Hara Castle Ruins

Little of the castle survives; the shogunate made sure of that. Hara Castle sits on a headland jutting into the Ariake Sea at the southern end of the Shimabara Peninsula. In the Shimabara-Amakusa Rebellion of 1637 to 1638, some 27,000 to 37,000 people from Arima and Amakusa, most of them Christians, gathered here under the teenage Amakusa Shiro. The shogunate's army besieged them for months, and when the castle fell in the spring of 1638 nearly all of them were killed. The walls were then deliberately wrecked. Excavations of the main enclosure found human bones under the broken stonework, along with medals and small crosses cast from lead bullets. The defeat is why the region's Christians went underground, and the site became a UNESCO component in 2018. Today it is open grass, a statue of Amakusa Shiro and a few wall remains. Entry is free. The Arima Kirishitan Heritage Museum, about 2.3 km away, explains what you are looking at.