Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 345 - The Shimabara Rebellion: Part 1

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Support the show on Patreon and get the second part in this series right now! https://www.patreon.com/posts/early-episode-2-119362620 Check out the merch store! https://llbdmerch.com/ Once upon a time in Japan, shitty landlords, high taxes, and religious persecution united a diverse band of Christians, Samurai, Ronin, and farmers under the leadership of a teenager, believed to be an Apostle, in order to rise up against the Lords of Shimabara and the Shogun himself. Part 1/3 Sources for this series: Robert Bellah. Tokugawa Religion. Ivan Morris. The nobility of failure: tragic heroes in the history of Japan Jonathan Clements. Christ’s Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion

Hey everybody, our merch store is restocked. So if you missed any of the live shows, specific merch, at wherever date that we went to and you couldn't make it to, it's all on our merch store, LLBDmerch.com. So get your orders in while they last. We only have certain sizes and certain numbers and whichever one it happens to be. So if you want something, get your order in.

Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also at Bydonkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom. We're missionaries representing the Armenian church and the Catholic church. We've landed in Japan in the late 1500s as a part of a bet that was lost by our churches in order to spread the word of God in a competition video put out by a man named Monsignor Beast. I have to admit I'm a little proud of that one.

Upon arrival, we're greeted by a group of confused looking samurai, and Tom decides to step forward to take the first crack at them. He hands them an iPod, sticks the EarPods into their ears, and puts on the most brutal hardcore music their ears have ever heard, quickly spin kicking the nearest samurai directly in the head. They reject the gifts of his church and kill him. Then it's my turn. I have brought with me many gifts, but I'm unsure which to give them. I decide against giving them a catalytic converter, not because I'm worried that it may upset them, but rather I would like to sell it later

Instead I reached in my bag and I hand them a single disposable vape and a baggie of loose pre-workout powder A samurai snatches the powder from my hands quickly rips a line of it and becomes more Vascular than any samurai has ever become before He comments to the man next to him, but how sick the pumps are then he kills me Hey, dude, buddy Samurai pre-workout is just like you want to defeat the mongol pussy Do you want to get pumped get your gay ass off the beach and get jacked? samurai rich Piana

Yo, you caught me a little bit of not on the way to the gym. Oh, God. No missionary Mr. Beast. I was inspired as fucking I'm here in Japan. I actually have to thank Francis for that because I was baptized Catholic as a child by my mom and her family, but I completely forgot what all of like the ranks of the church are. Oh yeah. And we were talking earlier, you start talking about Monsignor and I'm like, okay I could make this work. That's

how my brain works, Tom. That turned into Monsignor Beast. That reminds me, the other day I had to go pick up a DHL package and for some reason PostNL refuses to locate my apartment at any point. I think I told the story before about them just launching my mail onto my balcony and that's saying they delivered it to me personally. But now they've started dropping it off at the local liquor store. It is a run down ass like money laundering fucking scheme liquor store. We've we all know what this place looks like in our heads. We all know a place and it's the only place

I've ever seen Mr. Beast's like food merch. I don't know what to call it for sale. And all of the bags are like horribly damaged and torn open but still on the counters and shit for sale. Yeah. You know, inside you is two wolves. There's the Mr. Beast feastables. And then there is, you know, the dusty Tony's Chocolonely. Which way, modern man? I'm gonna go with Tony's 10 times out of 10.

Cause at least I know it's not full of mold and shit. Like I've heard the feastables are moldy. I have not eaten one. I do not plan on eating one. If you comment Joe, eat a feastable, I'm not doing it. Just Mr. Beast's like dead eyes on a fucking beach in Okinawa. It's like Watashiwa Mr. Beast. I fucking hate you for giving me that.

Oh yeah. So I got some good news and bad news for you Tom. We have what I think is... it checks all the blocks for our series. Samurai, we love them. Rebellions, we love them. The Catholic Church, don't love them so much. Conflicted. Also, do you want to go back and just like, ticks all the blocks? Hey, boxes are blocks, leave me alone. No they're not!

It's a 3D box. You take it. Your existence is just an indictment of the American education system. I have a master's degree. And that's unfair. Also the Austrian educational system, because that's where I got my grad degree from. Yeah. Yeah. Hello, school, which I will not name. You know, it's, it is really sad that

this is not a video based podcast and the people who are listening to this cannot see behind you on the wall, your framed master's degree from Hitler university. You got that H Y U alumni sweater on. Yeah. That makes me and the Pope have something in common. Sorry, former Pope. And that brings us full circle. Yeah. I watched them conclave at the weekend, incredible movie, really, really good. And it was just like, I can't believe they put in a joke about Pope Ratzinger being a Nazi. You kind of have to, right? Yeah. You can't bring up Ratziger and not remember the fact he was in the Hitler Youth. Yeah. Also, accused to be multiple other things.

Doing my study abroad semester at Hitler University in Austria. So we love all of those things, mostly just samurai and rebellions, and we're going to talk about all of them. So in the early 1600s, the domain of Shimabara was torn apart by a massive rebellion. A mixture of peasants, disaffected samurai, and Catholics all formed a strange alliance to fight back over taxation, famine, disease, and religious discrimination. They were led by a teenage Catholic samurai they believed to be magical with divine powers and it nearly brought the Tokugawa shogunate to its knees. What? This is the story of the Shimabara

rebellion. Have you ever heard of this before? I've never heard of this. Magical teenage Catholic samurai the anime character you didn't know you wanted. A magical teenage Catholic samurai? That's kind of Jesus. Sung in the tune of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Teenage Catholics. Whatever, I can't get the meter. I'm not a musical theater person. I'm not a theater person in general. I'm neither of those things.

I am the furthest of those things that you could possibly be. Yeah, if you ever get cast in something, it's just going to be, Oh, Joe, you are playing the role of Joe. I am oath number five. You're the tree. But first let's talk about some of our sources I used for the series. The first is Christ Samurai by Jonathan Clements. The second is Robert Bella's Tokugawa religion.

And the third is Ivan Morris's, the nobility of failure, tragic heroes in the history of Japan. As far as readability goes, Christ Samurai is definitely the top of that pile. But for our complete bibliography, of course, look at the show notes. Like in every episode we do for all of your reading needs without our voices, they don't read. Why did you think they listened to the podcast? I mean, I can't complain. I can't read either. Who needs to read? Why do you think I'm on this podcast? But before we get there, we have to talk about the background of this entire

issue, which brings us to 1543 and the arrival of the Portuguese to Japan. This is generally considered Japan's first contact with Europeans. And at the time the Portuguese had been trading widely with other areas and Japan was locked in the middle of its warring state period, which means this is a pretty good time for both of them to hang out. Never really a good point of reference if your first encounter with Europeans is the Portuguese. They're like, Oh, with Europeans is the Portuguese. They're like, Oh, they get off the ship. They're just handing you this little custard tart.

