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The historical facts about Amakusa Shirō are well-known in Japan and are indisputable. An adolescent at the time of the extreme and debilitating Shimabara tax revolt of 1637-1638, at the southernmost point of the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu, he became its de facto leader and used his belief in Christianity as a rallying cry. Along with the death of the 26 Martyrs in 1597, this is one of the best-known facets of Christianity’s impact on Japanese history. Unlike some legendary figures, we know precisely when and where and why Amakusa lived and died.
History, however, doesn’t stop there, especially when popular culture and the arts become involved. Unlike General Akechi Mitsuhide, whose revenge upon his shogun Oda Nobunaga to avenge his mother’s death validated a traditional set of beliefs and loyalties, the outsider religion Amakusa embraced colored the perceptions of not only his contemporaries, but those who learned of him centuries later. The fact of his embrace of western Catholicism became the starting point of the discussion, and not just a footnote.
This paper is an adaptation of a chapter from my 2017 book Holy Anime! Japan’s View of Christianity, published by Hamilton Press. My thesis in the book is based on the writings of Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said, and particularly his 1978 magnum opus Orientalism. Said theorized—and copiously illustrated—that the predominantly Christian West has had a predictable view of the Islamic world, a view defined and validated by often self-appointed “experts” through a lens that assumed that Christianity was a naturally dominant belief, while Islam was a deviation, childish at best and dangerous at worst, and in need of correction. My research indicated that Said’s dynamics of how a culture views both majority and minority religions applies in the same way, and with the same dynamics, when Japan regards the minority religion of Christianity. This paper looks at one small portion of Said’s paradigm as applied to Amakusa. The primary way to note the use of Orientalism in the case of Japan’s best-known Christian martyr is that in all of these fictional versions of Amakusa Shirō his martyrdom is denied. Sometimes he dies, but not because he was killed because of his faith. The dominant culture rewrites the narrative in various ways, but all of these ways avoid making the dominant culture look savage or even intolerant of a foreign faith.
Even when he was alive Amakusa Shirō became the subject of a propaganda war between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the rebels; the former said he practiced black magic, while the latter presented him as both a messenger of God and eventually as a bishonen (beautiful boy); thus comparing him to Yoshitsune, the legendary young hero of the Heike wars of the 12th century. (Drazen 2014, p. 96) After Amakusa was killed in the siege of Hara castle in 1638, legends about him multiplied, and he was declared to have summoned birds (which was reminiscent of St. Francis of Assisi), walked on water (in imitation of Jesus), and moved objects with his mind.[1]
The Amakusa Family—Rurouni Kenshin
The final story arc in the anime television series based on the manga Rurouni Kenshin by Watsuki Nobuhiro was written specifically for the anime. It takes incidents from two real occurrences in Japanese history and jams them together—even though they happened 200 years apart.
The Shimabara tax revolt turned into a religious crusade. The titular leader of that revolt, a teenaged Christian called Amakusa Shirō, was transported by the writers of Rurouni Kenshin to the 19th century and its short-lived Shinsengumi revolt in the 1860s against Japan’s modernization and return to the world after two centuries of isolation.
One historic conjunction made sense in moving Amakusa to the Meiji era: perhaps the most practical benefit of the return of western Christians to Japan was the revival of interest in western medicine. Known informally as Dutch Studies, this was one part of western knowledge which the Japanese were eager to expand, and which had been limited by the national policy of isolation. Consequently, medical knowledge plays a part in this episode.
In this story arc, Amakusa Shirō is now named Amakusa Shogō; he also has a younger sister named Magudaria, which suggests the name Magdalene. She is young and attractive, and is looked up to by her brother’s followers as a leader of the group; in this role she is similar to Maria, the “Goddess of the Slums” in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. She’s also a consumptive and has been for much of her life—afflicted with the disease now known as tuberculosis. While her brother duels with Kenshin (the whole point of their meeting, since Shogō has also mastered Kenshin’s exotic sword technique,[2] Magudaria crosses ideological swords with Kenshin’s companion Sanosuke, who neither shares nor sympathizes with her religion. Her illness causes her health to be a problem, and her brother has to prepare medical remedies for her—although their followers think of the cures as miracles rather than medicine. She has also been judgmental and intolerant of those who don’t share her belief in her brother, and it is not until her death scene—which, because she was established as a consumptive, comes as no surprise—that her own attitude loosens up. Ultimately, recalling the original Amakusa’s role as a military leader, she joins her brother to defend the Dutch consulate during a siege by the Shinsengumi, but is shot. Shogō and his remaining followers are exiled to the Netherlands, unlike the survivors of the Shimabara rebellion.
