Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 346 - The Shimabara Rebellion: Part 3

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Support the show on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Check out our merch store: https://llbdmerch.com/ The conclusion to our series on the Shimabara Rebellion!

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Once again, that is LLBDMerch.com and the link will also Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Tom. We have emerged from our foreign trading houses to try to do something that no man has ever tried to do before. Unionize the samurai. We have approached the local samurai encampment outside of Harai Castle. Through Tom's impressive use of Japanese that he had learned due to his hatred of dubbed anime, we have passed her on a clipboard

asking samurai if they wanted health care, higher pay, and shorter work hours along with a separation package from their current employer other than having to ritualistically disembowel themselves. Just as we're about to make headway, I slip that I actually prefer my anime dubbed, leading the man that we were talking to turn against us and beat me to death with my clipboard. How you doing buddy? I'm all good man. Getting beaten to death by Monsignor Beast because I prefer subbed anime. You know, it's fine. I mean, I don't really care what way or another I'm trying to think if I even have a preference or if I'm I mean, I don't really care what way or another I'm trying to think if I even have a preference

Or if I'm just lazy, but I don't know I have no idea. Um, yes, cuz you love slop like feast bowls It's still weird that the only place I've seen one of those in the Netherlands is like a weird Tax shelter corner store that absolutely is breaking the law in other ways. Also, a post-NL pickup spot, I believe I pointed out last time. Tom, I am currently two days into not having nicotine. Anybody who listened to our Lines Led by Robots episode this month will have heard that I have stopped vaping. And chronologically, this is the day after we recorded that.

You are two days into no nicotine. I'm two days into no meat. So that's easy for me. I kind of accidentally became a vegetarian. That's because you're built like a herbivore dinosaur. We got a long neck. Yeah, you're like a plasius oris. I got flat teeth. Good for graham. I got flat teeth good for graham crass. Not everyone knows that our meetings were they evolved from roving groups of herbivores,

but the bushes have to be really close to the crack. Yeah, the world's shortest hairiest dinosaurs. Yeah, Tom, when we left you last time, the Christly Rebels of the Shimabara Rebellion, along with their teenage saviour, retreated to Harak Castle, which was little more than a defunct trap house that they had to rebuild out of bamboo and dirt. I mean, that would certainly be nicer than the trap houses I had in my neighbourhood growing up. Just as a cart on

blocks outside the Edo period trap house. My homies getting fucked up in the Edo period trap house. The jugalow samurai rock up to like collect their protection money. I feel like the jugalow would be more like Ronin. They're too chaotic to have a liege lord, you know? Yeah. Say what you will about Shaggy, Tootope, and Violent J, but they're certainly not like Daimyo. I don't know. Are you a Juggalo Ronin right into the show? Let us know what your liege lord system looks like. What does the Juggalo fiefdom operate as? Joe, that's just being unemployed. That's not nice. J Glow's are nice people. No, I'm not just saying about like being a Ronin in 2025. Jesus, it feels weird to say that

is just being unemployed. Actually. Yeah, that's true. Why didn't we have to give nice titles to unemployed samurai other than just calling them unemployed samurai? These samurai need to get jobs. They are, you know, they're mooching off the state. They're eating all the rice in the feastables. Like Monsignor Beast is tired of feeding them. Like they need to pay their way. If the samurai go down to the Obama hot springs, they'll get means tested samurai job programs. If they open a small business in a underprivileged area, they can qualify for a loan. Meanwhile the Shogunate army marched towards them, setting up camp at the outskirts of

the marshes and blocked the only possible escape route for the rebels inside of Hara Castle. But it kinda turns out that wasn't a problem for the rebels, because they never had any intention on leaving. Instead, their plan was to force the samurai into actually attacking them. And that did turn out to be something of a problem, because the shogun, wanting this to end with as little fighting as bloodshed as possible, gave explicit orders to the commander of the army, Itakura Shigemasa, lord of Mikawa and personal

aide to the shogun, and brother to the Shogun's closest advisor, a guy known as the Shoshidai, to not fight the rebels, rather to starve them out. It's bad for business to get a bunch of samurai killed, shit's expensive, it looks bad if you slaughter a bunch of people in the backyard, it's a lot easier if they just surrender, you cut off the leader's heads, and you move on with your life. Right? Yeah. It's also like the real classic siege tactic of if someone's in like an enclosed secured location, it's just like, okay, we'll just wait this out. Like how much food and

water do they have? Yeah. I mean, it ends one of two ways. If you're not an idiot, they surrender because they have to choose between literally starving to death or surrendering or faced with dying of surrender or starvation, they march out and confront you in open battle. Meaning you no longer have to worry about the castle. Also as well, like the code of combat in this period of Japan, obviously like people abiding by stuff like Bushido, cowardly is I think technically the wrong term, but dishonorable to not fight someone head on.

That will become important in a little bit. I hate when I accidentally foreshadow stuff. Now Shigemasa didn't get to the rank that he had by disobeying the Shogun, so that's exactly what he set out to do, ordering the gathered samurai to block the rebel exits and do little to nothing else. This obviously isn't what the rebels wanted either, because they saw this as a religious mission, a divine war, and there's nothing really divine or cool about starving to death in a bamboo castle. It was pretty clear that the

samurai were not going to attack them, so the rebels had to think on their feet. They developed a groundbreaking new tactic to force the samurai into attacking Hara Castle. They began to shit talk them. They're just like spitting yo mama jokes? Pretty much. So we kind of talked about this before. Samurai, back in the day, had very distinguishable banners. This could be personal, it could be their own personal banner, it could be the banner of their liege lord, but they literally wore it on their back. This was a point of pride. Also it was a way to be better seen and organized while in combat by their commander.

He could look and see all these little fluttering flags and know exactly where his men were, right? However, the rebels knew what all these banners were. Every lord and their men had their own banner. So the rebels saw Lord Matsukura's banners outside the castle walls along with his mid and they began to yell out to them saying what amounted to, hey remember when you could throw us in prison and execute us for little to no reason. We'll come and try and do that now, bitch. Yeah. They're like, yo mama so ugly. Every time she looks out the window, she gets arrested for mooning. God damn it. Also like starving to death in a bamboo castle is just like the

type of weird esoteric metaphor that I would say. Yeah. I mean, it's something you'd expect in a Mishima novel quite honestly But to be like the most sexually confused ourvation ever known to man And of course they sprinkled the ultimate insult on top calling them all cowards for not coming out and attacking them Mmm, but that didn't work. Have you ever seen the movie half-baked? No, man. I'm showing my age here I don't really smoke weed, so... I never really was a bothead either, but at one time I was a fucking moron and I thought it was funny. You were just a big fan of the Wayans Brothers?

Wayans Brothers aren't in Half Baked. It was back before Dave Chappelle lost his mind. Ah, okay. Way before Chappelle was shown also. Anyway, there's a scene in it where a guy is quitting his job at a shitty burger company. And he like just points at people like, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, fuck you, I quit. I've seen this clip.

Right. And this is effectively what the rebels do to the samurai outside the castle. They point at the banners of the lords personally and begin shit talking them, moving down until they hit someone they actually liked, who we'll talk about in a little bit. Pass him up and begin shit talking the next ones. Calling them cowards, daring them to attack, saying that they have no honor. He's like, you know, we're nothing but farmers and peasants. Why can't you possibly come and attack us? You must be nothing. You're terrible swordsmen, men of no honor.

