Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 345 - The Shimabara Rebellion: Part 2

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

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and the link will also Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom. We've come to you, the local Japanese farmer of Shimabara, with a business opportunity. We've heard that your crops have failed and the shitty tax samurai keeps coming around and collecting rice that they're due, but you just don't have it. So what if we offered you the rice you need to stop from getting a sword through the face today, and you simply pay us back next month at the low rate of triple the amount of rice we gave you? So, uh, Tom, how are you feeling about a samurai rice payday loan entrepreneurs?

Oh, samurai loan sharks. I'm not really that in favor of it. I think, especially because, you know, rice is a consumable good. It's yes, it's a commerce item, but you kind of need it to survive when it is, it forms the vast majority of your carbohydrate diet. What if we repackage it rice, but spelled with a Y? Oh, Joe, don't, don't do that. No, you've spoken something into existence that really shouldn't. This is like, ah, this is like Huell. This is gonna be like some guy who's like, try rice today, and it's just like eating cream of wheat or cream of rice. Introducing RiceCoin. I feel like we've invented a guy that could exist in Samurai Champloo

if it was made today. No, this is just Rich Piana if he had survived. How dare you? Rich Piana would never do a Rice Payday Loan scam. He would at least use Trend. He would do Rice Coin, like just the Rich Piana shit coin is just Rice Coin. Rich Piana would definitely be into crypto if he was still alive. Oh, I know, I know. It's the first and only crypto that causes your natural testosterone rate to plummet.

My rice coin isn't doing so well due to all of the taxing of my rice coin. Yeah, yeah. Then again, rice coin does sound like something like a kind of right wing former military grifter would just call like the yen. Hmm, true, true. I hate the idea of the Shogunate going woke and taxing my rice coin. The Shogun crypto exchange.

So when we left you last time, the Shimabara region of Japan was badly mismanaged, crushed under taxes for the sake of a giant shitty castle and had its Christian population chased underground in a persecution so thorough that the local torturers nearly unionized out of exhaustion. I mean, were they Irish? Not this time. I do have to say I could not find any Irish people that pop up in this story. Some Dutch people, but we'll get there. We already talked about one of them in part one, he's around for this entire story, but no Irish samurai that I could find. And Shimabara is teetering on the brink of outright revolt.

And the only thing missing was a leader. Enter 15 year old Jerome Amakusa. Oh no, not another child warlord. Yeah, I will say 15 in Japan at the time isn't necessarily a child. This is like the what the fuck in 16th century. I don't know what I was doing when I was 15. I was certainly not leading a samurai rebellion in the suburbs of Detroit. If Detroit PD is asking.

You were 15, you were doing crimes, playing Final Fantasy 7 and jerking it. That is also accurate. Look, who's to say Jerome wouldn't be doing the same thing if he had Final Fantasy 7 available to him? Like, Final Fantasy 7 would have saved so many lives back in the day. It's like, look, Jerome, you're getting a bit uppity. Take the sticks, you know? Yeah, I'm straight jerking it and by by it I mean my shogunate.

Jorking my shogun? I'm jorking my shogun to a Shimabara. I can start to see why some people don't like us, Tom. I'm just gonna put it out there. Yeah, you can really see that we are all technically on Christmas leave right now. I am at home in Ireland, Joe is back in the box room. Jerome of course is Jerome's accepted Christian name. Jerome was born to a low ranking Catholic family and his father, Peter, also obviously his Christian name, was heavily involved in the spreading of faith, long after it had been outright illegal. He wasn't a priest, nor did he have any formal education in Catholicism outside of some books and some sermons given

to him by a Portuguese guy years before. Peter was also a samurai, but not of any important standing. And it's for that reason he drew the ire of a local lord for not allowing his son, Jerome, to become the lord's sandal bearer. Now that sounds kind of weird, some dude to carry your shoes around, but it's actually a very key role in a samurai's traditional upbringing. However, if you remember back to our Musashi episode, there's a certain kind of relationship that happens between a young boy samurai and an older one. Oh no.

Pedophilia mostly. Oh no. And this was not a secret. It was an open way of a samurai's life. However, Peter did not want his son to enter into that relationship because the Catholic Church. It was considered a sin. And yes, I understand the irony of that statement as we sit here in 2025, but like, I am leaning back in my chair and yeah, the Catholics being against nonsense, you know, who, who are the most people, who is the group of people that are most against noncing in history?

It's a Catholic church. I mean, I think the best way to look at this is they're against the specific samurai version of pedophilia. Yeah. The way to think about it is they were against it because it was foreign to them and anything foreign must be changed. Hence, you know, Catholic and Christian names, the destruction. It was like, think about it any way you want,

but it's a form of Assimilation to a quote-unquote Catholic culture. Yeah, and I'm not defending it But that's the way the Catholic Church looked at it because the Catholic Church times Of course doing shit like this all over the fucking place Now Peter was doomed to never climb Japan's social ladder because of this He pissed off one too many people because he wouldn't let his son enter into those relationships, therefore breaking the traditional bonds of Samurai-dom. He became very close with an undercover Catholic priest named Father Porradinho, who was organizing the Catholic underground within his region.

And soon Peter was delivering sermons with him in a time where getting caught doing so was a death sentence. And it's not like Peter's fellow samurai didn't know he was a Christian, which is also going to make sure he never climbs that social ladder. It wasn't just the Jerome thing. It was a combination of the two. As a result, the family was constantly on the run for their lives, seeing death, destruction and torture everywhere they went and in a lot of times, happening to people they knew quite closely. And Jerome was in the middle of all of this, escaping death so many times,

his father began to believe he was some kind of celestial protected messenger of God. And in Japanese, the term he used was, one of the chosen few, or an apostle. Mmm... Oooh, we're doing apostolic stuff now. Welcome to the Armenian church, Jerome! Oh, yeah. Hahaha! Oh... Oh, God, Saint Jerome.

