Christianity, introduced by the Jesuits in 1549, was proscribed by Hideyoshi in 1587 and comprehensively banned by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1614, on the argument that it was a subversive foreign allegiance. Missionaries and prominent converts were expelled to Macao and Manila; those who remained or returned were hunted, and executions by crucifixion, burning and the pit followed through the 1620s and 1630s, with the numbers of martyrs recorded in mission accounts and in later Catholic canonisation processes. In 1637-38 an uprising in the Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands, driven by taxation and famine as well as by religion, drew tens of thousands of peasants into the ruined castle of Hara; Britannica notes that an army of 100,000 was unable to dislodge them quickly, and when the castle fell in April 1638 the defenders were killed almost to a man, in numbers usually given as between 27,000 and 37,000. Afterwards the shogunate imposed temple registration on the whole population, required suspects to tread on Christian images, expelled the Portuguese and closed the country to most foreign contact. Christian communities survived in secret around Nagasaki and the offshore islands until the nineteenth century.
The Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity, expelled missionaries and prominent converts, compelled apostasy through registration and testing, and destroyed the Shimabara rising of 1637-38
Jesuit and mendicant mission reports, the only source, put converts at roughly 300,000 in a Japanese population of some 12-18 million; estimates in the literature run from about 200,000 to 750,000. The subsequent registration and apostasy-testing system (fumi-e, the temple registers) acted on this community and on the villages of Shimabara and Amakusa, where some 37,000 rebels were killed in 1637-38.
The bulk of the range is the killing of the defenders of Hara castle in April 1638, put at between about 27,000 and 37,000 in Japanese accounts of the siege; to this the upper figure adds the several thousand Japanese Christians executed in the persecutions between 1614 and 1650, recorded in mission reports and later Catholic martyrologies but never comprehensively counted. Deaths from the famine that helped provoke the rising are not included.
Public executions of Christians, the use of torture including the pit to compel apostasy, the fumie image-treading tests, compulsory temple registration and the destruction of churches are documented in shogunal edicts, in Jesuit and Dominican mission reports and in the Nagasaki heritage record.
Japan, Philippines, Macao