Think that your mom's a whore. Shit like that. Your feels are fallow, your oxen are lame, your sake isn't strong enough. Sick burns! Your sashimono banner paintings are very rudimentary and childlike, they bring dishonour upon your family. Your poems are shit, you can't arrange flowers. The meter of your haikus is so basic. Just absolutely reducing them to ruins. Your haikus do not make me contemplate life

enough. Your death poems make me want to live. Your second cutting off your head has a very poor arc to the swing of their sword. You call that disemboweling? I'll show you disemboweling. Anyway this finally worked. On February 2nd, after days of round-the-clock shit-talking, samurai from several domains rushed the castle without orders. Shigemasa ran to a small issue while trying to control his men though, obviously he didn't want them to do this, but the lords that let their men go into battle, as well as the lords themselves, on account of being you know tactically roasted

had brought more men to the battle than Shigemasa had personally. And despite his personal standing with the Shogun by value of his birth he was the same level of nobility as these other guys. So he believed it would be undignified if he tried to give them orders Which is really fucking stupid when you realize and remember that the Shogun put him in command of everything The military dictator of Japan put him in command. He's like Seems unwell. It doesn't seem right can't do it. Mm-hmm Anyway, these samurai ran into Haras walls and get a face full of musket since Since it was just a random, uncoordinated attack, they had zero hope of cracking the walls, even if they were mostly bamboo, which is stronger than people give her credit for.

The samurai were forced to pull back, but all of the ideas of starving out the rebels was thrown right out the window from this point forward, for probably the reason that you're thinking of in the back of your head. Now all of these lords who just got their teeth kicked in at the walls as well as their samurai were demanding that their honour needed to be restored because we just lost. You know that time that we ignored your orders and attacked the castle? Well now we need to keep attacking to restore my damaged honour. Yeah, it's a I am going to keep failing until I win

Yes And the lords that believe this all outnumbered Shigemasa He had no experience in actually being a battlefield commander, especially one of an army so large So he didn't have like the confidence or the rhetorical ability to control all these men. And he just kind of threw up his arms and yeah, sure. Fuck it. Attack now, I guess. Go nuts.

My commander has imposter syndrome. My samurai lord has imposter syndrome. My daimyo has anxiety. My commanding officer has imposter syndrome. The Shogun, I don't know, has like fucking agoraphobia. I don't know. But like, yeah, you're commanding officer like trying to rally everyone into like storming this castle and finally taking it and they're just like saying it in like a faltering voice, kind of like unsure of themselves or kind of like asking questions

at the end of every sentence. Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if we restored our honor? Yeah? You guys really want that honor huh? Anyway let's do some team building guys. What if the shogun's top advisor was middle management brained? I hate when my commanding officer has anxiety. His inexperience showed pretty much immediately. Shigemasa came up with an attack for the next day. Time for when the tide would be in. If you remember, a hara castle is turned up by swamps, marshes, and tidelands. Shigemasa sending in a messenger with a letter inside the castle and they open it up and it just says, are you mad at me?

Circle yes or no. Hey girl you up? Who up texting they dying yo? So from the very beginning this plan isn't going to work, because if you remember when we described Harukasle in episode 2, there's precisely two paths you can attack while the tide is in. Which means when the tide is in, the defenders know exactly if you're going to attack where you're going to attack from.

This is a Miyazaki Dark Souls ass battle. You can go through the poison swamp with one path in it that only works at low tide. Or you can go fuck yourself. And there's not nearly enough weird merchants on the road there to stock up on your mysterious antidotes that his trench coat is full of. Yeah you need potions, you need unguents, ointments. Oh no my ungulans. I got an ungulate guy out back There's just like Dark Souls basilis coming out and you're just accumulating curses

You're trying to go through the swamp and then you just turn into stone a rebel shoots me at the chest I hit him with the moan dot wav oh Now Shiggy Masa's idea was launch a feint attack at the Western Wall and then the main attack at the Northern Wall. If you can picture this in your head, you can't really feint an attack right next to the main attack. This meant that the attacks on the castle would be occurring right next to one another because they couldn't be happening anywhere else because he scheduled this attack to happen during high tide rather than wait and want to faint on the opposite side of the castle, which is what you do when you

launch a fate. Yeah. Like it's kind of predicated on a misdirection of resources. So like you attack one side of the wall, all the soldiers and archers go to that side. Then you attack the opposite side of the wall. If you attack the adjoining wall of the castle, the archers just have to turn, I don't know, 45 degrees to the right. I would have been surprised if I couldn't turn my head with this neck that I have. My battle plan has been defeated by the concept of a neck. Like just on the wall with your bow drawn

He's like are they attacking like 30 feet over there? Maybe we should like I don't know focus on both sides Seems dumb now rather than wait until the tide was out He launched this attack and also remember any attack like I said Whether it's high tide or low tide, it's through a fucking marsh. It's a bog. So every samurai attack, while wearing full armour and carrying full gear, would be through shin deep thick bog mud. This is a Miyazaki poison swamp.

Like they're accumulating poison damage. When you step into it you turn mysteriously purple. We've all played that game. Yeah, they don't have any purple moss clumps. You know, they're just, it's like, Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You're trying to hop through the bog. So you do less damage to yourself. Uh, these motherfuckers got zero clumps. They're clumpless. You're bitchless clumpless. You're poison.

You've made the mistake of rolling in the poison swamps now you're covered in poison so the status effect lasts longer. Now he also launched zero scouting missions which I'm sure at this point doesn't surprise you at all, but if he did he would have seen that the western wall was hardly approachable. It was covered by thick pine trees with only one trail leading through them to the wall and that trail was only large enough for a couple men at a time shoulder to shoulder. Also heavily armed samurai cannot exactly push through a fucking pine forest without making a ton of noise, so the defenders knew that they were coming before they showed up and where exactly they would be coming the whole time due to the fact, again, one single trail

leading through the trees. The pine trees turned into a samurai shooting gallery. Hundreds were killed and they barely even made it to the wall, breaking off the attack and leaving their dead behind. Then when the samurai thought they had pulled back far enough to be safe, Rigu want another attack, the defenders armed with firearms pulled back, and the ones armed with bows and arrows stepped forward, because in the era bows and arrows had a further range than an arquebus did. This forced them to completely abandon the attack as they began making it hail with bows, and it was all over.

But hay is only a feint, remember? That means things should be wide open for the main thrust of the attack on the north. Also as well, probably really hard to like retreat down that like single file woodland path. Yeah, a lot of people catching arrows in the spine as they run for sure. Yeah. However, the samurai in the northern attack completely ruined their own surprise because

they had got into position without the defenders in the castle knowing. You see, after hearing guns go off in the faint, the samurai that were supposed to be sneaking into the north let out a battle cry, alerting the defenders to their presence, resulting in thousands of guns being fired at them before they were in position. The attack was a complete and total failure and the samurai pulled back for the day. And then the rebels fell back to the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, trash talk. They were just shouting shit from the walls. They lit fires every few feet, not only to show the samurai that they're on watch all night, but they also like, look how good our supplies are. We can keep these fires going, but also the fires are so large.

