Japan's Kirishitan Persecution, a Quarter Century Campaign

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Tokugawa shogunate waged a quarter-century campaign against Japan's Kirishitan Christian community, opened by Tokugawa Ieyasu's 1614 expulsion edict and enforced with escalating severity by his successors Hidetada and Iemitsu until the country closed itself to the outside world in 1639. Missionaries and converts who would not recant were tortured and executed, suspected believers were tested by the fumi-e practice of trampling Christian images, and a community once numbering some 300,000 was driven underground as the hidden Kirishitan, resurfacing openly only in the nineteenth century.

Enforcement escalated through named mass executions, including fifty-five burned at Nagasaki's Nishizaka hill in the Great Genna Martyrdom of 1622, and culminated in the 1637-38 Shimabara Rebellion, a peasant uprising with a strong Kirishitan character that the shogunate crushed at enormous cost and treated as final proof the faith could not be tolerated; that uprising is recorded separately on this atlas as its own conflict. Christianity was driven from open practice in Japan for over two centuries as a result.