Soon, Jerome joined his father in his preaching. The way that this is kind of described to me, it kind of feels like tent revivals, but like really, really, really covert ones. Obviously they couldn't do it out in the open. This is happening in like sake storage basements and shit. But like this happened like say something that's supposed to bring out a context. I know this happened in Ireland as well during like the penal laws and the colonisation of Ireland is like you had like essentially secret mass rocks and stuff like that where you can go into a forest and go hear a priest talk about God.

It's not uncommon for a lot of places where a Christian or a sect of Christianity underground existed certain hand signals, symbols, things to show one another, other than just like wearing a crucifix because then that crucifix will be removed along with your head, you know? And the Christian underground flocked to him. Peter would give sermons of fire and brimstone while Jerome pulled off what amounted to party tricks, like training a bird to come down and land on his finger, at which point the bird would lay an egg on command. Jiroma then crack open that egg, and inside would not be a yoke, but instead a sermon wound into a tight scroll. Meaning, yes, this

kid or his father was jamming fake eggs up a bird's ass to impress Japanese Catholics. It is kind of just like gachapon if you think about it. We're doing religious gachapon, you just like crank the like bird's wing and it just like pushes out an egg with a sermon on it. Shout out to Jerome and Peter for inventing the world's first slot machine. Hitting the jackpot and a whole Bible comes out. Followers also said Jerome always had this intense look on his face, and piercing eyes, which is something that was similar to, if you remember, Hong Christ.

He had a way of looking at you, that would just, like, entrance you. He was also able to recite the entire Bible from memory. Which is impressive, because at the time the Bible was not really written in Japanese. It was written in Portuguese or Latin and Jerome could read both of them. So and one of the other things that he did so other Japanese people could read was translate it. Some translations into Japanese had been done already, but there were more like passages

from the Bible rather than the entire thing. His followers also told stories, of course, of miracles. They witnessed Drom do things such as floating, curing the sick and changing the weather. Oh, no, no, I'm getting shades of the boxers now. They believe he can fly. I didn't see over any kind of overwhelming belief that drum could just like Goku his way through the clouds. But this is, this is a question I have is like, when does levitation become flying? That's a good question. Like, are you just like hovering in a static position?

I feel like, once you can move around and gain altitude, that's flying. Maybe he had a nimbus, maybe she's just young Goku. Superposition, like a Christians, they're not doing like, they're not necessarily like flying, but they're doing instant transmission. So they're like teleporting. Actually, I will say hold that thought because that'd be really, really useful later on in this series. It's transmission your way out of starvation siege. You guys have fun with this. Bye. I hate when I accidentally foreshadow something. Now, if you remember back again to the Taiping rebellion, if you're preaching the end times, which Jerome and his father were doing for a common person of the day, current events were proving your sermons correct. Things were

day. Current events were proving your sermons correct. Things were not going great in Japan, specifically in this region. Crops were failing. Edo got obliterated by an earthquake. A typhoon hit the north. There was a drought, followed by flooding. There is a huge volcanic eruption followed by a solar eclipse. All within a few months of one another. As we've said before when we talk about these religiously tinged rebellions, the end looked very fucking nigh by 1637. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even amongst the non-Christians, the Buddhists or Shinto practitioners, all of these signs were at minimum really bad fucking omens.

Oh, fuuuuuuck. While lapsed Christians, those that were forced to convert or revert one way or another, became religious again, saying it was clear that the persecution that the Shogun was unfurling across the country had pissed off God so much he was punishing them for it. Meanwhile, for the completely unreligious and entirely practical, all this made their already very hard lives suck even worse. More crop failures, more taxes, and natural disasters joined forces to royally fuck over

the common Japanese peasant populations of Shimabara and Amakusa, regardless of whatever it was that they worshipped. We don't have a lot of information about this early stage of what would become known as the Shimabara Rebellion. One event in a small Christian gathering in a town called Arima, we do get something of a glimpse of what these early stages looked like. Word of this Christian gathering got back to the local administration, who of course arrested them because being Christian and practicing Christianity was explicitly illegal at the time. All of them, men, women and children, were arrested.

They're all brought back to Shimabara Castle and they were executed. And this seemed to be piled on top of all of the other problems that we've already talked about. Not to mention for the Christian believers, again, they have more martyrs. For the non-Christian believers, it's just another sign of the Shimabara oppression coming from this gigantic fuck you castle. They had their town literally stripped of stone in order to build my house. It has three walls. I'm starving. But the castle's there.

Yeah. I mean, the castle's there. It seems to be falling apart, but it's there. This seemed to be the final straw as locals got furious and ambushed one of the local cops and lynched him in another town to the south. A man was chanting to a Christian painting of a saint when cops showed up to tear it down. Again, the locals jumped him and beat him to death. And we don't really know if the people who did that were Christian believers.

It seems to be a mix of the two. And the reason for that is, well, we'll get to it. While this was going on, men called old farmers were protesting their treatment and refusing to pay their ever-increasing taxes to the lord Matsukura. Now the term old farmer does not fully explain what these men were. They were old, about you know in their 50s and 60s, but they were war veterans of Korea and the last civil war. Some were commoners, but many were samurai, and they still carried their swords. And in the middle of all of this, and we don't really know why, was Jerome. He joined the protest and began preaching the word of God to them. And there's no evidence that these old farmers were overwhelmingly Christian or even gave

a single fuck about the Bible. Their arguments were all of earthly complaints, but they were fine with him and his followers showing up to complain, too. So it's another example of the unifying theory of fuck that guy. Yeah. So when Jerome was told to shut up by the local cops, the farmers rioted. And this is where Matsukura began to panic. He knew word of this unrest would eventually get back to the Shogun

and make him look like shit. Especially if the Shogun heard about why people happen to be so mad at him. Namely his mismanagement of his domain. They're so mad that I launched shitcoin and did a rugpull on everyone. He essentially did do a rugpull. He's fucking up the rice coin. But the rugpull, this castle is falling apart and it hasn't improved your lives at all. You'll find Mike, my castle is quite fungible because it's falling apart. Yeah.