They illuminated every approach to the castle. So night attacks would be off the table. Your Dunbury bowls are poorly seasoned. Your Onigiri aren't that good. Your fish is not that fresh. Savage. Over the next three days, the samurai stayed in their camps. The overall mood was described as quote, depressed, which very funny to think of as a bunch of emo samurai. And they tried to come with the terms that they had gotten smoked by some people they

thought were not even the same level of human that they were. Then the rebels pissed them off even further, firing an arrow into their camp with a message attached. The message outlined that everyone inside the castle was ready to die for their beliefs, but they offered the samurai and their lords their surrender as a mercy to the Shogun due to the loss of life they have inflicted on the Shogun's army. Absolute bars man. These rebels are spitting burn after bird like imagine framing your letter of surrender as a mercy to the attacker I'm not gonna fight because if

I punched you in the face it would cave in your skull yeah I'm doing this for you yeah hold me back bro wait no that's literally what they're doing they're doing a hold me back bro yeah yeah but also it's kind of works like everyone I've ever heard say hold me back, bro Like there was a no threat if I didn't hold them back, bro But these guys have already killed a hundreds of samurai Yeah, now the rebels demands were very very simple and honestly quite practical They understood every single one of them who had taken up arms in the rebellion was going to die. And they accepted that.

They said that they would willingly surrender and submit to their own execution as long as their wives and children and all the thousands of civilians inside the castle were allowed to live, go back home, and practice Christianity. Like no one involved in there to include Jerome Amakusa, the leader of the rebellion, like no, we're going to die. We need to accept that, but allow the civilians to go back to their lives. Shigemasa was fucking furious and chucked the letter into a fire. Instead, he decided we're gonna siege, we're gonna do it right. He ordered a ton of bamboo and wood for construction. He began to build ladders and shields and all the other shit they didn't

think to bring with them because he got bullied to change his tactics. Then he received another letter from General Matsudariya Nobutsuna. He was coming with reinforcements, and this was very bad for Shigemasa. Matsudariya outranked him in every military and social way. Meaning, Shigemasa was being fired. He was being soft fired. He wasn't being told he was being fired, but he knew the second Matsudaira showed up, he was in command. Once again, I hate when my boss and commanding officer has anxiety.

My passive aggressive shogun. Like I love that the continuation of HR policy has just existed forever. The Tokugawa shogunate. Small bean. Yeah, just quiet quitting. Shigemasa decided he wasn't going to sit around and allow himself to get fired. He needed to end this shit now so he could not only save social clout but also possibly his position in the shogunate government.

So he began to rush plans that could wrap everything up before Matsudariya got there. He set his next attack date February 14th with a set specific time to coordinate all the attacks and told his generals, this is what we're doing, don't fuck it up, wait for my signal. Then of course, on cue, hours before the set attack time, Lord Arima Nausumi ordered his men into attack alone, unsupported, and not telling anyone else, so they'd have the glory of being the first group over the walls. I'm sure this goes incredibly well.

Everyone else in the army just sat back and let him get his ass kicked. Then I'm sure that's something you saw in your time in the army as well as like knowing something's not going to go well. I was like, yep. Okay. Fair. Go on ahead. I must say I was never the American army version of a daimyo, but you know, we have the ability to fire someone if they do something stupid where like, you know, the rules of nobility says my honor must be, you know, we have the ability to fire someone if they do something stupid, where like, you know, the rules of nobility says my honor must be, you know, conserved. It's just not a good way to run your military on vibes and shit that doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, like the consequence of doing something like this up until relatively recently was

dying instantly. So... Yeah, World War One was a real good cut off for that. Shigemasa just sits back on his horse and waits for his set time, watching Arima's attack completely fail, and then he carries out his attack like nothing happened. I mean there's many problems with all of these things, but he launches his attack at the original time, but Arima launched his attack at the same part of the castle wall that she must his attack was supposed to Attack so that meant he just walked up to the same exact place that a reema had just been kicked out of

Meaning all the defenders are already awake. They're armed. They're in position whether it be through sheer incompetence or terminal They're in position. Whether it be through sheer incompetence or terminal underestimation of the rebels, Shigemasa leads the attack himself. Stupid fucking move. His men get pushed through the woodchipper of musket fire, fighting their way all the way to the castle gates, only for the rebels to change tactics and begin dropping big fucking rocks directly on their head. Oh, big rocks, boiling oil. I hate being turned into the human version of a cat. So, yeah, it's not good getting tenderized by the rocks and then just

fried alive by the oil. Do you think it's going to get like the samurai to have a good pan sear on them? Like nice crunch, but still juicy in the middle. Well, so you can't get a pan sear from deep frying an oil because you require the Maillard reaction, which required contact with a hot surface, not suspension in a hot solution. That's some cooking knowledge for anyone who's listening. That actually helps me. Thank you.

At this point, most of his army broke and ran, but he, along with a small group of samurai, continued their charge into the gates with no hope of getting in. The rebels realized pretty soon that this guy, with a standard bear riding alongside of him, carrying flags, dressed head to toe in ornate, all black armor, was probably pretty important. So they all began shooting him to pieces in my head I'm picturing that scene from the devil's rejects, but free bird is played on a shamisen I was thinking more so that scene and I am a fucking Tropic Thunder Yeah, yeah, where his hands are blown off I would also just like to see a shamisen cover of Freebird. It definitely exists. Yeah it does. Shigemasa is shot literally dozens of times,

drops dead and the attack stops. Word quickly gets back to the other commanders of the samurai armor guys like Arima, Tachibana, Nabishime, that their commander had died and they just didn't give a single fuck. They hated him so much like yeah whatever no loss who cares Fuck him. I mean they were ignoring everything he was saying so who gives a shit Yeah, I mean like look when your NCO was that annoying you're just like fuck it I mean look this never happened to me But there is quite a few guys that I worked with that if the Taliban would have killed them. I would not have cared HAHAHAHAHAHA Like Joe a few guys that I worked with that if the Taliban would have killed them I would not have cared. Like, Joe.

Like, you're gonna try to kill us anyway why not take out one of the assholes? A few days after Shigemasa got punched full of speed holes, thousands of reinforcements arrived in the samurai camps, four more divisions of soldiers, who discovered that the camps were not nearly big enough to house them all. This resulted in the samurai camps turning into something of an overcrowded mud-filled samurai slum. But remember all of these divisions are run by different lords, and those lords are all hyper-competitive with their own interpersonal politics with one another.

Meaning that their men all had those things too. So soon fights and arguments began to break out over who got the best mud real estate. It didn't help that all the new arriving samurai believe that the ones that were already there must have been shit soldiers with no honor and no skills because they were getting their ass kicked by a bunch of people they still thought as farmers. Only one guy, Tachibana Munoshige, took one look at the castle and was like, You guys are trying frontal assaults against that. That seems really fucking stupid. Quote, even a farmer could hold a position like that.

So he told Matsudariya, we should probably starve them out. Which remember was the original plan in the first place! But again, all of the samurai, especially the newcomers, wanted to storm the castle, immediate frontal assault. But Matsudariya in command was not like their old commander. He was smart, he was capable, and he had the power to keep the samurai in line. His orders were explicit. Surround and starve the rebels. Anyone who attacked without orders would be in direct violation of not my orders, but the shoguns and therefore the emperor of Japan's, which meant you would be executed if you did it. He sent away any lords who went listen, giving them pointless and meaningless missions like

patrolling the countryside just to get them away from the castle walls. He also began to construct siege works like walkways over the bog, walls, towers. Up until this point the samurai were again living in a disgusting disease filled mud slum that they had built. Yeah, so every single one of them is becoming Miyamoto Musashi. Yeah, yeah, they stink real good. And Matsudariya shows up and is like, damn bitch, y'all live like this? This hoe got roaches in her crib.