Shogō’s quest for a “Holy Land” where he and his followers can practice their faith without persecution becomes compromised, not merely by being mixed up with elements of magic, martial arts, medical science and politics. This is part of the Orientalist approach outlined by Said in his classic Orientalism. His book’s outline of the West’s negative reaction to Islam as an outsider religion neatly corresponds with Japan’s historical view of Christianity as an outsider religion, and one of the ways this reaction is expressed in the establishment culture’s literature and popular culture is, to be blunt, fantasy: if you assume that anything CAN happen, then just about anything WILL happen.
This was not the only fictionalized version of Amakusa Shirō. Two Japanese novels of the 20th century[3], and subsequent film versions, have Amakusa Shirō return from death as either a vampire or as a resurrected demon. Both versions claim that “Christian magic” brought the young fighter back from death, in a non-humorous parody of the resurrection of Jesus. “(I)t is the foreignness of the ritual that provides the ultimate source of the power” of the resurrected Shirō. (Suter, p. 122)
The 1967 novel Makai tenshō (Demon Resurrection) was adapted into a seinen (adult) manga in 1987 by Ishikawa Ken (1948-2006). Ishikawa was a writing partner to manga artist Nagai Gō; together they created the Getter Robo manga franchise, featuring the first use of multiple robots coming together to create a single giant robot. They also created several adult titles in addition to Makai tenshō; these included Cutie Honey (a superhero android who transforms into a variety of identities—always with a good deal of nudity involved) and Occult Gang—which includes a bawdy parody of the Hollywood film The Exorcist.
This manga version of Makai tenshō takes the story as far down the path of reversal as it can go, with only a few elements of Yamada’s novel remaining—mostly the parts involving sex and violence. The two-part anime, produced in 1997 with the first part renamed Makai tenshō—Jigoku-hen (Demon Resurrection—Hell Screen),[4] starts with an account of the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, in which the shogunate changed hands after Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s remaining forces were defeated by those under Tokugawa Ieyasu. Among Toyotomi’s forces was Konishi Yukinaga, a Christian convert and a daimyō located in Kyoto. He fled the battle to Mount Ibuki, but was captured and executed; as a Christian, he refused to practice seppuku and kill himself.
This much is based on history. Fiction enters with Souiken Mori, described as a follower of Yukinaga. In the anime, he and his men fled to the Christian stronghold of Kyushu. By 1613, when anti-Christian laws were being promulgated by the Tokugawa shogunate, a supposedly prophetic scroll, the Suekagami, was written by a Christian missionary located in Amakusa. It declares that in twenty years’ time, when famine strikes and the sky is aflame, the Son of God will be reborn in Japan, bringing God’s kingdom to earth. However, according to the scroll, if this is prevented from happening, Satan, not the child of God, will be born. This option sets up the events of the anime.
The version based on Yamada Fūtarō’s story begins on Christmas Day, 1628 during a driving rain. Soldiers of the Bakufu—the military component of the Shogunate–are searching for Christians; they make enough noise to alert the worshippers, who slip away into the woods. The troops destroy a statue of the Virgin Mary, and, as they do, a boy walks in on them. He is shot in the chest but, once the soldiers leave to report to Nagasaki, a girl comes out of hiding and cries over the boy—who is, of course, Shirō. He is alive, since the bullet struck a crucifix in his clothes. As the villagers come out of hiding and declare it a miracle, the rain stops and a beam of light rises up from the cross into the clouds. An old man, whose beard suggests that this is Souiken Mori, watches with an expression of evil glee.
