Shimabara Castle

Shimabara, Japan, Japan

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Shimabara Castle is a reconstructed Edo-period flatland castle in the city of Shimabara, on the Shimabara Peninsula in Nagasaki Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan.

The site originally held an earlier castle called Moritake or Takaki, but in 1624 the daimyō Matsukura Shigemasa built a new, unusually grand castle here as the seat of the Shimabara Domain, replacing the older Hinoe Castle nearby; this new castle became famous for its massive scale, high stone walls, and a central keep that was extravagantly large compared with other domains of similar size.

The heavy taxes levied to finance its construction, together with harsh persecution of local Christians, were major causes of the 1637–1638 Shimabara Rebellion, in which about 37,000 peasants and lower samurai were besieged at Hara Castle to the south and ultimately crushed by a shogunate army of over 125,000, and Shimabara Castle itself remained in use as the domain seat until the Meiji Restoration, when most of its buildings were destroyed in 1874 under the order to abolish castles.