Early in 1638, Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate found itself mired in a combination of embarrassment and crisis. Requests were coming into its headquarters in Edo – present day Tokyo – for troops to lay siege to a castle on the coast of Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island. The castle had been captured by rebels, and to make things worse they were not even samurai. They were peasants – Christian peasants.

Christianity had been a feature of Japanese life for almost a century by this point. Back in 1549, the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier arrived in Kyushu to begin what he was confident would be a fruitful mission. It was generally believed by Europeans of his era that the gospel had once been preached across Asia by Thomas the Apostle and others. So when the Jesuits began to evangelise in India, China and Japan, hitching a ride on Portuguese merchant ships, they were on the look-out for signs of some lingering awareness of Christian truth.