Yeah. So Matsukura did something that kind of outlines most of this protest as it's written throughout history until some kind of modern rest-studies of it. And that is, he blamed everything on Christians. Oh, I don't think this is a really smart move because if there's one group of people that love to turn their persecution into rebellion, it's Christians. Yeah, and if you put yourself in Motsukura's shoes, it makes sense. He doesn't want to explain, you know, Mr. Shogun, everybody's pissed at me because I'm killing them with my mismanagement. It was those goddamn Jesus lovers, you know?

No reason to look too hard at all the root things that I have caused and also my father. Then in Amakusa, a tax collector went to a local farm demanding that this farmer pay his taxes, because they were late. He was missing 30 bags of rice from his tax total. And then the tax collector decided, until the tax is paid, the farmer's pregnant daughter-in-law would be locked into what was known as a wet jail. Oh no. Jail is bad enough, but like, even the phrase, wet jail... It sounds awful. And it actually is. So a wet jail, in Japan at the time, was a cage in the river.

And it was put there as like a time-based punishment, because obviously, rivers rise and fall. You better pay me, or do x, y, Y or Z before the river begins to rise. Otherwise you'll die. Also, not to mention it's the sixteen hundreds just sitting in the river for a really long time is pretty fucking hazardous to your health. Yeah. Also remember she's pregnant.

Yeah. Very pregnant, like nine months pregnant. The man begged for her to be allowed out because the water was up to her waist Mm-hmm let her out until she gives birth and put someone else in and I will pay my taxes The taxman refused she gave birth six days later while still in the cage and she and the child died However, this farmer was a samurai war veteran. He got on a horse, rallied up his local old war buddies, and demanded vengeance.

Soon, an army of 750 to 60 year old samurai surrounded the tax man's house and set it on fire, killing him and his entire family. Matsukura again was quick to blame this on the Christians, but none of these men were Christian at all. And soon officials from Shimabara Castle were getting ambushed and attacked throughout the domain, if they dared leave its walls. At the time Matsukura was away in Edo and he gave command of this response to this growing insurrection to a guy named Akimoto Shinbei, who was kind of worried about doing anything about it at first. He sat around,

not sure if he should kill more Christians or punish the people who are not paying their taxes. Meanwhile, more and more pissed-off samurai and veteran soldiers turned farmers, grabbed weapons, and began to gather in groups. In the middle of all this still was Jerome. Due to his travelling sermons he did with his dad, he knew a lot of people in Amakusa and Shimabara, Christian or otherwise. And soon they were talking to one another and organizing, pooling their weapons and meager food together.

Then they were joined by disenfranchised Ronan from the countryside. Oh, here, no, this is where it escalates, it's like, oh yeah, disgruntled, wandering samurai. And most of them, I mean, in the popular conception of Ronin, we simply think of a samurai with no lord. Most of the time, they're glorified bandits. I mean, they're cold-blooded murderers who rape and rob their way through the Japanese countryside. And they pile in because they had nothing better to do. So why not? It's like, yeah, I don't have any like, like sanctioned pillaging to do. You know, the

the Lord isn't supporting my pillaging efforts anymore. My rice coin is valueless. Like I guess I'll join you guys. Just need something to do. Yeah. I feel like I could steal a lot of stuff if I do it under your banner next. Yeah, there's so much stone just falling off that castle. It doesn't have copper wire for me to steal yet, but I feel like it could rip out a lot of iron. Yeah, actually yeah, that's what the samurai version of like ripping the copper out of the walls is. It's just like I'm gonna steal as much iron as I can. I got a pig iron smelter at the back of my shack. Some very very genius running stuffing to Tommy Matt's down his pants as he robs it. I could sell at least down the road motherfucker. Yeah.

Now the non-Christians must have been very confused by the followers of Jerome who were beginning to treat him as some kind of magical power wielding prophet. Remember his own father believed him to be possibly an apostle, and he was there to guide them through the end times. One of the books I use as a source for this, I cited in the first episode, Christ Samurai, the true story of the Shimabara Rebellion, says that while Christians were not the center of the rebellion, they were the most active in spreading it, mostly due to they saw the rebellion as something beyond the political, beyond

any of their earthly complaints. They saw it as religious, a crusade effectively. It was a religious mission from God where everyone else had complaints of the earthly variety and therefore weren't as fervent in spreading. Yeah, I'm very excited for the Japanese jihad. Jerome penned letters and sent them to surrounding villages, telling their headman to come where he was in Shimabara, saying if they didn't, they'd be punished with hellfire. Anyone and everyone should convert and be saved, and regardless of what happens, will be delivered into the kingdom of heaven. One letter actually ended in a very, very funny way. It said, quote, Jerome Amakusa is a man of heaven.

He is the chosen one sent to be our leader. P.S. Please come at once. At any point, a man who is an apostle or seen as an apostle has to do a P.S. at the bottom. Not a good sign. Yeah, shit's fucked, bro. We need we need some backup. The term chosen one or the chosen few is used quite frequently. It is generally considered that it translates into apostle.

So that is how important they see Jerome. And people did come, whether for a conversion or to join the rebellion for their own particular grievances. This created a strange alliance of pissed off farmers, angry war veterans, bandit Ronin, and an apocalyptic Christian cult led by a teenage wizard samurai. I mean, you know, the pissed off wizard samurai is a, it's a, it's a useful caucus to kind court. You know, I feel like they have a lot of skills that are necessary for the Japanese jihad.

