It’s less a castle ruin and more the ghost of a castle ruin.
On the Shimabara peninsula there is a series of rises by the sea. The land rises like green walls and forms terraces, layered as they gain height like a castle of earth. It’s a strange combination of shapes that are at turns natural and man-made. Tilled fields spread across the broad terraces and among these walls, holding the shape of a majestic fortress reduced to amputated earthen stumps.
This series of hills was once Hara Castle, a sprawling four-kilometer late Sengoku (Warring States) period castle with four palaces and baileys built on a promontory overlooking Shimabara Bay, opposite today’s Kumamoto Prefecture, home of the more famous and, until the earthquake, fully rebuilt Kumamoto Castle.
I visited the castle ruins with my Japanese girlfriend on a beautiful blue sky day and the setting felt tranquil and idyllic to me. My girlfriend on the other hand immediately felt uneasy about the place, which surprised me because she didn’t know about the deaths, and until I told her about it a few weeks ago, she had never heard of Hara Castle, but just being here she had a sense of the great tragedy that took place more than 370 years ago.
Catholic Daimyo Arima Harunobu, 13th generation head of the Arima Clan and lord of his domain since the age of four, ordered Hara Castle’s construction in 1599, after his return from an unsuccessful invasion of Korea. He had been a supporter of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the three men who unified Japan along with Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. Now with Toyotomi dead, he felt the need to build a castle. The Sengoku Jidai was nearing its end, but the times were still dangerous and the nation unstable. It also didn’t help that he was a practitioner of a foreign religion in a nation that within a generation would completely shun all outside influences.
His new castle was built on the site of a castle his ancestor Arima Takazumi created in 1496. The new Hara Castle, also known as the “Sunset Castle,” was blessed in 1604 as it neared completion.
Arima was executed for treason on the orders of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first shogun of a new bakufu, the military government that would rule Japan for more than two centuries. His son, Arima Naozumi took over upon his death in 1612 and in 1614 requested a transfer to Nobeoka. He was replaced by Matsukura Shigemasa.
When the “One Castle-for-One Domain” policy was enacted in 1615, he ordered both Hara and Hinoe decommissioned and used them as construction material on his new project, Shimabara Castle.
Decommissioned and dismantled, this should have been the end of Hara Castle’s story.
Matsukura and later his son, Katsuie, were harsh masters on their new territory. They taxed their people heavily for both the construction of Shimabara Castle with its five-story donjon (keep) and to support other Shogunate projects. They also began persecuting their subjects brutally when they refused to recant their faith after the practice of Christianity was banned.
Between 1627 and 1632 they boiled 188 unrepentant Catholics to death in the aptly named Unzen Jigoku (Hells), Japan’s hottest spring. (Incidentally, the Hells are now a popular onsen spot.) Yet, their domain was still full of individuals discreetly practicing the forbidden faith and as abuses became worse more began picking it up again.
In 1637 the shogun abolished foreign trade almost entirely, which cut off one of Matsukura’s primary forms of income. His solution was to raise taxes during what was also a bad harvest year. At the time taxes were collected in the form of rice, and so a bad harvest combined with high taxes left many peasants with one of two options- death by starvation or death by minoodori, “the dance of the straw rain coat.” Tax collectors forced the indebted to don their straw rain coat and then he would be set on fire and publicly burn to death.
This set up the domain for one of the only major rebellions to occur during the 250 year Edo period.
After the execution of a village leader’s pregnant wife by water-pit torture, a conspiracy was formed and the magistrate responsible for the killing was himself killed. Depending on your source, either on Oct. 25 or Dec. 11, 1637, riots began and soon almost every peasant from the southern domain villages and Amakusa Island rose up against Matsukura Clan. Roughly 60 percent of the domain joined this fight, which came to be led by Amakusa Shiro, a charismatic teenager and son of a former Kunishi Clan vassal.
Though the rebellion was born of economic hardships, it took on a religious dimension as many shared the same faith and carried battle-flags with Christian iconography, such as Amakusa Shiro’s.
Shiro Amakusa
Initially Shimabara Castle and Amakusa Island’s Tomioka Castle were besieged, but the rebels were unable to take them and fell back to a former stronghold well-known to former Arima retainers: Hara Castle.
No longer a true castle as everything usable was removed, the foundations, some walls and gates yet remained and the position was defensive by nature. The rebels, including wives and children, holed up on the castle grounds and created makeshift wooden defenses and dug more trenches.
This defense as well as the organization of the rebels was made possible by wolves in sheep’s clothing, ronin. Former samurai loyal to the defunct Arima and Konishi clans, they refused to give up their religion and instead chose social demotion to live among fellow Christians as farmers. Now in the rebellion they retook their roles as warriors and leaders.