The next title on the screen in the Western version states the date is February 28, 1683; a typo, since we see a battle of the Shimabara rebellion, making this 1638. Shirō is a young man, leading a congregation in worship, while his soldiers—accompanied by divine blue fire—attack the Tokugawa forces trying to take Hara castle. Mori tries to whip the people into a fighting frenzy, while Shirō speaks of his desire to end the rebellion and ease the suffering on both sides.
The Tokugawa forces meanwhile meet with their leader, General Matsudaira Nobutsuna, the daimyo who successfully ended the Shimabara rebellion. He also hears from another historical figure, swordsman Yagyu Jubei (1607-1650), who sets out to infiltrate the castle. Ultimately Yagyu finds Shirō on the chapel roof, but, before they could agree on surrender terms, Mori shows Amakusa the severed heads of two children in the castle—heads which Mori himself had cut off, blaming it on Jubei to inflame Amakusa. Shirō falls into the chapel, where Mori and his daughter Ocho wait for him. Mori tells Shirō that there is no God, and the only way he can find rest now is through having sex with Ocho. This act leads to the death and (later) resurrection of Amakusa.
Part two, created in 1998 and subtitled “Hell’s Spawn”, takes place months after Shimabara. Hundreds of miles to the east of Kyushu, in Nara Prefecture, Yagyu is still troubled by memories of the battle. Meanwhile, Mori declares that he will bring Satan upon the earth, as he intended to do with the Shimabara uprising. Playable characters on both sides, including a resurrected Amakusa, are introduced, and the anime ends—to be continued by the audience.
The anime producer uses the novel and the manga versions, in other words, to abandon a Christian intent altogether. The novel included classic samurai swordsmen such as Yagyu Jubei and Musashi Miyamoto; in the Ishikawa manga, they are zombies revived to serve Satan. (Suter, p. 128)[5]
A different manga version, adapted by Tomi Shinzō, was serialized in Comic Ran magazine, and published in paperback in 1995. This time Tomi downplays the religious aspect and the violence of the story, while playing up the nudity and sex. It also revives a hero to stand against the demonic Amakusa in Yagyu Jubei, the masterful swordsman who in this version “combines conventional attributes of samurai masculinity and of moral and sexual integrity.” No longer a zombie, he is “a rough man with a heart of gold, loyal to the Tokugawa state and a protector of women and children.” (Suter, p. 129) Over the years the role of hero had never truly been assigned to the Christian convert Amakusa Shirō except by other Christians. These variations make him an instrument of the devil, until at last Yagyu Jubei, the historic one-eyed imperial swordsman whose exploits were included in Kurosawa Akira’s film Seven Samurai (Drazen 2014, pp. 110-111), is chosen to serve the Tokugawa shogunate (which fought against Amakusa and the Christians in the Shimabara revolt). The Orientalist inversion of history—which occurs when an outsider culture imposes its own mores on another culture–is complete: Christianity has been demonized, literally, while traditional Japanese values have been uplifted to stand against the satanic forces.
But even this is not the final verdict, as Suter points out. The saga of Amakusa Shirō takes a different series of turns as the subject of the 1993 arcade video game Samurai Spirits and its assortment of spinoffs for home gaming platforms.[6]
By the 2005 incarnation of the game, in which Amakusa defeats the Big Boss in order to “punish [the enemy] for their sins and save their souls,” he has been depicted as “a follower of the Christian God, or its enemy, or possibly both; he is evil, or good, or both good and evil; the Christian God is the enemy of Japan, or its ally, or appears to be its enemy, but after all, this could be yet another instance of Amakusa’s deceit.” (Suter, p. 137) However, the meta-verdict, if you will, of Amakusa is the fact that this is a game and you, the player, are playing the version of your choice. You made one choice today; you may make a completely different choice tomorrow with no real consequences, because “it’s just a game.”