And you're like, what the fuck is this? I would love to be greeted with a custard tart. So obviously as most people know, Japan in general hated outsiders, but this feeling had somewhat eroded somewhat by the realities of the ongoing multi-sided never-ending civil war when each lord was trying to get an advantage over the other. Of course, I don't really need to explain why the Portuguese would want to trade in Japan. They're a vastly rich empire and this is just what empires do, right? So by 1543, they ended up on the Japanese island of Tagashima and they make contact by selling

them something called an arquebus, something of a really really old school matchlock musket. This is in exchange for Japanese silver and other goods that were not previously available on the market that the Portuguese of course went to corner on. The Japanese were already familiar with gunpowder weapons thanks to their contact with the Chinese and they had been using them for over 200 years. Like we talked about before during our invasion of the Ryukyu kingdom episode, these old school Chinese guns were vastly, vastly, vastly inferior to European ones at the same time. You're handed like a Portuguese flintlock pistol and it's like, oh, we already got one.

I just pull out an AR-15. The Americans came by with a time machine. Give the out an AR-15. The Americans came by with a time machine. Give the samurai an AR-15. An AR-15 could be aimed, they could be fired, and reloaded by a single person. In contrast, most of the Japanese own gunpowder weapons from China were like a two or more man situation. Go ahead and slide in a your mom joke here for anybody listening at home. And they were also very short ranged and very, very, very inaccurate. They're hardly going to turn the tide of the battlefield and they hadn't. Yeah.

Now, at first, the samurai and their warlords, they hated the new European weapons. And this is sometimes framed as like an honor thing. And, you know, going back to the mythos surrounding Saigo Takabori, who we did a series on. This is a re-imagining of what really happened. Famously Saigo Takabori did use guns, unlike depicted in the documentary The Last Samurai. But the samurai hated guns because it went against their style of fighting that means like feats of combat one-on-one with the best samurai winning hypothetically as I have learned in preparation is playing through ghosts of Tsushima in the space of a week Jesus Christ how'd you do that in a week I'm

really depressed Joe fair enough fair enough I've gone from playing Ghosts of Tsushima to now playing stalker two, two sides of the same coin. Ukraine. Is it the Japan of Europe? Who knows? Many people say this. Many people are saying this more than like losing to their fighting style or whatever. What they were really upset about was it takes years to be able to use a sword effectively or even a spear. If you put a musket in the hands of a commoner, they immediately can clap them samurai cheeks with the pull of a trigger. Yeah. It's part of the reason as well, aside from obviously rampant disease that the conquistadors were so effective in central and South America is like they had firepower in the form of like the

Arquebus. Also they had horses. Horses. I don't like them. But when your limit break is horse and the other side has no horse to match your horse, you generally win unless you're Mel Gibson in Braveheart, famously a historically accurate film. Yes. But yeah, I mean, to this pretty much the same thing as like the firepower is obviously very important, but their objections to guns were more based on their status being threatened than anything to do with honor. You know, the Bushido code or swordsmanship or any of that shit was suddenly the caste system in Japan with the warriors on top of it. Now suddenly

could be flipped on its head when you gave the boomstick to the fucking dirt farmer and your sword training didn't matter anymore. Yeah, it's like fighting without honor during the warring states period in terms of outside of the battlefield, not directly facing your enemy, fighting one on one was considered the remit of thieves. Yeah, made you below them. And not to mention mention the samurai were also understandable about just how awful they treated their subjects. Yeah. And they knew like, hey,

if these guns start ending up everywhere, we're going to have some serious fucking issues. Yeah. Don't want some dirt poor farmer pulling up on the block and like unloading seven muskets into my chest. Like I'm 50 cent. I'm 50 Koku, the Samurai rapper. However, that objection really only lasted as long as it took one warlord to understand how useful these things would be. The most famous of these is certainly Oda Nobunaga, who quickly took the weapons that the Eurotrash brought with them and did a pretty great feats of military Stratagem with them, you know, mm-hmm. So within a few weeks

He would have rank after rank of trained gunmen as well as his own facilities to crank out Japanese copies of the same guns Mm-hmm pretty soon after that any objections to guns fell by the wayside as everyone began punching one another full of Portuguese speed holes. Which sounds like a euphemism for doing cocaine. Or like putting your dick through a bathroom stall. Yeah. Is that just a new name for a glory hole? Portuguese speed hole? It's the Lisbon Glory Hole. You know, we're eating pastel donatas, getting our dick soaked in the bathroom. However, another important thing happened just a few years after that. Jesuit mercenary Francis Xavier and his gang of Mary Priests showed up.

Oh, and the Japanese do not like priests. No. Somewhat hilariously, Xavier and his group were a bunch of really, really tall guys. Uh, something that may have been done on purpose because, you know, they have heard stories. They've like talked to other Portuguese traders who have been there. They're told that they're very short. And as a flex, they said the tallest priests imaginable. Why would you a priest? He should have been dunking like grab the basketball.

The NBA summer league hadn't been invented yet for tall random Europeans. The Jesuit team is like the Harlem Globetrotters. Their height was so much so that it shocked the Japanese who constantly remarked just how huge one of them were and that they had hair like demon. I don't know how fucked up your hair has to be like man. It looks demonic My barber fucked my shit up so bad the Japanese are making fun of me They attempted to talk to the Japanese via translator named Yajiro Yajiro has an interesting life story of how exactly he ended up here because it's not like he's the earliest Japanese Catholic convert. He had stowed away on a Portuguese ship

leaving Japan because he was trying to get away from a murder charge. Then he got caught and the punishment for being a stowhead of Portuguese ship was death. So now he was facing a death sentence on either side and the Portuguese like, well we might be able to use you. You kind of speak Portuguese. You certainly speak Japanese better than any of us. Your Portuguese is shit. But if you become our interpreter, we won't kill you. So a translator is born.