And the weirdest part of all of this in a form of democracy, all of these factions got together and elected Jerome as their leader. Now the argument of why we ended up here with this 15 or 16 year old Catholic samurai as a leader of all these different factions. We don't know, but we have an idea. The best anybody could come up with is because the leaders of the rebellion, sometimes called the gang of five or six or more, depending on who's telling the story, had all fought under the Christian samurai leader Augustine Konishi during the Battle of Sekigahara, some of whom had been officers within Konishi's military,

high-ranking as company commanders. Some had previously been Christian, but reverted back to the traditional beliefs after the crackdowns, while others simply respected their former lord's belief so much that they preferred to be led by a Christian, even if he was a teenager of no important samurai lineage or background.

As a show of loyalty to the rebellion and their newly declared leader though, they all converted on the spot. I mean, that's a, they have a lot of faith in them. Um, and I think I, I appreciate their openness to trying something new, you know, when the organizational change gets a bit stagnant and nobody's really up to the job, it's a good, it's good to get some new blood in. I support this. Yeah. We have, you know, we've tried a farmer's rebellion. We've tried a peasant rebellion. We've tried Buddhist monk rebellions in the past in Japan.

You know what we haven't tried? Catholic wizard. Let's say Catholic wizards. I mean like you look at how wizards are generally depicted in popular culture. They just look like Catholic priests. While you're pondering the orb, I was pondering the sword. look like Catholic priests? While you were pondering the orb I was pondering the sword. While you were out pondering tomes I was killing people. I mean like, what is transubstantiation if not magic? Yeah, why not? Another interesting fact, we actually don't know the names of any of these men for sure, in this gang of five or six or however many, other than one, a guy named Yamada Amosaku, a guy who will become important later. He was one of the

young Japanese boys that the priests had brought to Europe for a tour, make of that what you will. Then they returned to Japan and Yamada Amosaku became a samurai in the service of Augustine Konishi, then retired to become a sign painter after the death of Konishi before joining the rebellion. Outside of that, we don't really know who's in this gang of 5, 6, or however many. Together these men decided they would announce the rebellion by spreading it out to each town in Amakusa, loudly proclaiming their faith, and then begin burning down Shinto and Buddhist temples and shrines. They did so on December 12th, 1637.

Meanwhile, Akimoto, back in Shimabara Castle, had finally began to act. He pulled food and supplies into the castle and locked it down before sending out a detachment of soldiers along with a couple samurai and gunners to march out and crush the rebellion while Amakusa began to burn. He still assumed that he was only dealing with farmers and most of their writing the samurai simply call them farmers or old farmers in Shimabara and the men were not sent out with any overarching battle plans other than just go out there and fuck the farmers up. They didn't think anything of them. This is where things get kind of weird. The detachment

soldiers reached the town of Fuqye and had no idea the townspeople had joined in with the rebels who were all waiting for them in the surrounding forest. So as the soldiers stood there a loud battle cry of Santiago SANT-YAH-GO filled the air! I swear to God. You're fucking joking. Nope, there's the Spanish name for Saint James, the patron saint of the Reconquista, who the Japanese Catholics held dear. Of course, of course.

Because they saw themselves as, you know, conquering Japan for God. Then they were attacked by a thousand rebels, all dressed in white baptismal clothing with crosses shaved into the sides of their head. Bro, like once again, Martin Scorsese's movie Silence could have been so, or a Steven Seymour one of the two, could have been so much cooler if they hadn't depicted this. Unfortunately, we never get the cool Shimabara movie. Instead, it's just Andrew Garfield crying in a forest. He cries in most of his movies. I mean, good on him. Andrew Garfield, a testament to the wonders of a Turkish medicine. But

you might be surprised to learn that these rebels were not armed with farming tools or hand tools like the samurai thought they would be. Instead, they were all armed with guns kept over previously from their war service and since been used for hunting. And here's an interesting problem that the Matsukura man ran into. They were all young and inexperienced while the rebels they were fighting were old grizzled war veterans who had weathered volleys of gunfire before. So instead of retreating at the first shot of a musket like people thought they would, it didn't even faze them. Instead they quickly formed disciplined firing lines and began to

return fire in steady ordered volleys. For most of the government soldiers and samurai even, this was the first time they'd ever experienced real actual combat. So they immediately broke and ran. Oh yeah, oh, not good, not good. As Akamoto sat in his castle, he could see Amakusa burning and then hear the gunfire of the battle getting closer and closer. That's because the rebels didn't break contact after chasing off the government troops.

They ran after the soldiers as they began to after chasing off the government troops, they ran after the soldiers as they began to retreat back towards the castle. Nakamoto was speechless as he saw his men were retreating from some simple backwood farmers. I'm just a simple backwood samurai, just me and my musket. Now I may be just a simple backwood samurai, but if you think some simple musket fire will scare me in my britches well let me tell you I'm not wearing any I'm wearing a baptismal cloak that is bequeathed upon me by the Lord Jesus Christ I for some reason fight for a man called Santiago now many many people say that the constitution of the the component parts of the Eucharist are

Jesus' body, but let me tell you, you can make a very good Eucharist out of rice flour. And it is also gluten free for those who are gluten intolerant. We may not know what gluten intolerance is at this time, but you will know if someone takes upon themselves the body of the Lord and then gets a sick tummy. Akamoto is watching Huffley's men retreat, and he doesn't actually see what they're retreating from yet, so he refuses to open the gates, demanding no, you stay out there and you make a stand outside the castle walls. Then from the forest comes the rebel army, over 1500 people, all approaching, not in a mob or an uncontrolled charge, but rather

disciplined marching ranks of musketeers. Oh, you would be shitting yourself. If you were a soldier set to defend this castle you're like oh fuck like i know i have to stay here but i really want to i really don't want to fight the disciplined ranks of people ripped to the gills on jesus you know it's never good unless it's your crusades because then you can just lead them out to the desert well they'll forget they need to drink water and they'll die oh yeah they're ripped on the jesus vent yeah yeah the rebels carried their attack directly against the castle,

where the government troops had the upper hand. They had cover from the superior numbers, and they were able to pour volley after volley of fire into the rebels who were now stuck out in the open. However, still, the rebels did not break, and the defenders were firing into the rebels at such a pace they realized that they were running out of ammunition. But the rebels had no means to break into the castle.