For a variant that’s more than just a game, Suter points to Akaishi Michiyo’s shoujo manga AMAKUSA 1637, which was published between 2001 and 2006. This story inverts just about everything connected to Amakusa Shirō: instead of being a young boy pretty enough to be a girl, this story offers up Hayumi Natsuki, a modern Japanese girl who disguises herself as a boy and who has the martial arts skills to be able to pull off the deception. She and a group of friends are on a ship that gets caught in a time warp and end up back in the year 1637, just before the Shimabara rebellion was to occur. However, in this version, Amakusa is killed several months earlier by one of Natsuki’s friends. Natsuki assumes Amakusa’s identity, and proceeds to rewrite history itself by urging the nobles of Kyushu to stop exploiting the peasants with excessive taxes and thereby peacefully defuses the Shimabara situation. She accomplishes this with the aid of 1990s technology which fortunately manages to work, even in the 17th century—even the cell phones. So, what had been seen as divine miracles by Amakusa are now the results of manmade technology, recalling the “Third Law” of author Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Natsuki manages to prevail upon the Tokugawa court to allow Kyushu to be its own independent state, abandon the Sakoku policy of isolation and continue to trade with the rest of the world. They even anticipate a 20th century fad by introducing Christian wedding ceremonies to Japan; these ceremonies are essentially cosplay, they do not require belief in Christianity, and often the “priest” is an actor.
Ultimately Natsuki (as Shirō) brings 1990s sensibilities to 17th century Japan, changing history for the better. (Suter, pp. 151-160) Christians no longer face cruel and bloody persecution; however, in this laissez-faire society where people are encouraged to believe as they choose, there is no incentive—in Heaven or on Earth—for Japanese people necessarily to convert to Christianity either. Natsuki and friends recreate (better than they realized) the 1990s in Japan, when Christians make up less than one percent of the population.
In this context, when asked to pass judgment on Amakusa Shirō and his actions, divorced from the reality of his time and place and even from the faith that set the Shimabara rebellion apart historically, the only choice available to the Japanese gamer or the manga reader or the anime viewer is not to choose.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Drazen, Patrick. 2002 (2nd edition 2014). Anime Explosion: The What? Why? And Wow! Of Japanese Animation. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press.
———. 2017. Holy Anime! Japan’s View of Christianity. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Press.
Inada Shiho and Ono Fuyumi. 1998. Ghost Hunt, in 12 vols. Tokyo: Kodansha.
———. 2005. Ghost Hunt, in 12 vols, trans. Tsubasa Akira. New York: Del Rey.
Kouenji H., Nagai Gō and Ishikawa Ken. 1991. Shinrei Tantei Okaruto Dan, vol. 1. Tokyo: Taitosha.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Suter, Rebecca. 2015. Holy Ghosts: The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Footnotes:
[1] This latter ability becomes significant in our own time in the interest in Japanese pop culture in telekinesis. Israeli psychic Uri Geller, who claimed to bend spoons with his mind, had become no less influential than Jesus and Francis of Assisi in the Japanese imagination in the 1970s even after being revealed as a fraud. Numerous manga and anime invoked his name and powers and transferred them onto other “esper” characters who use ESP, from Pokemon to Ghost Hunt (story by Fuyumi Ono, art by Shiho Inada) to Locke the Superman by Yuki Hijiri (1980s).
[2] (Suter, pp. 111-113) Shogō studied the technique to avenge his parents, who were also Christians and were killed because of their faith. Even though a convert to Christianity, Amakusa Shogō was Japanese, and was still shown in the anime to think in terms of avenging his family. Japanese Christians, according to this anime, were not forbidden to hold grudges. Suter notes that, in other modern literary evocations of the Shimabara rebellion, Amakusa Shirō is “more reminiscent of the vengeful ghosts of the horror genre, driven by an uncontrollable urge to destroy their murderers”. (p. 118)
[3]. Dokuro kengyō (The Skull Abbot), 1939 by Yokomizo Seishi, and 1967’s Makai tenshō (Demon Resurrection), by Yamada Fūtarō.
[4] In the west the title is changed to Ninja Resurrection, moving the focus away from the demonic characterization of the Christian Amakusa. The subtitle Jigoku-hen (Hell Screen) is borrowed from a frightening 1918 short story by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, author of Rashomon, which has nothing to do with the battle of Sekigahara or the Shimabara rebellion.
[5] . Both are known as authors as well as swordsmen: Yagyu Jubei was author of Tsukimi no Sho (The Book of Gazing at the Moon), while Musashi Miyamoto wrote The Book of Five Rings, a classic on military strategy that enjoyed a western revival during the Eighties.
[6]. The series was also released in the west under the name Samurai Shodown (sic).