You can either go back to Japan or would you like to go to this amazing place called Brazil? I'll take you to a visit of what we call the Portuguese Speed Hole. However, Yajiro really sucked at his job. There were several reasons for this. For one, he had no understanding of the Christian faith or the Catholic Church whatsoever. Remember, he was not a convert. He just kept telling his fellow Japanese that these dudes who came with him were Buddhist monks, as that was the only religion he knew

of, and he saw that they're wearing robes, monks wear robes, therefore they're Buddhist monks. These monks are about to experience the worst possible outcome of being big in Japan. And his mistranslations got like swords pulled on them multiple times. He told the Japanese that the men came from India. They were Indian, like from the Indians of Connaught, rather than they had traveled from India. Because he didn't know what Portugal was. This led the Japanese to think that these guys were not in fact Catholic priests from Portugal, but rather weird Indian Buddhist cultists,

and thus were given the nickname the Namban-jin, meaning southern barbarian. Or even worse for a Japanese person at this time is to think of like worse than them being Indian is they're secretly Korean. That comes up later. Oh fucks sake. Of course we're going to end up talking about Korea at some point. Despite all of these setbacks the Jesuits stayed and over the years they learned fluent Japanese, they taught Latin and Portuguese to Japanese converts to Christianity, meaning they could

accurately translate their beliefs, goals, and ideas into the local languages as well as be understood. You couldn't be a Japanese convert without learning Portuguese because of Empire reasons. I mean, come on, you guys know that, right? You've been listening to the show long enough now this is not because of the love of Christ. Come on. Someone definitely needs to open like a small place restaurant in East London. That's like, Oh yeah, we fuse like, you know, Portuguese, a puri puri with Japanese food in honor of like, call it, we fuse like, you know, Portuguese, uh, period period with Japanese food in honor of like, call it the non bon gene. Yeah. Call it the non bon gene bone. And it costs like 20 pounds. Of course it does. And it's really small. So you have to

eat like two of them. And the dude who owns it is wearing the smallest beanie, but has a huge beard. I can picture that man in my head. I believe I've bought a beer from him in London. To teach their new faith to the Japanese they were allowed to build two seminaries, one in Amakusa and the other in Shimabara, though eventually the missionaries were able to spread even further into Nagasaki. Thankfully the last bad thing that would ever happen to Nagasaki. I think multiple bad things happen in Nagasaki between this and the bomb. Only this one thing. Nothing else ever happens.

Two things have only ever happened in Nagasaki. Who's worse, the Catholic Church or an atomic bomb? Only Nagasaki can answer that question. Once there, they would open soup kitchens and hospitals that would be open only to converts to show people the never-ending Mercy of Christ letting those who refuse to convert to die of starvation and disease in case that might sound familiar To my co-host here. Yeah, they're doing the Japanese version of taking the soup. Yep Yep, I guess you could consider that, uh, the Catholic church, the Catholics did a first. Yeah. Yeah. Like we have this brilliant idea worked in Ireland.

Well, it hadn't been done in Ireland yet. I know this is more of a test run. Yeah. Actually. Now that I think about it is like, you know, if they had have been smart, they could have like, rather than like some terrible like cabbage soup in Ireland, they could have introduced ramen into Ireland during the famine. Introducing Irish-Japanese fusion restaurant during the famine. Yeah. Some Irish guy goes like made the sucks. Why is such a small bowl of soup for a hundred pounds? I just like, Hey, how like Ireland always comes up in episodes for a

completely unexpected reason. Handshake across the entire world, the Irish, the Japanese fuck the Catholic church. Yeah. Instead of like that weird racist thing about the professor Yakub it's actually like Irish people are the, um, all what's, it's like the weird phrase used by insane people about the aliens who are behind everything. As well as the Irish are actually aliens, like the Irish built the pyramids. I knew it. That fucking picture of the white Pharaoh, except now he's ginger. Most people in Ireland just look like me. I know I've been there.

I've been to all of Ireland now. Yeah, there you go. Very few gingers, I have to say. The stereotypes that were told to me as a young American growing up, not accurate. How dare they? This all was led by a man named Alessandro Valignangno, the head of the Jesuits of the East Indies, which is an official department of the church, which also now included Japan. His career is, let's say, a strange one. He started out as a lawyer, bad start, then got two years in prison for stabbing a woman in the face, even worse.

Jesus. Yeah, also two years in prison for that. Yeah, Christ. Then he got freed early by a friend who happened to be a cardinal, then used that connection to get him to become a priest, and then was sent to Japan. So they got the woman stabbing lawyer in charge of the Japanese Jesuit church. Honestly I'd take the two years. Like it's the 16th century, I do not want to be sent as a missionary to Japan

I mean in two years in a 16th century prison, that's gotta be mostly a death sentence, right? Like you're gonna catch the consumption and die horribly. You're just covered in boobos till the point you look like the bend them That's how from soft games got conceptualized They said the boobo infected woman-stabbing priest in Japan and the very confused Japanese samurai were like, holy shit, what is that? You joke about that? Well, that is literally just the lonesome dung eater from Elden Ring. Hey, we're not here to hate on a man for his hobbies. No, no, Joe, we are not being OK

with corpophilia on this podcast. I'm sorry. Just because Gigi Allen did it, it's not OK. It's weird. It's very bad for your health. I am King shaming. If you are listening to this and you're into corpophilia, I'm sorry. Stop.

It's a bold stance to take. Yes. How dare you drag Gigi Allen's hollow name through the mud and by mud in this situation I mean human shit and heroin. Don't eat your own doo doo. Don't eat any doo doo. I'm sorry. There's so many other nice things to eat.

How did we end up here? I don't know. Whenever I record this podcast, it's like I black out and then I just like wake up like completely nude upstairs. Wake up completely nude, a ring of human shit around your mouth like, Oh no, it happened again. I would just wake up and I'm like Keanu Reeves coming out of the pod in the matrix. See, I don't tell you to be covered in weird liquid goo. You do that on your own and getting goo pilled, goo maxing. I take my skincare very seriously.

Got to put the goo on. I just get a sleeping bag, fill it with Vaseline and sleep in it. Just slither inside. We call it the Tom sack. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a silkworm. My problem is I could visually see this in my head and I hate it. Yeah. Now, this is where we get into some yield racism. Alessandro considered the Japanese spiritually white.

Oh, this is a thing that won't come back up in the 19th century. Sure won't. Now by that, I mean, he believed that the Japanese could be converted into Christianity without violence, like the church had done in many other places. He thought that since their souls were white, they could simply see the true light of the one true faith on their own once they had it explained to them rather than, you know, raping, murdering and burning their way across Japan. Yeah, cause everyone knows that St. Peter in heaven uses the same entry requirements as that one screenshot from family guy.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, Oh, why? Yeah. Okay. Now we're getting into the brown part. No, you're, you're going somewhere else. Doing spiritual race screening at heaven. Like, like a guy at a shitty club. Japanese guy ends up in Chinese heaven. He was like, I just didn't expect it to be Chinese. Oh, the Japanese guy would hate that. Yeah. So Chinese heaven. He saw the normal outreach that the church did of like helping the poor and the sick as not working because of the way the Japanese caste system worked. And he finally kind of got to the point where he understood it. Uh-huh. He discovered that the Japanese nobility and namely the samurai samurai the daimyo the shoguns you name it saw that helping those people was

fundamentally and spiritually below them For example a samurai could kill a peasant if they so much as looked at them seeing a priest Hang out with those people as well as like lepers the hungry all that shit the samurai and their lords didn't want to associate with them they saw them as unclean and below their station and therefore most importantly not worth listening to yeah so Alessandro said fuck the poor the sick and went on to try to convert the samurai and the lords and he did it in A way that he knew they would like like. With little custard tarts? Actually kind of. Fuck!