They didn't have siege equipment. They had no cannons, no artillery. So they turned on the town of Shimabara, where they began, of course, torching Buddhist and Shinto shrines. However, once that was taken care of, they just began killing everybody they could get their hands on. Some accounts of the story put the blame of this violence on the Christians, or the farmers, or the large contingent of Ronin's bandits and criminals that were in their ranks. Sometimes just the regular townspeople were getting at it. And I could see all of

those things. But I could also see one group starting it and everybody else joining in. It's a rebellion. A lot of people have a laundry list of petty grievances. People are hungry, poor and desperate. There was no way that this is going to, this force was going to attack a town without devolving into a massacre of some kind. Yeah, it's your neighbor Jim, like, borrowed your copper pot. Yeah, he did give it back, but he dented it. He didn't really take good care of it.

It's like, fuck that guy, time to burn down his house. Yeah, someone that you owed money to, someone who was jacking up the price of something you needed. Someone who looked at you wrong on the street that one day and now you're just covered in blood and Jesus and you got to take it out. You know, yeah. God damn it. He talked to my wife at the fish market, you know, that's my wife, not your wife. This is my wife. He's eyeing that kimono. I got to take his hands off.. Soon Akimoto ran into another problem. He could not trust his own men. His regular soldiers were drawn from the local villages.

Samurai tended to move around, of course, with getting sent to one domain or another, being transferred from one lord to the other, but his regular garrison soldiers were all drawn from the area. Meaning, most of them certainly had people related to them in the rebellion outside that was doing the old ultra-violence to Shimabara. So soon, soldiers began to sneak out at night to join them, taking their weapons and armor along with them. After a few days, the rebels, finally accepting they weren't going to take the castle and

running out of people to kill and things to burn, slowly pulled away. Though for the defenders, they remained in a state of siege too afraid to go outside. Meanwhile in Amakusa the rebellion was not going as well. This is thanks mostly to do with the simple fact that Amakusa is a hard place to get around in. It's a series of islands, rough mountain passes, the rebels have a harder time to move around and spread their message. Remember part of the tactic was to spread out to each town and declare their beliefs to the local government and inspire people to join them. And some people did do that but in some places in Amacusa that literally

meant just a single guy walking in saying a prayer or holding up a picture of a saint or something and immediately getting his head cut off with a sword. Yeah. Another problem with this plan was they had no backup plan. They assumed or holding up a picture of a saint or something and immediately getting his head cut off with a sword. Yeah. Another problem with this plan was they had no backup plan. They assumed this mass declaration of faith would be all they needed. After all, it worked in Shimabara, but it didn't work in Amakusa. The leadership in Amakusa decided, well, shit, if that's not going to work, we might as well

start marching towards Nagasaki and try this shit there. Because remember, Nagasaki had a bit of a history being a hub of Christianity in Japan, while still others warned Jerome that he should flee and get towards Shimabara. The march to Nagasaki was a popular opinion in the gang of five or however many, but it would require them to march through nearby mountain passes that were not entirely friendly to them, though they had once been Christian. So it was possible they'd flip their religion again, or join them, or at the very least be sympathetic to them. The thought of hundreds of dudes marching by with weapons certainly would help that.

It's an interesting sell to people of like, here's hundreds of retired warriors who are all following the doctrine of the first ever yeah. We might go, I mean, why, what is the new Testament and the story of Christ and the apostles except yeah. We might go, can we get it animated? We could bring this full circle. Joe, do not speak that into existence, please. I know it already exists, but no, but the local government also knew that those dudes that live in the mountain passes used to be Christian, they might have some sympathies to Jerome if they marched that way. So when word got to a guy named Sana who is a Matsukura loyalist, he decided, I have a way to cancel out all this Christianity possibility madness that might happen.

Is it rice? He ran into the mountain passes and kidnapped a village headman's child and brought them to Shimabara to make it very clear if the villages in the mountains were to join the rebels, they'd kill his kid. Oh, this is not a good idea. This is not going to go well. It actually worked. What?

The mountain passes were like, you know what? We're good. We're sitting this one out. Okay, fair. Though just as things are getting to look hopeless, Jerome and the Amakusa leadership got word of how things were going in Shimabara, which was comparatively great. They beat an army from their Lord in the field.

They besieged a castle they didn't win, but you know, they could fix that. Maybe they get the hands of some cannons or whatever, but what else could this be other than evidence of the glory and the power of God? It began preaching that the powers of God on high had already struck down the Lord Matsukura, evidenced by the fact that, well, look how good they're doing over in Shimabara. And that wasn't true. Matsukura was still in Edo and he was getting together a Shogunate army to put the rebellion down. Now, previous to this, the rebellion almost certainly would have been crushed immediately by a neighboring Lord. But the Tokugawa, in an effort to end the ceaseless civil wars and the constant beefs between Daimyo of the previous era, issued an edict years before

this rebellion that said no lord or their army could leave their domain without the explicit permission of the shogun. So despite the neighboring lords in their domains, seeing and hearing what was happening in Shimabara and Amakusa, they couldn't act. They couldn't do anything on their own until the Tokugawa Shogunate said, okay, go ahead. And most importantly, you could cancel that out. If say Matsukura asked one of his neighboring lords, like, could you

handle this for me? But no Lord would ever do that. It would make him look weak and subordinate to someone else. So House Hasegawa, one of Matsukura's neighbors, wanted to get involved, but they couldn't. But then Jerome's family ended up in their domain, sent abroad by the rebellion for their own safety. And of course, were arrested. However,

they were kept at a beachfront village called Kanura by Lord Hasekawa, despite the village headman pointing out, hey, we're right on the fucking water, these assholes can invade us to get the family back. The lord insisted this would never happen, but it was part of his plan. If the rebellion attacked him, he could then intervene. But the village headman, a guy named Hikko Zaymon, didn't buy it. He ordered his people to begin melting shit down for musket balls and setting large fires on the beach, hoping it could scare the rebels off. And the rebels did set sail sail fully planning an amphibious invasion parking a short way offshore But then they saw the fires because a couple hundred fires on a beach meant there's possibly Thousands of shogunate troops stationed there waiting for them