He makes them build like a bamboo floor and walkways to get around without like trudging disgusting mud everywhere. He's the first person who organizes toilets. They've been there a long time, Tom. I mean they were living in a big toilet. Yeah. Really. Also, he began to get artillery in the form of cannons from

the Dutch, as well as a Dutch warship sent to aid the Shogun's mission. This is where Nicholas Kocherbacher comes back, employee of the Dutch East Indies Company, which yes, that company is as evil as it sounds. There's a time and a place to go into that evil and it's somewhere else. However, Nicholas is the Dutch guy here. When the Dutch East Indy Company gets roped into helping the Shogun, he is the one they send in command of it. But Nicholas did not want to fucking do this. He's a Protestant and the Japanese Christians are mostly Catholic, but he still sees them as Christian. Despite all of the politics going on in the world at the time, the way that Nicholas puts it is like, they're still better than all the other savages in Japan, why are we gonna bomb Christians?

God, this would have made Ian Paisley Sr. so rock hard. He absolutely did not want to help the Shogun at all, because Nicholas also fucking hated the Japanese government for being deeply corrupt, ineffectual, and slow. So he spent weeks trying to drag his heels and explain to the Japanese how I just can't help you for one made up reason or another. At one point he damaged his own sails. He put so much work into not doing his job it's almost respectable until you

remember he works for the Dutch East Indies company. That is like next level shaming. Yeah yeah yeah he is a shamurai. Oh my god there we go. But the Japanese government eventually hits them with like the trump card which is like if you don't get on your fucking boat and get over to hara castle we're cancelling all the trade deals we have with the Dutch East Indie Company and finally he's like ah fuck okay fine I'll go and he does he's gonna bitch and complain the whole time yes

I'm gonna she's the castle but I'm not gonna be happy about it I will frown the whole time I'm going to frown I'm gonna take very long Like the letters between him and the Dutch East Indy can be effectively boiled down to just go bomb the papus so we can keep getting money from the Shogun. Yeah. Get a secure the Shogun's bag. The rebels see all this going on outside and realize, fuck, someone who actually knows what they're doing must have shown up. So they send out another message, pointing out, look, we have no problem with the Shogun. We simply hate Lord Matsukura. He's the one we have problems with. He's the one we're rebelling against.

The letter didn't bring up Christianity at all. And they even said like, you know, what amounted to we cannot hope to fight you. But you know, Lord Matsukura has simply pushed us so far we would have died anyway. So we rose up to bring the attention of our plight to the Shogun because our Lord was not doing his job in telling the Shogun of our concerns. Of course, that's a fucking lie, but it's a pretty solid move Yeah, they also point out quote we have already dismissed ourselves from this life meaning their previous offer stood Like we will surrender you can execute us but allow the civilians to continue on but it also effectively said

We're also still willing to die. We will keep fighting Mm-hmm, but at this point the Japanese field artillery, which they had purchased from the Dutch previously, was arriving and this was like a Fitzcarraldo-esque expedition to get all these cannons there. Because as we explained before, this is pretty hard to get rural place for Japan back in the day. And Japan, the Shogunate army isn't great at moving cannons around yet. So they're just dragging it through the countryside on horseback, the laborers are polling them, you know, it's not going great. I'm not going to do the voice, I'm not going to do the voice.

Despite the mansion of Fitzcarraldo, I'm not going to do the voice. However, the Japanese Army may have brought the guns. It didn't mean they were really trained very well on how to use them yet. So they kept firing cannonballs way too high, splashing down the sea on the other side of the cannon. Though this did have an effect, the rebels did not want to fuck with cannons. So they kept their heads down, they stopped shit talking, all while Matsudari's men dug trenches and earthworks closer and closer to the walls of Hara Castle. Then Nicholas' ship shows up. He opens fire as well, but Hara Castle is set quite high on a cliff, meaning it takes

him a lot of time to get the range correctly, and at first he isn't really doing much. And because it turned out Matsudariya was a very, he was a micromanager. He wanted meetings virtually every day. So while Nicholas should have been left in command of the ship to figure out the ranging of his guns, he kept having to get on boats and paddle to shore to keep having meetings with Masudariya. He's just like, I have to fill out all these Gantt charts and workflows. It's like, I hate having to log onto my ye olde Trello parchment to take off tasks.

And then there was another problem of the samurai were very curious about the Dutch ship. So they'd get on their own boats and paddle out to it to watch it fire, but then get so close to the ship to watch it work that the Dutch would have to hold their fire for fear of accidentally killing them. Like they were having rubberneckers. Or the Italian guys, the Umarels, just like old guys with their hands clasped behind their back.

Watching the construction workers. Yeah. But by the end of February, Nicholas and his ship found its range and began dropping cannonball after cannonball directly into Hora Castle, setting fires and blowing up a lot of things, including their gunpowder storage. However, they also accidentally missed from time to time, and because of where they were, that set the arc of the cannonball directly into the samurai camp in the swamp on the other side of the castle, killing multiple samurai. I mean, look, you can afford to lose a few shogunate samurai.

Yeah, I mean, there's tens of thousands of them out there at this point. What's six less? Also this sparked a new round of shit talking from the rebels. They were like, oh you had to call for help! You brought in the guys and you fucking pussies! They literally said quote, if there are so many brave soldiers in Japan, why do you need help from the Dutch? I mean if I got dissed in a haiku I would just kill myself.

Yeah there's no recovering from that. You're ruined. Now bombed out and depleted like hard castle being just like absolutely demolished in meter. It's just like, no, I'm done. Done. Despite the on point rebel trash talk, the siege got deeper and deeper as more and more cannons arrived on scene, making the long trek to the Japanese camp. Some were nearly a ton in weight. And by March, they began to join in, shelling Hara Castle. And it was around this time that the scouts that Matsudari had sent in returned, reporting that something weird was going out. Remember how I told you he sent lords he didn't like on pointless missions to keep them away? Well, he sent them into the countryside and they discovered something that made no sense. There's no rebels outside the castle. There's no people in the countryside. Everyone

is gone. And that is when Masudari realized that the region's entire population was inside Hara Castle. Tens of thousands of people. Fuck. He's just like, imagine that realization. He's rubbing his temples. He's like, oh, I'm going to have to do a genocide. Fuck. I hate when I just have to do one.

A bureaucratic shogunate genocide. Yeah. That, however, did not stop the bombardment. Matsudari never once made a single decision to try to spare anyone's life inside this castle. But he did understand something. He was like, yeah, I'm blowing the shit out of the castle itself, the bamboo, the few stoneworks that still exist, but they weren't doing any damage to the earthworks, the bunkers, the trenches that they have built out of dirt and timber and all that buried into Hara Castle. Meaning everyone inside the castle,

tens of thousands of people, was probably in these earthworks and completely unharmed by any of their attacks so far. And that was true. But that didn't mean much. They still had them trapped with no access to food or water other than what was stored there. So Matsudaira still had everything in hand and the Dutch thought so too. So they began sending their ship's cannons ashore to reinforce the Japanese artillery on land. And after a few weeks, they decided that their experienced gun crews didn't really need to be involved anymore. The trained Dutch gunners were replaced by just some guys on the Dutch ship, like labourers.

I mean look, sometimes you gotta replace skilled labour with just some guy in order for cost saving or whatever. Never really works out in the long term, but sometimes you just gotta get a guy. The reason makes sense to me. Look, it's one of those things, it's stupid, but I understand how we get here. Nicholas had been running his men around the clock, specifically his trained sailors and gunners, and he decided they needed some rest time. And so he replaced them with just laborers who had never fired artillery before, where

they went to shore to begin using them. One of these guys fucked it up so bad, he blew up his cannon, turning him into the same consistency of the inside of a bitterballin. That was enough for both sides to be like, you know what, the Dutch have done enough, you guys can go home. And Matsudariya told him as much. Nicholas shrugged, said fine, left behind all of his cannons, took his men, and got the fuck out of there.