So he got rid of all the Jesus, the loving, the Christ, all that shit, and just became a conduit for cutting new trade deals between the Japanese government and his own. I mean that's literally just the Catholic Church at this point. Yeah, yeah. I mean Alessandro was just the first guy to do it specifically in Japan. He's not the first guy to do it. There's this thing called the Papal States. I mean in Alessandro was just the first guy to do it specifically in Japan. He's not the first guy to do it. There's this thing called the Papal States. I mean, in Japan he was.

The first Jesuits that were there were doing, I mean, if you cut out all the ugly shit that it entails, good work helping people that nobody else is helping. However, it wasn't doing fuck all to spread soft power in the church or in trade deals. Alessandro looked around, said, this poor dude with boobos has nothing to offer me. Fuck him. And just went to the government. Yeah. It's like I want to be eating that good rice. Yeah. I don't want to be eating millet. Yeah. Nobody wants to eat millet. I was eating millet in Europe.

Why the fuck would I do that? Yeah. Get away from me, broke bitch. I do not care for you. Like, get your money up, you know, before you talk to me, you got to hustle and grind until you get to church mindset. You know, I am a Jesuit priest in Japan. I'm here to convert people, but essentially what I'm going to now do is finned on the samurai. You know, the poor don't have money to give me. They can't be my pay pigs. What about the daimyo? It's hammer. I pay pig. What is taxation if not being a pay pig for the state? Now he was offering trade deals, but not in exchange for anything monetary.

So the samurai and the Lords are like, man, we're making a killing. He's like, yeah, you can get great new trade deals with my government, but you have to let me open more schools and churches. And they're like, fuck yeah, that sounds like a win win for us. We don't have to give you shit. But this is the thing that the Catholic church has used throughout history is like it is that soft power of like the spreading of knowledge, education, caring for the poor. And it essentially tries to position itself as like a parallel state to whatever state apparatus exists in a country. And it's like, we're not going to interfere with your

stuff. We're just going to like take away the hassle of like dealing with all these people. We'll deal with it. Yep. And then once eventually the state that they're kind of growing on, like a barnacle realizes the threat that they pose and the state cracks down on them. The Catholic church could be like, Oh my God, Catholics are being repressed. And then armies invade you. Yeah. It's like goading someone into punching you in the face and then being mad that they punched

you in the face. Yeah. And you call your six friends over to beat the shit out of that one guy. Yeah. Because fundamentally being Catholic is being a pussy. So Alessandro continued to ignore the sick and the poor, just like their own feudal government had. And this worked. And soon the Jesuits were elevated to effectively a parallel privileged class of Japan, converting

lords and samurai of all ranks traveling everywhere with the converted samurai bodyguard. Alessandro hit the nail on the head here because normally everywhere else that they had gone, they had hit pay dirt by converting from the bottom up. In Japan, they converted from the top down. Yeah. It's more so to do obviously with the structure of Japanese social life. Like if you look at something like India, where there is a very strict caste system, like you just a kind of a numbers game working from the bottom up does eventually work to some extent, but because Japan was so insanely rigid and also Japan was like during the warring state period

was everyone was kind of jockeying for power. So by doing it top down, you can convert the like upper echelon of like a particular region and then that will trickle down. But also it will then get you kind of in a position of power against like other states to then do the same as them. Exactly. And that was Alessandro's goal. Get in good with the nobility. The nobility would have trickled down conversions or whatever. Alessandro knows, the samurai know, the nobility know, that no one involved here is true believers. They're using it for trade, power, and specifically firepower and riches. But it doesn't matter.

Eventually he converts the Lord of Nagasaki himself and then he does the thing that Alessandro is truly hoping for. He forces all of his subjects within his domain to convert immediately or be exiled. Then he goes about torching any Shinto stuff he could find and turns it into effectively the Christian headquarters in Japan within only a month. So that's what he was trying to do. Yeah. And like a big reason why I suppose this is going to be two minutes of theology is the reason why Catholicism and Christianity in general is like such a good soft power political

tool like as a political tool for the ruling classes is that like it is based on the fundamental idea of suffering in this life and piety will lead to a rewarding eternal life when you die. So it's like, it helps keep poor people in their place. Yeah, exactly. Which is kind of antithetical to the core tenants of Shintoism as well. That does lead to some conflict later, which we'll talk about as like some fundamental Japanese cultural beliefs run diametrically opposed to Catholicism. And then the missionaries have to

like quickly just like drag goalposts back and try to explain why it works. I mean that's just Catholicism in a nutshell. Yeah, yeah. Then we get to the location of our series, Shimabara, which borders Nagasaki. The lord of the land refused to meet with the Jesuits for months, but after six months of trying he finally gave up and sat down with them. They just wouldn't leave. He soon converted in 1576 and ordered his domain to be converted as well. Then he died, leaving the lands to his underage son.

Now the son's regent hated the Christians and ordered the conversion to be undone. Go back to being Buddhist. But the Jesuits were able to convince the boy as he got older to remain a Christian. Not by reading Bible passages or teaching him the light of God or whatever, but sending a ship full of guns and ammo to his front doorstep free of charge. I was going to say, was it, were they showing him King Baldwin edits from Kingdom of Heaven? It's like, this is, fuck it's sick. Lord Arima, then 13 years old, was baptized shortly thereafter.

He was bribed with a boatload of guns. It was from Watashiwa Mr. Beast. Literally praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, but with a boat. I'm here in Japan to give this young lord loads of guns to become Christian. Other nobles converted because of something even pettier than guns. Do you want to guess what it was? You might be. I feel like if anybody can guess it's you. It's probably food. Nope. They hated their wives. You see, divorce was not uncommon in Japan at the time, and Min could initiate a divorce with a simple letter to his wife saying that he wanted a divorce.

But for nobles, it was different because their marriages were all political. Their divorces had to be approved by their daimyo or the lord of their domain. If you happen to be a daimyo who want a divorce, it had to be approved by the Shogun, the military dictator of Japan. So you can assume that this process did not work that well for them. I mean, to be fair, Catholicism doesn't have a lenient view on divorce either. No, it doesn't. But that's only if you are married in the Catholic Church. The Church said if you're married, but that marriage happened before you're a Christian, that marriage doesn't count because it only counts if you're married in the eyes of a Christian God.

