was the first son of the
Kirishitan, from Portuguese cristão, referred to Roman Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used as a historiographic term for Roman Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries. Christian missionaries were known as bateren or iruman...
daimyois a generic term referring to the powerful territorial lords in pre-modern Japan who ruled most of the country from their vast, hereditary land holdings...
Arima Harunobuwas the second son and successor of Japanese daimyo Arima Yoshisada. Harunobu was born in the castle of Arima and controlled the Shimabara area of Hizen province. After Harunobu's father's death, he began the persecution of Christians in his region. With Ryūzōji Takanobu expanding into his domain,...
. He was baptized as a child with the name Miguel (ミゲル). He was born in Hinoe Castle in
Shimabarais a city located on the north-eastern tip of the Shimabara Peninsula, facing Ariake Bay in the east and Mount Unzen in the west, in Nagasaki Prefecture, Kyūshū, Japan.-History:...
but was sent by his father to work beside
Tokugawa Ieyasu was the founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan , which ruled from the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Ieyasu seized power in 1600, received appointment as shogun in 1603, abdicated from office in 1605, but...
at the age of 15. He married
Konishi YukinagaKonishi Yukinaga was a Kirishitan daimyō under Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He was the son of a wealthy Sakai merchant, Konishi Ryūsa...
's niece Marta (マルタ); however, in order to curry favor with Ieyasu, he divorced his Christian wife and married Ieyasu's adopted daughter Kuni-hime in 1610. In 1612, he inherited his father's land valued at 40,000
kokuThe is a Japanese unit of volume, equal to ten cubic shaku. In this definition, 3.5937 koku equal one cubic metre, i.e. 1 koku is approximately 278.3 litres. The koku was originally defined as a quantity of rice, historically defined as enough rice to feed one person for one year...
in Shimabara when his father was executed for his role in the Okamoto Daihachi Incident. Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered a general persecution of all Christians in Japan, and Naozumi immediately gave up his Christian belief, exiled his former wife and secretly killed his two half brothers– 8-year old Francisco (フランシスコ) and 6-year old Mathias (マティアス).
However, he was dissatisfied with the constant revolts and chaos as a result of the Christian persecution and asked the
ShogunateThe Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the and the , was a feudal regime of Japan established by Tokugawa Ieyasu and ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family. This period is known as the Edo period and gets its name from the capital city, Edo, which is now called Tokyo, after the name was...
to transfer him to
Nobeokais the northernmost city located in Miyazaki, Japan.-Population:As of the January 1, 2008 merger, the city has an estimated population of 130,435 and a population density of 150 persons per km². The total area is 867.97 km².-History:...
in
Hyuga Provincewas an old province of Japan on the east coast of Kyūshū, corresponding to the modern Miyazaki Prefecture. It was sometimes called or . Hyūga bordered on Bungo, Higo, Ōsumi, and Satsuma Province.The ancient capital was near Saito.-Historical record:...
. When
Shimabara RebellionThe was an uprising largely involving Japanese peasants, most of them Catholic Christians, in 1637–1638 during the Edo period.It was one of only a handful of instances of serious unrest during the relatively peaceful period of the Tokugawa shogunate's rule...
broke out in his old fief in 1637, he answered the call of the Shogunate and led a 4000 detachment to suppress the rebellion. He died in 1641, during his
sankin kotaiwas a policy of the shogunate during most of the Edo period of Japanese history. The purpose was to control the daimyo. In adopting the policy, the shogunate was continuing and refining similar policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. In 1635, a law required sankin kōtai, which was already an established...
in Osaka.