#samuri

Christ's Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion

The plight of 16-year-old Jerome Amakusa, the supposed leader of the rebellion, and the rebels who accompanied him are at once instantly recognisable to contemporary readers, and yet they were alien, by design, to the populace of Edo Period Japan. The propagandistic machinations of the Tokugawa shogunate tell of a rebellion borne of a dogged devotion to a doomsday cult instead of what we now know it to be: the result of religious persecution, over-taxation, and famine. Numbering in the tens of thousands, the sheer size of the agitation surprised the shogunate, who devoted over 100,000 men to quell the fires of rebellion after receiving news that the mostly peasant force had almost captured several castles in the area. On the run, the rebels made their final stand in Hara Castle, a shabbily patched-together fortification that would see the last large-scale battle in Japan for over 200 years.

胡蝶 しのぶ

こちょう しのぶ