If you convert and you're married to a heathen, well then you were never married at all! Yeah, fucking Japanese Rodney Danger feels like, I'm my bitch wife, I get no respect around here! I'm converting to Catholicism! So a lot of dudes converted and quickly Christian married their side pieces, leaving their now suddenly ex-wives Very confused as to what the fuck just happened. God the dime you're just saying. You ain't fuck Nikki you fuck the old body.

I mean like of course this is what happened right like if you watch the show Shogun you see this happen at the show They show it pretty well Where it's like people scrambling around divorcing their wives of decades because they finally now could get it done because the Shogun would previously sign off on their divorce. By diktat of the horn, you are now free. The rapid conversion of all of these lords from Shimabara, Nagasaki, Amakusa, and all of the forceful conversions of their subjects meant that the church had gone from nothing to technically hundreds of thousands of converts

Forced or otherwise within only a few years Yeah as a show of faith Lord Amakura of Nagasaki Effectively just gave the Nagasaki domain to Alessandro like personally now He gave Nagasaki to him as a show of faith to the church However, Alessandro was now running it as like a church trading cartel without Rome's approval Listen, all I'm gonna say is I think it was a mistake trusting the Iberians, you know Never trust someone from a peninsula. Hey, I'm from a peninsula.

You're from a continent. Michigan is a peninsula. Here we go. It's the fucking mitten thing. I don't care. I do not care about your copperless region. Hey, hey, hey, hey, you shut up, you fucking cold Islander. Who's even from an Island that's not warm?

All right. Fucking cold islander who's even from an island. That's not warm all right us because it made us tough we fucking proliferated using spaces between words Well done a beautiful country fully someone built a roof over it. Fuck you and your squiggle alphabet dickhead Oh, who's the real Catholics just cuz you were in the fucking mountains, eat dirt for hundreds of years. We're not Catholic. We're apostolic. Oh, even worse. It's from before the Catholic Church. Oh, listen, Ethiopians, we were the first Christians.

Who cares? Nobody, that's who. Do you know what? I wish the fucking Mongols had taken the Anatolian plain better and wiped us out. Hey, we got a lot along fine with the Mongols. The Mongols showed up like, pay your taxes. We'll burn everything down.

The Armenians said, yeah, that sounds about fair. We're cool with you guys. They showed up and all the Armenians were still in bed. Hey, hey, hey, who cares if that's true? Yeah, the Armenians learned their lesson from the Mongols and now just on Mars, don't pay their tax. Yeah. Like my family paid tax in like the, to the golden horde. I'm, I'm, I'm done. I'm good for the thousand years, right? Yeah. Yeah. The, listen, the con said like pay me. You won't have to pay it ever again. I'm becoming

a sovereign citizen of Armenia, but only recognize the golden horde as the rightful government in Europe. No, you're not becoming a sovereign citizen, you're becoming a Reichsburger, but in the Caucasus. Nothing has existed since the Golden Horde. That's right. I only respect my Khan. I don't recognize the Prime Minister. It is fetid seat at Yerevan. Yes. Now, please excuse me while I drink my fermented horse milk. God, that would kill me. I'm already lactose intolerant. I feel like that would just finally put me out. Fermented horse milk is what's finally going to end this podcast. Your Patreon money is going to, funding us going to host a live show in a yurt in outer

Mongolia where Joe finally dies. Fund my death. Support the show today. Community Mongolian Sapu is making a lactose intolerant person drink fermented horse milk until they shit themselves to death. IBS stands for I.B. Sapu. So eventually word gets back to Rome about all of Sandro's

illicit church fiefdom them and the Pope tells him you gotta give it back All of Sandra says okay, but then he doesn't what's the Pope gonna do? I'm on the other side of the world Yeah, you're gonna get on a boat you old bitch. Yeah, I doubt you're gonna take your old raggedy has the Japan I dare you come to my hood in Nagasaki I guess I got shooters and samurai in these streets. Yeah, it's like you said I wasn't pushing pee I'm pushing pee pushing powder down my musket. I Pulled up on your block and nobody knew you Obviously all this leads to what a hell of a situation for the Shogun at the time

Toyotomi Hideyoshi the spread of Christianity was causing all kinds of problems within his country, which was still dealing with the not completely overwarring states period. So in 1587 he issues an edict banning the building of any more churches, curbing the never-ending influx of more missionaries, and harshly curtailed what priests were allowed to do if they were allowed to remain. He also then took complete control of Nagasaki back from the church at 1580, so Alessandro controlled this bitch for years. Damn.

And then how bad do you fuck up for the shogun to be like, no no no, I'm not giving it back to the lord, it's mine now, because you fucked up. It's like you can't be trusted with this. We're taking it off you until you're responsible enough. It's like giving a 16 year old wine at dinner. He was fine with it for a while because as you can imagine, having a massive open law free trading port did benefit Japan to some extent until it didn't. Right? Yes. You only could have Japanese Macau open for so long. Yeah, we tried to do the feudal era Japan and Camp Wetland didn't work out.

You know, at the time, despite the Jesuit success outside of their core believers, overwhelmingly Japanese people hated and feared them. For example, it was not unheard of for people to believe the Eucharist was actually a form of cannibalism. And not that it was symbolically a form of cannibalism, but they were literally drinking blood and eating flesh. No, no, no, no, think about it, that is also the attitude that the Anabaptists had. So like the Anabaptist rebellion, the Japanese people handshake against Catholicism. I hate when I get the Eucharist that true transubstantiation become Jesus's body, but it's actually his ass. I hate eating Jesus's holy ass.

Hey, he's sacrificed for it's actually his ass. I hate eating Jesus's holy ass. Hey, he's sacrificed for you to eat that ass. Eating ass at mass. The ass eating mass. Now we're in our respect of the Portuguese speed hole. That's a different speed hole. It must be very difficult to try and eat ass through a glory hole. You have a long tongue or a long ass? Why is a long ass? It's kind of probiscus I don't know. How is that the most disgusting thing said on this episode? And to the surprise of everyone it was me that said it. Also the Japanese didn't understand the fire and brimstone and the end times and all the dead walking the earth because traditionally the Japanese cremated their dead so they're like well we already defeated that problem I don't see the issue.

They can't walk the earth we burned them eat shit pope 1-0. Then there was another problem namely politics. Japanese politics but also the politics of the church and the missionaries themselves. Portuguese missionaries may have been the first to show up, but they were by far not the only ones in town anymore. The Italians and the Spanish have shown up too, bringing their own politics in the guise of the church with them. And soon the three factions had their own Japanese followers who all hated one another,

even though Spain and Portugal were technically unified at the time. It did not matter. They brought their own politics wrapped up in faith and then forced it upon the Japanese. Yeah. It's like multiple warring stag dudes like getting into battle on the fucking in the red light district in Amsterdam. That's true because the Dutch are there too. And of course they're watching not getting involved. They're like, these guys are fucking stupid.