That Dutch guy was the only one who died, having blown himself up. With that the siege rolled on. Now they were so close to the walls, because remember Matsudari is inching his way forward with these different earthworks, tunneling operations could start and expand at the direction of Hasekara Tadayoshi, who had a plan that admittedly sounded like it could work in the history of tunnel warfare, right? Tunnel under Hara's walls, dump a ton of gunpowder into the tunnel, and blow it the fuck up. I mean, that's worked before. A- It's a pretty simple plan, man. The castle is, like, yeah, it's surrounded, it's protected

by like, two sides of the cliff, you only really have the north and the west wall to attack. It could, it should work in theory. Yeah, I mean, tunneling operations work, there's a reason why they exist, this exact plan has worked before. So they start and they use fully a quarter of all the gunpowder in the samurai camp. The explosion was massive, it shook the ground, but it did absolutely nothing to harukasle. Nobody is entirely sure why, and of course the samurai were not exactly experienced in handling explosives to the point it was a science. It's generally agreed that they didn't tunnel under the castle walls like they thought,

they were too far in front of them, therefore the explosion did not funnel in the correct direction. There's also some reports that Matsudari understood that they were not under the castle walls and just let them do it anyway as a way to vent off the idea that they needed to do something rather than sit around and let them starve. Yeah, it's because the way of the samurai is antithetical to the way of the mole. Yeah, you can't mole max effectively if you have Bushido. Yeah. There's a reason why there's no samurai diglets. They don't have hands. Yes, exactly. How is a diglet meant to swing a sword? Yep, exactly. This heaven knows, I guess, whatever. I guess

that means diglets are Armenian, but also this idea that Matsudari has set them up to fail so they would abandon this idea that they need to act on their own and would instead follow his orders. And that did work. He did get Hasekawa, the entire house of Hasekawa, to quit their bitching and listen to him. There's a way that he controlled all these various different personalities instead of like a rigid command structure where everybody's constantly trying to pull away from it, which obviously does not work in the context of a samurai army. Because Matsudari had another plan, he had just been contacted by a turncoat via an arrow-borne letter from the inside of the wall, a guy named Yamada Amasaku, one of Jirou's inner

circle, and he told Matsudari that he could bring the Ting to them alive in exchange for Amasaku's own life and the life of his family, who was also inside the castle with him. But Matsudari didn't trust him, thinking it could of course be a trap. So he had one of his subordinates pen or apply. And what is more important than this letter is who that subordinate was, Lord Arima Naozumi. Now, the Arima house had been the lord of Hara castle before the Shogun ordered it decommissioned and then they were sent to a different domain. So in his letters back inside, he framed himself as the rightful lord of the domain that they

are now effectively squatting in, saying, let's set up a face to face, we can come to an agreement, and because I am the rightful lord of Hara, I will then bring your complaints to the shogun, as is my duty. There's also another aspect. He was the husband of General Augustine Konishi's niece. And remember, Augustine Konishi, the Christian samurai who fought during the Korean invasion, was the liege lord or commander of a lot of the people inside Harus Castle who had become followers of Jerome Amakusa. So the idea is they might still have some loyalty to him due to his connection to Konishi. Mm-hmm. him due to his connection to Konishi. They assumed Jerome would refuse to meet with him of course, so in reality their plan was to sow dissent in the rebel ranks, while the

old loyalties fought with new ones. And it kinda worked immediately. We don't know exactly what happened inside the castle walls for reasons that we will get to, but a letter Jerome posted inside did survive. In it he demands leaders get their men under control. He tells them all if they refused to continue doing their duties as they swore they would, God would never forgive them and they would be executed for this dishonor. Now this letter is really weird because it uses many Latin and Portuguese phrases in regards to the Christian faith would have been common for a Japanese believer at the time. But when referring to God, he uses the Japanese term for God, Kami. That is never the term that

they would use to refer to the Christian God or Jesus. I mean, the Latin term Deus. Yeah, that's odd. It was a political move. He had never done it before. Most historians think that this was a shrewd political move and maneuver to appeal to the old way of life to try to keep the samurai in line while also reminding them of their new way of life and sworn duties. Referring to the Christian faith and Portuguese and Latin, like all of them would be familiar with, but also going back to what they would have used to believe in.

This worked. It worked so well that when this letter got out of the castle walls and the samurai lords read it, they had to admit that Jiro Mamakusa would have been a great fucking daimyo if he was given the chance. Yeah, he was just spitting pure fire. Yeah, I mean, like he is incredibly intelligent politically, able to keep all these people in line. Like it's a shame you have to kill him.

Yeah, like rhetorically, like that is just like such a smart move. Yeah. And remember he's 15 or 16. Incredible. You know, once again, like the Daimyo just go like wiping their hands together, like shame. We have to kill him horribly. Mm hmm. Now, Matsudari also had other tricks up his sleeve, like allowing Jerome's captured family into the castle for short visits,

carrying letters written by his mom and his dad. Jerome knew immediately what was going on, and instead of falling for the attempted tug at his heartstrings, he used it for his own political means. He held giant banquets for his family, like a massive feast, knowing that they would then return to the Shogun's camp and tell Matsudariya, like, God damn, these guys have so much food, you're never going to starve them out. However, Jerome was smart. He's politically shrewd.

He's a mover. He wasn't as good as Matsudari. Matsudari didn't give a single fuck about his supply situation. His family were all spies. On top of that, they were delivering letters to a Manasaku inside. Jerome played the wrong hand. It's also because Jerome couldn't comprehend that someone inside his walls was a turncoat. Effectively.

As smart as he was, he was still 15. Yeah. I don't mean to like lavish praise on Matsudari, you did outsmart a teenager. Congratulations. I hate when all my dogs turn to snakes. So he's using Drum's own family to deliver letters to the traitor Imanosaku. And through this exchange, Matsudari confirmed that the guy was legit. And through this new letter system exchange, rather than just firing arrows, he was able to engineer a meetup between Lord Arima Naozumi, acting as the fake lord of the domain, and Imanosaku, who Jerome sent as his own representative after Imanosaku told Jerome, you cannot own representative after Imanosaku told Jerome you cannot possibly

go it could be a trap. So he's getting worked by multiple people at this point. It's now late March and it's clear to everyone that the siege is winding down and one way or another. Every rebel the Samurais have seen for a while now had been reduced a little more than skin and bones. Their supplies were dwindling rapidly only made worse by the constant feasts they were still pooling their supplies together to create every time one of Jerome's family members showed up,

which was like weekly. Yeah, that's probably pretty hard to take. It was like, I'm starving to death. I have now started eating clay off the walls and I've eaten half my own tatami mat that I sleep on. And this dickheads cousin gets to eat a wild boar. Yeah. And I mean, it wasn't Matsudaira's original plan to, for the supplies, but after his family started telling him, he was like, yeah, every time we go in there, they're feeding us like more food than we could possibly eat. He was like, yeah, every time we go in there, they're feeding us like more food than we could possibly eat. He's like, well, that's dumb.