Mm-hmm then as if that wasn't enough Hickazim on ordered his people to take their muskets and begin firing them off the cliffs into the sky. Obviously he's not going to hit the ships. They're too far away, but it was one of those look how much firepower we have. We can just waste it. It's doing psychological warfare and it worked. The rebels decided we don't want none of that. And they retreat back to Shimabara. The plan works now. Quite literally. We don't want that. Yeah. Now the plan works for the village. It doesn't work for house house ofgawa, because they're like, fuck, they didn't attack us. Now we can't invade. God damn it. This stupid plot to rescue Jerome's family

and spread this rebellion got other lords in the area to really begin paying attention to what was happening. After all, this wasn't just a small rebellion anymore. They had the power, resources and ability to stage a possible seaborne invasion. Well, kind of, but they tried. So soon these lords were mustering armies and requesting that the Shogun greenlight their invasion of Matsukura's land. Meanwhile, the lord of Amakusa, Mikki Itobi, who was also subordinate to another lord, Terzawa of House Terzawa. But now, Mikki was held up inside of his castle waiting for Terzawa of House Terzawa. But now, Mickey was held up inside of his castle waiting for Terzawa to send troops because as his superior liege

lord, Daimyo, he could invade his territory. He wouldn't have to wait for the Shogun's approval and send them to the Amakusa domain. However, his troops were days or weeks away and finally Mickey decided, fuck it, and sent troops of his own out of his castle towards the town of Hondo, which housed a place called Hondo Castle, a much smaller sized castle that had a great position, overlooking everything in the area. This march was a show of four showing people that the government, but most importantly, the government samurai were still around so don't be getting any fucking ideas. Yeah, fuck you. Yeah, your rice coin is like fully devalued, but don't get any fucking ideas.

We can march, we got guns, we can set fire to shit. We'll load our swords into our guns. Yeah. Now, Tom, you aren't a military guy, but you've been on this show long enough to have an idea where this is going. Let's say hypothetically, there is a rebellion going on. You're outnumbered. You have a castle. Do you want to leave that castle and begin marching in the open? Uh, no, I would say I want to stay inside the castle, which probably has secure stone walls and has food and water and doesn't have loads of wandering rebels wanting to kill me.

And would you want to leave your strong castle, march through the open to a castle that is much, much weaker? I'm going to say no. Well, you're smarter than this guy. Congratulations. Because this ends up being a perfect target for the rebellion. Shimabara Castle, remember, is cartoonishly huge, and therefore the rebels were never going to crack it. However, a Hondo castle in comparison is tiny.

It's a ripe target. It's possible, you know? Yeah. Jerome had since gone to Shimabara, linking up with the leaders there who had led the attack on the castle and told them, hey, in the upper Amakusa Islands, there's a castle we could attack and actually fucking win. So let's go there. So they did. Soon the Shimabara rebels are seizing every fishing boat they could get their hands on. Not before, of course, nailing a crucifix to the head of every single one, packing it with thousands of men, guns, and as many supplies as they could steal and setting sail.

They landed and made camp a short way away from the castle, numbering about 6,000 men. Now, this is no longer the hard group of war veterans and samurai and soldiers. There's a mix. They've picked up a lot of regular people who just have weapons now. Though Mickey didn't know all of this.

He didn't know how many people there was, and not and not to mention remember he still thinks very little of them. These are nothing more than farmers with pitchforks if those pitchforks had fired a musket ball. So he sends a small force of a few hundred men to ride out and raid the rebel camp expecting his samurai and his soldiers to make short work of these people that he thought so far below him. He heard gunfire in the distance, assume this was a sign of victory and went to take a nap. I mean, look, you know, I think the one of the greatest kind of military tactics you can do is to be

well rested. It like a health to cognitive function. You can think more clearly. Yeah. Mickey is a champion of samurai wellness programs. You got to respect him for that. Yeah. Look, it's a good thing that he is considering the mental health of the whole operation. Obviously you don't feel as good if you're tired. So you have to, you don't think as clearly. It's, it's good that he's considering like his own mental health levels of fatigue. He wants to be fresh. Yeah. He gathers all of his samurai together and he's like, you know, I hear you, I see you, I'm with you. And because I respect your labor so much, I've gotten all of you two months

free to better help. Oh God. Uh, to anyone listening, I know that better help is a, it seems like an affordable option, but your mental mental health will be better if you find a actual. Yeah, don't, don't use that shit. Don't don't use it as someone who has gone back to therapy and was considering better help and then very quickly did not consider it. And yes, you must be better off with a consistent practice. Yes, it's a unethical immoral practice that they have. And there's been multiple articles written about it. You go read them don't use that shit anytime I see a content creator that I like doing partnerships and getting paid by better health it makes me think so much less yeah there's a reason why we don't have ads yeah the

only ad that we would take is ads for white monster so monster energy if you would like to sponsor the show or are you selling a pre-workout supplement perhaps I won't do an ad for it, but I will take your product for free. Actually, since we are branching out our offerings in terms of stuff we make that you can buy, maybe we'll come out with a line set by donkey's pre-workout. Fucking horrible idea. I think it'd be fun. It's just nothing but like beta-alamine, caffeine and lysines.