Yeah. You know, it's a, it's very interesting. We we've arrived in Japan. We've learned this new art of Dutch kabuki from the lovely Japanese people. But it seems that there's all these European priests arguing around the place. Actually, yesterday I learned about I was on a podcast of a friend's and was taught about the history of Santa. Oh, yeah. And when we got to Svartepete. Oh yeah. Yeah. A good old Sinterklaas. Yeah. It's very hard to translate

Sinterklaas and Svartepete to the Japanese. We had to show them. However, these anti-Christian edicts only spread so far to places that they were easy enough for the Shoguns agents and administrators to get to. Amakusa and Shimabara were hard to travel to and therefore not easy for the Shogun to enforce any kind of real order. So that is where Alessandra went to continue his work, waiting for this whole edict thing to pass. Then the Tokugawa government crucified a couple people in Nagasaki, making him realize that

he might be in for a longer wait than he originally thought. Yeah, crucifixion is a great deterrent. Now the Shogun found himself with more than a few Christian daimyas. He had to think of a way to get rid of them without causing another civil war, as the last one had just ended. He also wanted to expand Japan's power, challenging the domination of not only the Chinese, but also the encroaching efforts of the Europeans, whose conquest Tokugawa kept hearing about, which was making him kind of nervous. There was also another problem

he wanted to fix. The Warring States period was now over. He had thousands upon thousands of board-train killers sitting around Japan, which is never really a recipe for success for any country. Yeah. That's how you just get Fort Bragg. Yeah. Yeah. How you get rampant drug trafficking, people trafficking. I think it was also the Fort Bragg Twitter account that was thirst posting at one point. Oh, that just reminds me. I think it's Michael McGraw. He's a politician in Ireland, very famously once got caught liking a Facebook page called MILF of the day. I can't hate him for that specific thing. Yeah. I look at I'm at an age now where MILFs are just

my peers. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to the MILFs out there. We're big in the MILF community. So the Shogun did what every Japanese dictator does at some point. He decided to invade Korea. Oh, why, why, why do the Japanese love invading Korea? It's cursed by being close by. Uh, yeah. Also where a lot of Japan, mainland Japanese people originally come from. Well, that's a controversial opinion, but it's true. Though he made sure to draw his armies heavily from converted regions, making sure that the Christians he hated would be at the tip of the spear. Tokugawa's invasion would, of course,

fail. We'll eventually do a series on it at some point. But he did succeed in getting a lot of his own Christian Samurai and Lords killed and we love a guy who can turn an L into a W. Tokugawa Hideyoshi himself would eventually die, which was good news for the Christians because they assumed whoever took over Dex wouldn't hate them so much. Another good sign for them was that two of the five regents now in control of Japan were Christian, so they figured things can only get better from here. And slowly things did improve for them, if anything other than officially. The edict still stood, but individually lords began to loosen restrictions over Christians

even if they weren't Christians themselves, though others kept the edict fully in place and enforced. Christians in these edict domains, so to speak, were banished, generally fleeing to Amakusa, Shimabara, or Nagasaki. The regions left in control of Japan after the death of the Shogun collapsed into a pile of civil wars once again. Christian lords ended up on either side of the civil war, as did their Christian subjects and soldiers.

The Tokugawa eventually won again at the Battle of Sekigahara and Osaka Castle, once again unifying Japan after years of warfare. Tokugawa Ieyasu became Shogun, and the rise of Christianity solidly hit a wall in Japan. We've talked before about his rigid administration that he wanted to enforce on Japan to bring an end to the endless feedback of war and infighting. And he did that through an iron fist effectively controlling his daimyo and lords with an iron fist, knowing it would kind of sort of trickle down onto his subjects. He wouldn't allow the daimyo to do shit without his approval, including changing the religion,

which was made much harder when he outright banned Christianity. Many of the Christian lords that had been around before the last war were now gone, replaced by Iyasumin, and the ones who were on his side and had converted silently just kind of went back to Shintoism so as not to draw the new shogun's attention and pretended they never had a Jesus phase at all. Most of their subjects quickly followed suit because they had been forcibly converted in the first place and had never been true believers and practiced Shintoism on the down-low on the side.

In the Christian heartland of Japan, Nagasaki, Amakusa, and Shimabara, they all had their lords and holdings moved around. New loyal anti-Christian lords are put in place, and they commence to the forced reversion to Shintoism. Christian books were banned and burned, anyone who had converted was brought from the Shogun's men to recant, as Christianity was now foreign, foreigners were all spies, and both of those things were banned. Recanting was the only way to show that you were not a heathen spy for the foreigners. Um, actually a really good depiction of this is the Steven Spielberg movie Silence. Yeah.

Yeah. It's really, really good. And one of the ways to show you're a true believer in Shintoism was to walk on top of a metal like framed depiction of a saint. If someone refused, you're given the sword treatment. If you walked across the cut of the saint, then obviously you were not a believer. And somewhat hilariously, the Japanese did not quite understand Christianity well enough for this band to work. For example, the Protestant Dutch who were in Japan had no issue walking over

the depiction of the saints because they didn't believe in them. Idolatry, everybody. Iconography. It's, you know, it's not big with the Protestants. The Japanese had no conception of the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, and therefore the Dutch were allowed to stay and continue trading in Japan in one specific place. They're like, well, you want me to walk over a picture of place. They're like, what you want me to walk over a picture of St. Michael? Yeah, fuck man, I'll tap dance across that shit. I don't care. That might as well be a picture of like the queen. Never trust a furtive Dutchman.

These weren't the first anti-Christian edicts, but they were certainly the most enduring as the Tokugawa Shogunate with last hundreds of years. But at the time, the Christians didn't know that, thinking it was just another passing phase put in place by a man that would eventually fall out of favor and die after another civil war, and he would be replaced by someone else. But of course, that wouldn't happen. Ieyasu retired and his son Hidetada took over, and the edict remained in place, and would get in fact even harsher. In 1614, Hidetada, or more than likely, Ieyasu acting through Hidetada, issued another edict. All missionaries must leave, regardless of where they are from, and any mixed-race children

they had while they were in Japan had to go with them. All foreigners were officially banished, other than the Dutch, who were allowed to stay because they passed the Saint skank stepping test To stepping on a picture of Jesus and it was in effect a purging of specifically Catholics and anyone connected to them But of course the Christian faith continued underground between commoner, samurai, and even nobility alike. Most said that they were loyal Shintoists.