All right, let's keep doing that then. Just coming back with like a little styrofoam plate for everyone else. I had to bring takeout. It's crazy. Yeah. Matsudaira was sending the samurai home as well, no longer thinking he was going to need all of them in, in his camp. But most importantly, he was doing it so he didn't

have to supply them anymore. Yeah, conserve his own logistical system. As if to underline how doomed the defenders were, on Palm Sunday, one of the Samurai's cannon shots blasted through the walls of the building where Jerome and his closest advisors were holding prayers. It exploded and liquefied six of his advisors on the spot, but Jerome left completely unharmed. However, when word of this got to Jerome's believers, people kind of believed the opposite of what I would think. Normally when someone walks out of there unharmed,

like, oh wow, you know, what a miracle. But Jerome's believers took it a different way. He had lost, you know, what's called the mandate of heaven because his advisors got killed while he was nearby. He should have been like if he was an apostle, he should be able to protect them. So people began to be like, oh God, I may have been following a charlatan. Oh, I hate when Svengali's fool me. Meanwhile, Hasekawa's men had returned to their tunnel digging. Where their bomb had failed to do anything, they decided, let's just keep digging. Maybe we'll make it all the way under the castle itself, and we'll pop up in the middle like true mole maxing samurai.

Yeah, we need to abandon the Bushido way and adopt the tactics of the mole. Yeah. The mole way path. Mmhm. However, underground they got lost, they made a wrong turn, they pulled a can of Monte Cristo on accident, ended up inside the prison rather than outside the prison. They tunneled directly into the rebel earthworks rather than the castle itself. Obviously, the rebels heard the tunneling going on under them, and they had prepared

a countermeasure. You want to take a wild guess what it is? Explosives are hot oil. The hot part is right but they had run out of oil. Boiling piss and shit. They were dumped directly into the attackers tunnel followed by burning tree branches to smoke them out. Oh you're just like you're inhaling shit smoke. The worst vape in human history. Oh the forbidden out. Now into April, the Samurai camps edged ever closer, with large gangs of labourers being brought in rather than Samurai themselves, to dig and build the encroaching earthworks that the B-seizures would use to get closer and closer. At one point the laborers got close enough that the rebels began to throw rocks at them, hitting several laborers in the head and killing them. Now, after getting brained multiple times by flying rocks, the

laborers shouted at the rebels saying, hey, we're just doing our jobs. We're not soldiers. Leave us alone. It worked. What? Yeah. The rebels like our bad. Sorry. We didn't mean to mess with contracted labor. You know, we respect the union. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just one of those weird stories. It's like, you know, the labor is effectively told them like, do you think we want to be out here? And the rebels were just like, yeah, fair enough, bro. Go about your business. We're starving just as much as you. Come on, just leave us alone. Meanwhile, Amanasaku and Matsudariya continued to exchange letters via arrow.

So it was only a matter of time before one of those messages flew a little off target and landed somewhere else. Someone grabbed it, read it, and realized they're like, oh, this guy's a fucking traitor, and ran the letter straight to Jerome. They immediately murder Amane Saku's entire family, but he's brought before Jerome for final judgment, and Jerome hears him saying, you know, he's innocent, it's all in the enemy plot, and that seemed to sway him, because he doesn't execute Amane Saku, despite the fact they already murdered the man's family, and they decide to just lock him up in a basement and

Figure out what to do with them later as if there's even a later for someone in their situation You know you have an arrow-born letter in his handwriting Yeah, what no I mean again. He's 15 or 16 years old You know then on the night of the fourth which should have been the night of Imanosaku's plot to kidnap Jerome and deliver him to the samurai, the rebels launched a counterattack to the south. This is the first and only counterattack that the Shimabara rebels would launch during this entire siege.

The samurai had been so comfortable in their camps, and so far, like I said, the rebels had never launched any counterattacks, so they just assumed they couldn't. It was easy for the rebels to sneak out. Small groups of people, like dozens here and there, with fire arrows and muskets raided the samurai camps, but this wasn't an attempt to stage a breakout of an encirclement, which is something most armies in their position would try at this point. Rather, the rebels were starving to death, and they're trying to steal as much food as they could.

One lord, Kuroda Kenematsu, was shot in the face and died because he ran out of his tent discovering several rebels stealing his personal supply of fish. That wasn't even an act of war. That man was mugged. Lord Karota got fucking his shit ran. He got fish jacked. He got fish jacked. The confused fighting spread throughout the entire samurai camp as small groups of starving rebels attempt to stuff bread in their pants and rice in pockets and make a break for it. Hundreds die on both sides and the rebels were beaten back before the sun came up.

However, this would be the last gasp of the rebels. As a long April rainstorm turned the arty shitty ground worse, Matsudariya planned the final assault, And again, samurai bullshit would get in the way of it. At this point, everyone knew that the end was near, and the samurai that had been there the longest were chomping at the bit to be the ones to end it. Not only to regain some of their honor they had lost previously if you believe in that kind of thing, but to steal glory from the others because they are still samurai. So with Matsudaira's plan to launch on April 10th, Nabishime Naosumi decided to undercut

him and of course, launch his own attack a full day earlier without approval in broad daylight. We are seeing military tactics on a intelligence level never seen before. I know this didn't work for everybody else, but I'm built different. Obviously everyone saw what they were doing, but owing to earlier failures, they just let them do it anyway, thinking they'd get their teeth kicked in, and then they would attack later that day on schedule after learning their lesson. But that didn't happen.

The Nabashibamen got to the walls and they weren't repulsed. They began scaling them. The rebels were simply too weak, too hungry, and desperately short on ammunition to keep up the fight that had once kept the samurai at bay. Soon, Nabashibe banners on the backs of their samurai were at the top of the castle walls, slaughtering rebels. So now the other lords are panicking, realizing, oh fuck, it actually worked, and we're missing out on all of this.

So while Matsudariya screamed and demanded they stay to the plan, Lord just begins sending their men into battle. He'd completely lost control. Samurai burst into the castle at all directions without any kind of order or tactics, meeting a prepared maze of defenses. Gunmen, swordsmen, people hiding random fucking tools ambushed samurai from every corner. From areas on top of the walls that hadn't been captured yet, boiled oil, shit, and piss was dumped out of buckets as rocks smashed into their skulls.

In other parts of the castle, these confused attacks all ran into one another. So samurai coming from every side of the wall where they could coming through the gates, they meet up in an alleyway that's also being defended by rebels, and it turns into a really confused five-way close quarters battle. Jesus Christ. Nobody's entirely sure if this was truly chaos and confusion, or is a bunch of samurai taking the opportunity to settle a bunch of old scores. Either way, it ended so badly they ended up having to withdraw and only capturing part of the castle complex

of Hora. And that's how it ended that day. The next day on April 11th, this time under Matsudariya's actual orders, the attack continued toward the main keep of Hora Castle. And the main keep was high above them, which would require the samurai to climb towards it. Luckily for them, the rebels had run out of ammo so they couldn't shoot the samurai as they climbed. But, unluckily for them, they did begin to tear apart their own castle to find shit to throw down at the samurai. Rocks, timber, bayoneted mounted arquebuses, even cooking pots were thrown at them as they charged. And it did kind of work. Virtually the entire first wave of samurai was killed outright.