It's gonna be one though some fitness influencer makes a YouTube video about in like a year saying I tried the band pre-workout. We just make Potemkin Jack 3D. Whatever we make will be illegal in the EU for sure. I know because I live in the EU and I have a hard time tracking down any pre-workout that's worth the shit. I want to get a pump so awful my heart gets abs and instead I have health regulations I have to follow, Tom. This is bullshit. I want to feel like my entire epidermis is tight like an erect force. Exactly. Now, the next morning, Mickey's mid had not returned and instead he was

greeted by thousands of rebels waving white banners and tooting on conch shells. Fucking wonderful. I mean, you know what? I appreciate it. Ingenuity. Play those sick beats. You know, our army didn't come with a band, so we made a band. You're playing conch shells. You're doing power, diddles on, I don't know, rocks. I mean, they're doing like a stomp the yard shit. I imagine they found a few bins around to drum on. There's just a soldier doing like the exact routine of Channing Tatum in the rain and step up to the street.

Hell yeah. Give that man a promotion. I totally forgot that Channing Tatum's early career pre like the 2010s was just being like a kind of hood white guy. Look I can respect a man who was blasted as much gear as Channing Tatum and it seemingly shows no side effects for it so far. Nothing but respect to our gear king. Yeah I watched three quarters of Coach Carter a while ago and I was like, I totally forgot that Chatting Titans in this and is just doing like a mid 2000s like white boy, like fly ass white boy. He's just John Cena. Yeah. Minus the charisma at that point. Anyway, in front of this advance was a samurai commander named Sawaki. He took one look at this force

of thousands of rebels from his position and decided, you know what, I like my odds. It's like the scene from the other guys where they like aim for the umbrella or whatever it is, they just dive directly down under the sidewalk or aim for the overhead splat. He only had 50 men. Sawaki, a samurai of the Karatsu domain, ignored Mickey's orders because he saw Mickey as below him as well, finding them dishonorable, and thought a single volley from his samurai musketeers would be enough to scare off these peasant farmers. So he lined his men up, ordered them to fire a single volley, and then immediately caught one return, obliterating them all up the spot in the blink of an eye. He got the Thanos snap of musket fire.

Alls we found was samurai armor full of blood shit and piss. More rebels were landing in the area, some at that first point, and another on the opposite side of the beach. In order to attack Kondo, they would need to converge at a single point, the sole bridge that crossed over a river which acted as another layer of protection for the castle. So Mickey led his men down to that crossing, hoping to catch the rebels at this choke point, rather than waiting behind the castle walls. You know, sometimes mistake number one is the only mistake you get to make. In this case, leading your outnumbered army out of a castle into the open field. Because what happened next was short and violent. The rebel gunners,

like before, proved themselves to be much more apt at their job than the government soldiers. And before long, they were over the bridge under a steady, disciplined drumfire of musket volleys, and Mickey's men were running for their lives. Mickey himself was killed at some point in the battle, we don't know when, they just found his body afterward, all while his men sprinted towards the town of Tamayoka to warn them about the rebel advance. Ironically there was something that could have possibly turned the tide of this battle. 400 samurai of the Shimizu domain watching just across on an island, because that was the Shimizu domain watching just across on an island because that was

the Shimizu domain. They didn't cross their own borders, but that's as close as they could get without violating the Shogun's eating. They literally watched like a stage show as Mickey and his army were destroyed. I mean, it's like me watching those battle simulators on Tik Tok of like, what if how would a million crash bandicoots stand up against like 50 master chiefs? It depends. Does master chief have the suit that sucks him off? I mean, by default he has the suit that sucks him off. No, it doesn't suck him off. It jacks him off. It's different. Is there a vacuum? A vacuum I feel like would make it a suck.

This is something we need to write the bungee about. We need to write a bungee, although technically three, four, three industries now, um, maybe, maybe someone send an email to Phil Spencer and ask him directly. Or the guy who played master chief on that weird TV show was on Paramount. I feel like maybe they put him in an accurate representation of the suit. He couldn't act well because you're just constantly getting sucked off. It's cause he is like Cortana. Give me the coordinates. Do you work for Bungie?

Do you know the in and outs and then the in and outs and then the in and outs of Master Chief Sue right into the show? But that's how he was so easily portrayed by the Prophet of Truth is that like he was just too busy busting to really listen to what was going on. We've all been there. Now, the battle of Hondo Castle was over on December 29th, but Jerome arrived a day later to a hero's welcome, and he dressed for the part. He wore all white, a cross painted on his forehead, a symbol that would become normal for the rebellion, and wearing a crown of grass, thorns were not available. He also carried a wand for some reason.

It's written as a wand, sometimes as like a stick. It could be, I don't know, a swagger stick of some kind. The Japanese shillelagh. I don't know. I'm not sure. A form of scepter? Yeah. I mean, if he's a wizard, he needs a wand or a scepter. He commanded his troops to attack the town of Shiki near Tomioka Castle, and they quickly overtook it and burned it to the ground. Then Jura moved his headquarters into its smoking ruins in preparation for their assault

on Tomioka. Shiki was so close to Tomioka Castle that the men stationed behind its walls could watch as the rebels mounted row after row of severed heads from the soldiers they killed during the Battle of Hondo in front of them on pikes. It was the guy who's it was his responsibility to gather up all the severed heads and transport them. I feel like it was the samurai because samurais like we've talked a bit on the show before like samurai collected heads.