They went to a shrine and actually had to get a piece of paperwork filled out by the monk there to show the Lord proving their faith in the old ways, but would continue to practice their real faith in secret, either alone or in small groups. Other Christians loudly expressed their faith, daring the shog alone or in small groups. Other Christians loudly expressed their faith, daring the shogun's men to cut them down, because if they did, they would face judgment and hellfire from the Lord on high. They were cut down and in fact did not face hellfire from the Lord on high. There were also underground missionaries, but not the crooked businessmen like Alessandro to spread the soft power of

the church or state, but rather the actual true believers. The Shogun in turn constantly searched for them. Believers, Japanese and foreign alike were caught all the time, given one last chance to recant their belief, and if they didn't, they were mutilated and killed. This only galvanized the believers, which of course their numbers were shrinking, but the ones that believed it only made their faith stronger. Because all of these people getting caught were now martyrs. This in turn freaked the shogun out due to the strength of their convictions.

Yeah, you know, an entire religion based on martyrdom, it's not a good idea to start killing them. Yeah. He was like, wait, I've cut their ears off. I've cut their nose off. I've boiled them. How could they still believe in this shit? Because he was kind of used to dealing with priests who were only into business. Yeah. The business priest. Hey yo, it's me, the business priest. You want to do some trade some trade? He wasn't used to dealing with people who actually believed in anything. With all this going on, we have to jump back to Shimabara, now under the control of Matsukura Shigemasa, who was put in charge by the Shogun to get the province in order.

Shimabara was known as a hotbed of Christianity. It was known as a safe haven for mixed-race kids of mercenaries and merchants, and probably more important than anything else, it was desperately poor and had been ever since a bunch of its finest warriors and therefore its most important administrators were sent out to die in Korea. Not to mention the other constant wars, which always of course weigh much more heavily on the common man than anybody else. Then in the aftermath of the unification and peace, taxes skyrocketed. Taxes in this case were levied on the Lord Matsukura in the form of rice or koku, and a Lord's prestige was based on how much koku he could produce as that koku was measured

in how many soldiers he could provide the shogun during a time of war. At first undercover Christians in Shimabara were surprised to find Matsukuro was not taking the time out of his day to oppress them. He let them live pretty much openly. Unfortunately this is because it didn't matter what their faith was when he was putting all of his peasants in the field to work them to near death to generate Koku. A Dutch merchant named Nicholas Koukbaker in Hirado joked that Christians lost the right

to die for their faith and instead were treated the same as everyone else, badly. His goal was not to only meet, but exceed the government's mandated koku limit for his area because that would promote him in the eyes of the shogun, while also turning his domain into the crown of the shogunate rather than a deeply impoverished backwater that nobody cared about. And what better way to do that than to generate a massive amount of koku and build a giant sick brand new castle. And I mean huge it was the biggest castle Shimabara had ever seen so big that they had to

cannibalize all of the other stone fortifications in Shimabara to build the fucking thing fucking hell and even then they ran out of stone and just began dismantling people's houses that use stone. I would be so pissed off. You're like sitting in bed and it's like, all right, I got to get up. I got to go work in the fucking fields. And it's like, what, what's that sound? And you just see like a soldier's face come through your wall because he's taken a stone out. Sorry, I'll be needing this. Of course you're going to be like, yeah, I'm going to join the insane Christian revolution. Yeah. Like I used to have a nice stowed wall. Now I have a three walled house. Thanks Lord Amacusa. You did.

Yeah. But you know what has four walls? The house of the Lord. That's right. Hey, Jesus was a carpenter. Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't a stone worker, though. No. Get to go further down the Jesus family line to find the stone carver. Yeah, Jesus was all about using, you know, sustainable eco-friendly materials. He was, you know, very, very environmentally conscious. Yeah, yeah. Green Jesus.

Yeah, green green party. Of course, it ended up being so big that the original costs spiraled wildly out of control, causing him to squeeze people for even more money, and then slash the pay for the people actually building the thing. The Shimabara Mega Castle became such a thing in Japan that the Shogun himself asked Matsukura, uh, don't you think it's a little too much? Because he kept saying, remember, we don't have wars anymore. Like what is the, why are you building this? Yeah. And then, you know, Matsukura like, ah, hey, it's my castle.

I already like, look, I already disassembled half my town to build it. You got to let me finish. Yeah. Like what's worse than a half built castle? Like how am I supposed to live in that? That's not habitable. I know your house only has three walls now, but like, have you ever thought about me? Have you ever thought about me? Your, your nobility landlord? Yeah. It's just like the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is just like entirely purple and it's, I need a castle. The process of building this monster required so much manpower that Shimabara's population multiplied several times over in order to fit all of the people inside that were working on it.

When it was finally completed, it was a towering piece of shit. That's because it cost so much money that everyone in the city would bankrupt, including Matsukura, requiring the builders to start cutting corners to the extent that some walls were collapsing before it was even complete. Yeah. It was like, yes, the castle was very important to his mental health. My mental health castle. Yeah. It's my mental health castle. Like it's really important for my self-esteem and for, you know, my mental health and my performance as a Lord is really, really dependent on how

I'm feeling. And now I hadn't invented CBT yet, so I needed to mindset Daimio. No, I had to engage in FHC and a lot of people didn't really agree with the methods, but quite frankly, I really, really engaged with and benefited, but quite frankly, I, you know, really, really engaged with and benefited from the process of fucking huge castle. It's, it's a great lesson. And if you pay your workers absolute shit and mistreat them, you get a pile of shit in response. Why are you attacking me for giving myself a little treat for my mental health? Yes, the little treat was a giant castle that completely bankrupted us and is falling apart,

but I don't you are really undermining its importance to me. Have you considered that I am in fact a small bean and your words hurt me? Yes. Then he raised taxes again, framing it as the people should be paying dues on the castle because it protects them. Also because he needed to now pay for repairs at his castle that was already falling apart. Ironically this led Matsukura to allow even more people that were banned in Japan into his province so he could squeeze them for tax revenue and bribes rather than hunting

them down per the shogun's orders. He instead set his personal army not on crushing Christians but searching for tax evaders. This turned into something of a problem because when Matsukura traveled to Edo to tell the shogun, good news, the castle is done, the glory of the shogunate has in fact reached shimabara the shogun did not give a single fuck about the castle because most importantly quote that is not your job he reminded him your job was to root out christians and now everyone keeps telling me shimabara is lousy with fucking christians what are you doing over there? I don't give a shit about the castle In fact Christians built your castle. You don't think I have spies there. Yeah Christians bit my castle