For cooking pans and spears and shit. But then more and more came. Samurai shot fire arrows over the keep walls, setting fire to, let's call it a large camp of makeshift tents that were inside. Now inside that tent complex, that camp if you will, housed the castle's civilian population. Women, children, and old men burned alive with nowhere left to run. Others not caught in the flames, purposefully turned around and ran into them to die, rather than face their fate of being captured by the samurai. Other civilians climbed the castle walls and jumped off the cliffs to dash themselves on the rocks

below. At this point, there's no organized defense going on. This collective mass suicide is also like the militant rebels are doing it. Like if they have ammo left, they're shooting themselves, they're throwing themselves into fires, they're throwing themselves off the castle walls. More and more samurai attack, breaking through what remains of the defenses. Any structure the rebels once had was now gone and everything devolved into what amounted to be outright slaughter that would last for the next seven hours. Most of this killing was not done by the first samurai through

the breach, rather the last. Having missed out on the actual combat, they took their anger out on thousands, possibly tens of thousands of civilians that were still alive through a practice known as the Iki Damashii or the testing of the blades. This is this thing that the samurai did, which was they tested the sharpness of their blades on condemned criminals, which everyone inside was now. And they collected their severed heads. The numbers are a bit sketchy, but it's thought that this orgy of samurai violence could have killed up to 50,000 people. As for Jerome, he died without anyone knowing who he was. Wounded and running through the ruins of his own former castle, I guess he was squatting in, a samurai simply stepped up and beheaded him without a fight, and attached his head

to his belt line with the several others that he was carrying at the time. Which we've talked about this before, but this is how samurai proved their worth to their lord, and then they would be paid a bounty for the heads they collected, which led to head fraud and people cutting off heads of people they didn't kill to collect money, whatever, it's stupid. It's the worst type of wallet chain. Yeah. Nobody knew who he killed until later that night when his lord was inspecting the heads, which is something that they did, recognized

Jerome's head. I mean, remember, there's no pictures or anything back then. So they had to confirm it. So they brought in Jerome's mom to look at the severed head, who confirmed that that was her son. As for the Shogun's army, this rebellion, which they thought was idiot backward farmers, took one hell of a fucking toll on the army sent to crush them.

Tens of thousands of samurai were killed or wounded, thought to be possibly 20,000 killed, wounded, or sickened. This would have been 15% of the total force the shogun sent after them. And we have no idea how many people made it out of Harukas alive. Officially, according to the shogunate, only Imanisaku did, surviving the entire thing in his basement prison. M- I mean, survive like a coward is still surviving. S- There's also some belief by historians with a more modern take on this whole thing that the Shogun lied?

The government lied that only Imane Saku survived? Because what was Imane Saku in the end? A loyal subject of the Shogun. He was willing to sell out Jerome for his beliefs, which of course rapidly changed as his life became threatened. Whatever. It makes more of a like a useful political story as well as like, oh, the one person who was actually loyal to the Shogun survived. And owing to the future persecution of Christians in Japan, it is great for a scare tactic to say,

none of them survived. It's a very good possibility that some of them did. I mean, None of them survived. It's a very good possibility that some of them did. I mean, seizures are confusing. People get out all the time. But it also makes sense that maybe they did slaughter 50,000 people as an example not to try this shit again. Dictators have certainly done worse shit. In the aftermath, Lord Matsukura, arguably the man who caused all of this shit in the

first place, was ordered to commit seppuku by the shogun for the gross mismanagement of his domain, and then his domain was put under direct shogunate control. However, the shogun ran into a problem. The army had slaughtered so many people that there was nobody left in the domain. The domain took such a staggering decline in population that nobody was left to farm or live there in any appreciable numbers. So the Shogun had to encourage immigration into Shimabara and Amakusa with cash bounties

and free land because all the people owned it were dead Yeah, also he decreased taxes by half but only in those domains to encourage people to move there Okay, the Shogunate standing policy of isolationism Was made more strict as they believe that European Christians were the root cause for the rebellion rather than any actions of European Christians were the root cause for the rebellion rather than any actions of their own. Only the Dutch and a very, very small number of them at all, as well as a few select other foreigners were allowed to stay and trade in Japan, never being allowed to leave the tiny little port of Digima.

The persecution against the rest of the Japanese Christian population grew even worse than it ever had been that we talked about during the series. With even the suspicion of Christian belief being punishable by death and an official Shogunate office being created to continue the persecution called the Christian Suppression Office. I mean, it does what it says on the tin. Yep, yep. Japan would remain closed to the outside world for over 200 years after this, with the memory of an asshole treating people so badly that they erupted into the most violent war Japan would see until the Bochon, the restoration and all of that, with all of this having no small part in the Shogun's rejection of outsiders.

So the end. You have these weird rebellion to have a pretty large part into the continued Japanese isolationism. They were kind of warming up there for a little bit until Jerome showed up. And yeah. That's the Shimabara Rebellion. Thanks Jerome! Thanks Jerome. Way to go Portugal! Once again, the Portuguese

don't get enough shit. Yeah, I agree. I 100% agree. And like the Dutch as well. The Dutch generally get a pass from a lot of people who aren't more familiar with their colonial enterprises. But that is our series on the Shimabara Rebellion. Tom, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can donate to the show on Patreon. You can ask us through Patreon DMs or in our Discord, which you'll also have access to if you donate to the show and we'll answer it on air. And today's question is, what is a hot take you have about literature, reading, or a specific book that might be unpopular. Uh, I have one that I can't say because people will get very mad about it. And it's about

it. Patrick Radden Keefe's book say nothing, but, um, be my guest to say it. We've already talked about this. I mean, this is a hot take after all. Yeah. So I think, uh, Radden Keefe, while presenting a interesting narrative of journalism, I think is undermined by a lot of his assertions about the involvement of the British state in the troubles, but also I think is massively undermined by his unwillingness to discuss violence from any other paramilitary organization that isn't the IRA? You know, it's interesting. I haven't read his book, but I saw the show they turn it into.

I believe it's on Hulu. And I found, you know, after we discussed this, it is a common pratfall that many journalists have when they try to write what could be considered a historical piece. Let's say be as nice as we possibly can and assume he didn't do any of that on purpose because I believe where he's from we can be sued if we say otherwise. But you miss the forest for the trees and there's multiple factual inconsistencies with his work that any medium, low to medium amount of historical rigor would have sussed out, but it's not something that he has because it's not his field.

And he's not the first journalist to fall into this mess, which we have talked about as well. I think I've talked about before on the show, you know, just like I am not a journalist, a journalist is not a historian. There are two different fields and it's very, very stupid to believe that you can be an expert in both of them. However, these fields happen to come up with people who think so much of themselves that they could do anything and they just don't got it. But also there are some that do. This

is not a universal truth. Some absolutely can do it and they're very good at it. It's just not one of them. I will say that I think, I think journalism and historians are, it's two different things. I think there's several different types of like historical document in terms of like literature. Of course there's hagiographical work, which is like examining the purposes and stories created through history and like the, the history of history. Um, sorry, that's historiography. But I think with journalism, and this is from someone who worked briefly in journalism, I think when journalists are presented with much broader sweeping projects, they seize the opportunity to try to create

a consistent narrative. And I think part of the problem with, you see it happen with like other stories around like large scale conflicts that are dragged on for years. Like you look at say some of the literature that's written about the Congo and especially a lot of conflict in Africa is people kind of can't really talk about multiple things being wrong at once. And this isn't trying to do what aboutism either. It's, I think it is a problem with the form. And the reason that I brought it up as well as that Jack Sheeran who goes by Yule Goat on Twitter wrote an incredible article at Christmas in the Baffler about Say Nothing and the kind of historical issues with Anne Radden-Keefe's presentation of it. But I think as well, I suppose to something that cleaves

a bit more towards like actual literature, I think a lot of modern writing and this is mainly in the past five years from a lot of young writers. Oh God, this is directed entirely at me. Joe, you're not young. It isn't targeted at you. Hey, five years ago I was younger. Well, you write fiction. I think it's more modern fiction. And I think if you read between the lines, you can probably guess who I'm talking about is way too solipsistic. And I feel like people, younger writers are obsessed with putting too much of themselves in the narratives they create, which I think is a natural impulse for people earlier on in their It's self inserts for sure.

