The peasants were desperately poor. Bad harvests plagued the 1630s. Let starvation rage; taxes must be paid regardless. And if they couldn’t be? If there was nothing to pay them with? Morris quotes a contemporary account by a Dutch trader:
“Those who could not pay the fixed taxes were dressed ... in a rough straw coat made of a kind of grass with long and broad leaves and called ‘mino’ by the Japanese, such as is used by boatmen and other peasants as a raincoat. These mantles were tied round the neck and body; the hands being tightly bound behind, their backs with ropes, after which the straw coats were set on fire. ... This tragedy is called the Mino dance.”
Morris adds: “In order to make the victims burn more brightly and further to terrify their fellow villagers, who were forced to watch the ghastly spectacle, the officials in charge ordered that the straw coats be rubbed with lamp-oil; and often the punishment was carried out after sunset like some macabre display of fireworks.”
If impoverished tax defaulters could be so treated, how much more vulnerable were those propagating an “evil sect?”
This report of a public execution is from “The Christian Century in Japan” by C.R. Boxer: “This ordeal was witnessed by 150,000 people, according to some writers, or 30,000 according to others.... When the faggots were kindled, the martyrs said sayonara to the onlookers who then began to intone the Magnificat, followed by the psalms ‘Laudate pueri Dominum’ and ‘Laudate Dominum omnes gentes,’ while the Japanese judges sat on one side ‘in affected majesty and gravity, as is their favorite posture.’ Since it had rained heavily the night before, the faggots were wet and the wood burned slowly; but as long as the martyrdom lasted, the spectators continued to sing hymns and canticles.”
The description is quoted at length not to indulge a taste for horror but to raise the question: How can human beings do this to fellow human beings? There’s horror enough in the story of Shimabara — which will resume next month.
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