Despite being 37,000 strong at best and composed primarily of peasants in a makeshift castle, the rebels held out against a force of 120,000 from the collective Kyushu daimyo’s armies that alternated between attacking and besieging Hara for three months.
The first leader sent to fight the rebels was ineffective and his multiple frontal assaults resulted in no gains but the loss of men and his own life. He was replaced by Matsudaira Nobutsuna, an adopted relative of the Tokugawa shogun and his former page.
Matsudaira starved out the Hara rebels and on April 11 led a final assault on Hara. By the next day they had surrendered and the survivors executed and decapitated. Amakusa Shiro and all 37,000 people within Hara Castle, men, women and children, had their corpses dumped on the castle grounds and mixed into the soil. The remaining stone walls of Hara were also dismembered as their inhabitants had been and the ruins were set on fire. The Minamishimabara guidebook describes it as telling of the hatred of the government forces for the rebels. Finally, 10,000 heads were impaled on poles around the site. After our visit, I still couldn’t bring myself to tell my girlfriend that the bodies had been left in the soil until being excavated 350 years later.
The remaining heads were put on display around the domain and Nagasaki to remind people what happened when you opposed the government. Amakusa Shiro’s head was mounted in front of Dejima, a man-made island in Nagasaki Bay that was the only legal foreign outpost in Japan.
The rebellion had been put down and in the process an entire domain was depopulated to the point of collapse. The mismanagement and brutality of Matsukara Katsuie ultimately led to his occupying a unique place in Japanese history. Not allowed the dignity of an honorable death by seppuku, ritual suicide by disembowelment, he was the only daimyo to be beheaded during the Edo period.
We visited the former honmaru (inner palace) grounds, which houses a few memorials and is the best preserved section. The honmaru’s stone stump appears to have never been pulled apart, but there are large stones scattered about the area, remnants of the castle walls. The view of Shimabara Bay from the stump is most impressive and it’s easy to see how this place gained the name of “Sunset Castle.”
There are a few small graves on the stump most notably that of Amakusa Shiro along with a statue of him and a cross mounted atop a beam. The signs with the memorials and graves are in Japanese and English, as are several informative placards around the honmaru area.
There isn’t much to the ruins, but after my previous visit to Shimabara Castle and learning about this particular chapter in Japan’s history it was worth coming to see where the rebellion ended. Being a castle ruin added more weight to the desire to see it.
Before visiting the Hara Castle ruins I recommend first seeing the Arima Christian Heritage Museum (Harajo Cultural Center on some maps) on the road leading to it. The museum is relatively new, so most of the artifacts related to the rebellion or taken from Hara Castle already reside in other museums. To compensate there are lots of high-quality replicas alongside actual artifacts such musket balls, religious medallions and crosses pulled from Hara Castle during excavation. It all helps tell the stories of both early Christianity in Japan and that of the rebellion and the factors that led to it. There is also a room dedicated to the archeological work carried out in the late 20th century and includes a walk through area replicating the dig that excavated many Christian artifacts and bones from the castle grounds.
Admission was 300 yen and at no extra charge, an English speaking tour guide lead me around the museum, taking my questions and explaining what was not in English. I spent most of an hour inside, but it was very informative and will help visitors gain an appreciation for what they will see when they visit Hara Castle. Basic information is in English, Japanese and Korean, but the heavier paragraphs are exclusively in Japanese. The introductory video with English subtitles was also very helpful. Finally, before I left they gave me a 36-page guide book for free.
Another site worth seeing is the nearby ruins of Hinoe Castle. Not as impressive as Hara, Hinoe is still an active archeological site and visitors can see where work is still being done. A word on visiting, all the Hinoe Castle areas are closed off and have gates with a sign written in Japanese on them. Initially I thought it said “STAY OUT,” but I snapped a picture and took it back to my girlfriend, who was waiting in the car, to translate. (After Hara Castle, she was exhausted and done seeing depressing ruins for the day.) She explained that the signs said to close the gate behind you when visiting to keep inoshishi (wild boars) out of the ruins.
Hinoe Castle was built in the 14th century and was the Arima Clan’s original stronghold. As a sign of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s favor, the Arima were allowed to use special gilded roof tiles unique to his castles, one of which can be seen at the Arima Christian Heritage Museum. Decommissioned along with Hara Castle, it was also more fully destroyed after the Shimabara Rebellion, though it had not been used by the rebels and had no connection to them.
There is no admission to either set of ruins nor hours of operation. For a special visit, go during the annual festival held at Hara Castle during the spring.