Obviously write what you know, but I feel like there is a certain level of introspection required for good writing and there is unfortunately too much sometimes. I think people who use, okay, this isn't necessarily a hot take as an author, I suppose, who has done self insertion characters before. And this is a criticism of my own work. I think people who do self insertions are not introspective enough to make them good. And I include myself in there because if you're writing about yourself in a fictionalized way, you still think too highly of yourself to do it. You

like yourself too much. You can't, nobody wants to read that boring. I think it would be unfair just to criticize authors. I think as readers and people who engage in literature, I think people now kind of have this aversion to literature that's difficult or is treated with too much esteem and like feel like they're being kind of a little bit counter, kind of dominant modes by like, oh, I'm not going to read like Dostoevsky or something like Yukio Mishima or like stuff that is like classics for a reason. And I think it's a criticism I in general have about a lot of people's engagement with art is that they approach art with the idea of consumption rather than like treating art for what it is something to be engaged with

and to engage with critically and think about it and enjoy it. And because the best literature and the best art say, will say more about yourself than you probably think, this isn't necessarily like argument to like, oh, you have to engage with stuff that you don't agree with. I think it's more so, I think people are less willing to engage with stuff that's difficult or weird or like might require you to read it like more than once? Yeah, that can be the case. And I know I have been criticized in the past for my opinion on being a slave to classics or like insisting that someone needs to read certain classics, which I don't like. There's only certain some classics I do like. I don't like Dostoevsky.

I've read it. I'm not a huge fan. I don't like Blood Meridian, for example. I can like and respect them for the impact that they've made on literature and genre fiction if they have to be a genre classic and still not enjoy them. And I think unless it is your job to do that, it's an exercise in smell on your own farts. I think people should read what they enjoy, regardless of what that is. But sometimes some of the things that you will enjoy are from people that are people you would not enjoy. Like Mishima is a great example. He is a deeply fucked up and troubled individual who was a bastard, but he's an amazing author. And the ideas that he is saying in his books are not okay,. Yeah. But it's also okay to not always read things that are gifted to you on like

nice little cushy velvet gloves. Like it's something that like it's happening more and more where books written for adults are becoming less and less morally conflicted and complex because people don't want to like, maybe they don't want to read them. They have traumas, whatever. That's something different. But like as a whole, like this idea that because there's things in the book that you find a morally repugnant or objectionable means you can't enjoy the book. It's just not true. I mean, especially in fucking genre fiction. That's the whole point. That is conflict. That is the story. Everything can be done

well. Yeah. It's like the argument that morons don't get that 40 K is meant to be satire. Sure. Like I went and saw, it was a fantastic talk by James Willis, who used to be a designer for and writer for the black library. And it was very interesting, like him saying, he said right up front is like 40 K is satire. It has always been satire. Yeah. But I think like my thing more so less from like a marvelous stance is that like, you know, do what you want at the end of the day. Like you shouldn't really care about what my opinion is too much, but I, I would recommend, more so than it's enriching to your life, um, rather

than just looking at it as entertainment is like read old stuff, like watch old stuff, watch like Murnau's like Nosferatu it's on YouTube, watch the crucifixion of John of Arc from 1927, like watch old stuff, read stuff, read the Iliad, read the Odyssey. Like yeah, it is difficult and like sometimes it can be boring, but you will be enriched so much in your enjoyment of art because you will realize so quickly how much stuff is just built on top of each other. Oh man. Uh, actually going back to your take on 40 K, um, I, uh, this isn't a hot take on 40 K as much as it is as like what happens, and

I say this as an author, is what happens if someone that you find morally repugnant likes your art? You're writing, you're podcast, both has happened. What happens if you have a fan base of people who obviously don't fucking get it? My opinion is I don't care. Not because I want their money, I can't control that. It same can go for something like 40k. It can go for Lord of the Rings. It can go for any fandom that has this toxic weird element to it and you get people who make let's say video essays that I saw recently pop up in my algorithm where where it's just like, you know, is 40K too far gone because of the fascists? I'm like, no, that's fucking ridiculous.

Why would you stop enjoying something because some dipshits on the internet that you don't like also like it for incredibly different reasons? Like, you can't do anything, as an author and as a creator, you can't do anything to control that author and as a creator, you can't do anything to control that. Nobody would ever accuse me of being subtle in my political beliefs on this podcast or

in any of the books that I've ever written. But it still fucking happens. I know writers who use subtlety and they're all cowards. And it still happens. Just like I've never played the 40k tabletop game or anything, I've only been introduced to like the books and things. It's pretty clear that this is supposed to be over-the-top insanity, right? And I would not consider myself the most media critical person on earth, almost certainly the least of anybody

who works on this show. But if someone does like it because they unironically think the Imperium is a good thing. Does that take anything away from my enjoyment of this medium? No, they enjoy it for a completely separate reason. Just because someone is stupid doesn't make you stupid. Yes, just because someone is stupid does not make the things they enjoy problematic. What makes a piece of media problematic or objectionable, as much as I hate using those terms, is the media itself.

It's not who enjoys it. There's this whole subculture of weird neo-Nazis who think the Lord of the Rings is a white supremacist fantasy. Does that mean that it's not still my favorite book series? Why do I fucking care what they think? They're fucking stupid. I mean like the most important part of media criticism and consuming media is you can take anything from anything It all depends on where your fucking head is And if you're a deeply fucked up individual you're gonna take deeply fucked up things out of a piece of media that I don't and that doesn't

ruin it for me. It makes me laugh at you. Yeah. Like I think as a closing point, I will just say to anyone who's listening to this, obviously it's the start of the new year. A lot of people will have resolutions and things they want to do in 2025. I would say go to museums, go to galleries, go to like screenings if you can in an independent cinema in your local area because that's very important. And actually engage with stuff as art and not just as media to be consumed. Go see it, watch it, go stand in front of a painting for more than 30 seconds and just see how it makes you feel, see how it makes you think and like put weight in it. And you don't, you can do that and like have a be enriching and even not enriching, like kind of weird in your life and don't think of

everything as content. Yeah. Do what I do and go to libraries and bookstores for hours upon hours and piss off everybody by never buying anything. Yep. It's great. I love them. It's one of the things that I will be the quote unquote trad guy about is I miss bookstores. I will say the Netherlands has a lot more bookstores than I'm used to in my modern

life and I love it. I really hope the recent government actions don't kill some of them. I am worried about it, but I go to a bookstore at least once a week. I have I go to the local library. It's great. I don't check out or buy everything that I pick up. I think it's I think it's nice. I like being surrounded by those things.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but that's the end of the podcast. Now, whoever asked that question, thanks. That one that would really derailed, but Tom, you host other things, plug those other things. Yeah. Beneath the skin show about the history of tattooing told through the history of everything. If you enjoyed literally the last five minutes, that show is a lot of that. It's talking about like what art means and its importance and its history. And it's not just strictly about tattooing, it's history of everything told through it. And glue factory, a show that's

about nothing but riffs. And if you want to learn recently, we did an episode about the where they talked about the Monty hall problem and bathism. Go watch that. And this is the only podcast that I host. so thank you so much for listening to it. Please consider donating to us on Patreon, it makes everything we do possible. And you get a ton of stuff, like almost seven years of bonus content, discord access, ebooks, audiobooks, read by me, every regular episode early, side series from audio and visual, where we have a nice stockpile of those growing abouts Armenian soldiers fighting in Artsakh and during the first Karabakh war as well as interviews with Armenian

Ukrainian veterans fighting in the current war after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia This is a very interesting video series which you can all get on our Patreon as well as first dibs on merch and live show tickets when we have them available so lots of stuff until next time boil that piss prepare for the samurai