It was like one of the things they did to prove how many people they killed in battle. Yeah. I mean it's kind of like you know the samurai version of Americans know about like taking scalps and native warriors did You prove that you killed the enemy by bringing them the head Of course this led to I guess you call it head inflation Where Samurais would stalk the aftermath of a battlefield just severing heads at random because heads had a bounty on them Look at my lord. I killed ten enemy for you But in reality, it's like now I waited in the rear until everything was over and I started chopping heads off

when the smoke cleared. So you got head inflation. The heads are very fungible token, you know? Yeah. Heads fungible. But then again, it's kind of a stable currency. You can't go around severing everybody's head. Yeah. Like we have rice coin and it's obviously devalued. So how are we going to store value in a non fungible way? We're creating head NFTs and an exciting new offering from the Shimabara. There you go. Tomioka castle was small and was armed with only one ancient cannon. We've talked to before about how Japanese gunpowder weaponry of the era could run the gamut from being kind of modern to being hundreds years old piece of shit that they got from China. This is when the latter. So when the rebels lined up to attack the castle, they

saw the cannon explode. Now rather than seeing it as a form of poor maintenance or you know ancient weaponry, instead they saw it as divine province. God came down and smote their cannon and the castle is now unarmed. Counter-artillery Jesus if you will. You ever had to call Jesus for a fire mission? Calling in down and smote their cannon and the castle was now unarmed. Counter-artillery Jesus, if you will. You ever had to call Jesus for a fire mission? Calling in Jesus for an airstrike! On January 3rd, they launched their attack, marching towards the castle, chanting, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, with each footstep. Like how terrifying must this have been if you're in the castle? Also, I'm impressed they got the cadence down correctly.

Like they could keep a beat, you know? Yeah, they just had the cadence of repeating Jesus over and over again rather than like talking about someone's mother being obese. Yeah. Yeah. We don't have cadences like they used to. Now they marched directly into a line of musket fire. The rebels simultaneously tried to storm the walls and the main gate only to be thrown back by gunfire, leaving hundreds of dead behind them before they broke off their attack. But they weren't breaking off their attack from the castle entirely.

If they're going to assault the castle, which is well supplied with ammunition and gunpowder, they need to build shields thick enough to protect them from incoming musket balls. So they began tearing any piece of wood from nearby towns they thought would be thick enough and good enough for the job. So after they were finished robbing people for their doors and kitchen tables, they attacked again on January 6th behind a wall of homemade shields. Certainly the first time anything like that and the last time anything like that would happen on January 6th Called the Maga Samurai And wouldn't you know it the shields did protect the rebels from musket balls, but the defenders themselves could think on their feet They're carrying bits of unvarnished wood. We have fire arrows

So they launched a wave of fire arrows down onto the shield bearing rebels setting them all on fire Rebels chucked the burning shields aside just in time for the defending samurai musketeers to fire a volley at them, now unprotected. This was enough to convince the rebels, you know what? Jesus doesn't need this castle. They break off the attack and leave Tomioka Castle in the hands of the government. And this dealt the rebels one hell of a fucking blow. They had failed at Shimabara Castle, and now again at Tomioka. Shimabara was obviously important because its size, its strength, and the overall importance that it was as a symbol. While Tomioka would have had to been taken to allow the rebellion to spread towards Nagasaki,

which Jerome thought was still the route to victory for them due to Nagasaki's possible sympathetic population towards Christianity. But now that too was cut off, and a rebellion, if anything, needs momentum to succeed. Once that hits a brick wall, in this case literally, it tends to peter out because a rebellion cannot survive in a defensive war for very long. Not to mention the realities of a defensive war start to settle in in people's gray matter who are leading said rebellion. And despite being high on that Jesus pack, the rebels knew it was only a matter of time before two things happened. The Shogun's reinforcements showed up and or the Shogun authorized the

surrounding lords to go on the march, both of which was now happening. So Jerome and the rest of the rebels packed up their shit and ordered a march towards Hora Castle. Hora was hardly a castle at all. It had been abandoned by the government for years and is charitably known as dilapidated. We've all lived in a place like that. I have, multiple times.

Anything that was worth a damn that mated a castle had been taken away back in 1614 when the Shogun officially decommissioned it. There wasn't even any stone left. It was effectively a foundation with some earthworks on a hilltop. So the rebels went to work rebuilding the castle from the ground up. And they weren't going to do some last-minute stonework, obviously, but they dug trenches, they dug bunkers, they piled the resulting earth they dug into very thick, complicated, complex earthworks. They cut down entire bamboo forests to build towers, block hoses, command centers, bunkers, you name it. And since on one side of the castle was the sea, on another side was a sheer cliff base, and on one side of the castle was the sea, on another

side was a sheer cliff base, and the other side of that was a fucking marsh, even with these mostly ad hoc defenses, it made one hell of a good defensive position. The marsh was also completely flooded at high tide with the exception of one small trail, meaning that any attack that would occur or could occur towards the castle had to happen at a very precise time and a very precise location, meaning the defenders would always know when the attackers were coming. Soon the Shogunate's forces would arrive and pitch their camp almost a kilometer away because it was the closest land they could find that was not a swampy shithole of a marsh. And that is where we'll pick up next time on our conclusion of the Shimabara Rebellion.

I'm so excited for the weaponization of swamp thing. You got swamp thing? I'm telling you, the Dutch are going to reappear. Well, the swamp thing and the Dutch is the same thing. How you feeling, two parts in? I am excited to see how this goes because I feel like the rebels are definitely going to win some ground and like reach a point where it's like, oh, they could win. And then it's just going to all fall apart because of swamp magic.

They got that swamp pack. And not to mention what we know enough about samurai, just in the things that we've covered on the show, what happens when you get, say, a diverse cast of samurai from all around Japan of various different domains of political allegiance, all gathering into one camp? Yeah, it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be stupid, and oh boy do a lot of fucking people die. That's the thing I can promise on part three. Ugh, the Jesus magic won't save you now, Christ boy. I mean, you might not secure a kingdom here on earth, but he's going to secure the fuck

out of that kingdom in heaven. Yeah. Tom, that's a podcast, but you host a different podcast. Plug that podcast. Uh, beneath the skin show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and glue factory, a show about, uh, riffs and nothing but riffs. If you want to see comedic excellence in a free word association, check it out. And this is the only show that I host. Thank you for listening. If you

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