Jesus bit my hot rod. It's like it's fucking you know, we'll be sticks all the way down Yeah The Shogun told him you need to get rid of all of these fucking people or I'm going to send you somewhere else Meaning he would lose his sick new castle before he even moved into it. So Matsukura got fucking furious. He thought the castle would elevate him, and now he was on the shit list with his boss. His province is poor as fuck, his castle's falling apart, he's having a bad time. So he goes back home and turns on the Christians who had just been working for him, fully enforcing the crackdown. He's exactly the same type of hood rich as you described the guy

whose house was falling apart, but had a nice car in Detroit. Exactly. He is samurai hood rich. He sent so many people to get tortured, to recant their beliefs to his torturers, that they got overworked and tired. So they just started executing everyone that they brought him. It's like, man, I am not ripping off anyone else's fingernails. I got to get home by five today. Just kill them. I know like my house only has three walls. I have to make dinner, you know, I'm kind of stressed because our family is starving. I don't really care about executing Christians. I'm doing it because it's my job, but the

passion isn't really there anymore. You know, back in the day, we used to love killing Christians. I took a lot of pride in my work, you know, my blades were always sharp. My pliers were always like well torqued for pulling off fingernails. Yeah. Now you've been doing it so long. You got like tennis elbow from, from cutting off so many heads, you know? Like the passion isn't there anymore. You know, I just, I, you know, I want to go back to the old days where we really cared about our work because you cared about us unionize your torturers. Yeah. Yeah. What followed was a string of tortures, executions and face brandings, which now people just

pay for. I've seen illustrations of that from the period. It's pretty fucking gruesome. Yeah, it's nasty. Nasty. But like before, this did nothing to kill Christian belief. In fact, it created more martyrs, made them more fanatical in their belief and drove them underground.

Then Matsukura got very, very sick and decided to go to the Obama hot springs. Obama is a place in Japan, not the former president, but let me be hot. Let me be clear. It's, it's very important that he addresses his mental health in the hot spring and his castle is fixed. He is under a lot of pressure and he is a great, great man. We promise we will bring investment to the people of Shimabara and we will give tax relief for the first Lord who opens a business in a underprivileged neighborhood. As long as he employs poor people,

we are relocating our drone pilot program from Fort Hood to Chimibara. We're bringing local jobs to local people and we're very excited about these opportunities and diplomacy with Japan. I'm gonna create a conspiracy theory that not like the super racist one that President Obama Obama's actually Japanese! Yes, he's from Obama Japan. Yes, he's from Obama, Japan. Yeah. So funny thing about hot springs, anybody who's been around hot springs, like I've never been to like Obama, but I've been to like Iceland and there's some hot

springs you cannot go into because they were way, way too hot. Yeah. He jumps in one of those and dies. He just crawls into a boiling hot hot spring and turns himself into soup dying in a horrible horrible pain. That has to be probably the dumbest way anyone has ever died on this show. No, no it isn't. It's fucking up there man. It's up there because everyone knew that's one of the things that led to confusion in his court and even in the Shogunate

It was like how did he not know which one not to go into? We all know what one not to go into there's normally like signs and stuff Yeah, and this led to like the Christians that had been oppressed by him saying like it was punishment from God Because like of course any normal person would be fine people go those hot springs all the time our Lord goes there it gets turned into fucking ramen that had to be a sign from God oh human ramen oh he was replaced by his 27 year old son Matsukura Shigetsugu who inherited a massive falling apart castle at a pile of debt.

His domain was mostly in ruins because of his father. His father had taxed people into hunger and then a horrible streak of weather hit, ruining crops, which was made worse by the fact that the standing tax rate of 60% of all crops grown in the domain was not cut. In fact, Shigesugu rose the tax rate again after the bad harvest. Then he rose the tax rate again because a ship carrying crops to a different place in Japan sank or a crash was lost at sea. He's like, oh, we have to make up for the deficit.

Meanwhile, all of his farmers like, bitch, all we have is deficit. I don't even have shoes. You took my wall. Like you took my wall. You've taken my food. You've taken my fingernails. I don't know what else you want me to give you. You won't even let us eat the soup that the last lord got turned into The forbidden soup we don't have the Christian soup anymore We don't have you know the daimyo soup like what the fuck am I supposed to am I supposed to eat dirt? The dirt is also taxed. Yeah Gotta pay the dirt time by the 1630s all of this was coming to a head. People were starving, taxes continued to go

up, and their new lord was completely inexperienced. He was very much unlike his father, who, when faced by angry peasants, would simply start hacking them to pieces until they calmed back down. Yeah. But Shigetsugu wasn't quite sure what to do. This led things to simmer, and before long, it would coalesce into what would become known as the Shimabara Rebellion. And that is where we'll pick up next time on part two.

I'm excited. This one takes a lot of weird twists and turns. I don't think anybody's gonna see it coming. I do think, however, it's the last time human soup will come up. Yeah. Take that for a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know how you feel about human soup at home listener. Like, you know, between the boxers and Hong Christ and these guys, you know, the concept of Kung Fu Catholics like isn't that strange, but the fact has happened more than once is you had the two doses of the Kung Fu Catholics. Well, I mean, it's hard to say that. Less of the boxers.

Well, like the boxers certainly. I mean, that's part of their reputation. I don't know if you want to consider Hong Christ Catholicism exactly. Christianity. Like you got the papal Kung Fuist, you got the Christian Kung Fuist, and now you're going to get the Catholic Samurai. Yeah. I would watch that UFC event.

Fuist and now you're gonna get the Catholic samurai. Yeah. I would watch that UFC event. I will say if I'm going to rank them here at the end of part one, Taiping rebellion by far the most insane of all three of these. The boxers in the middle. I believe this Shimabara are the most rational of the three. But if I'm going to rank all of the religious rebellions you had, the Anabaptists are solidly in second place. I put them ahead of the boxers. Yeah. What is the difference between getting punched in the face and punched in the day? I'd rather get punched in the face. Yeah. I could answer that a second. There's going to be a lot of mysticism that comes up, but there's also a lot of practicality that comes up with it, which is very, very similar to the rest of the religious spiritual based rebellions.

Taiping the religion played a much bigger aspect of all of it, but then you have all of the other things under that that push normal people into believing deeply weird things. That's the unifying theory of fuck that guy that we talk about all the time that comes into play more than any other rebellions in my opinion in this series than Shimabara. We talked about Miyamoto Musashi a while back and we talked about how he got knocked off of his horse by a stone throwing Christian rebel. That's during the series. But that is the Shimabara rebellion. Part one. Tom, you have a different podcast. Plug that other podcast.

Beneath Skin, show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and glue factory. A show about with no theme, nothing but riffs, which I am as soon as we get off this call, have to set up the cameras for. This is the only show that I host. Thank you for listening to it. If you like it, consider supporting us on Patreon. You get every episode early, a pile of bonus episodes, bonus series, both audio, video, get ebooks, audiobooks. You get

a bowl of the forbidden human soup. Drink the forbidden soup. Until next time, drink the forbidden soup with your butt promiscuous.