Death’s Head Mound

This mound stands five meters high and ten meters wide, and contains the severed heads of men executed after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 to 1638. More than 20,000 rebels had occupied Hara Castle, holding out for months against a shogunate force of roughly 120,000 soldiers before the castle fell and everyone inside was killed. The heads of men of fighting age were counted as a way of tallying the dead and buried here. The scale of the uprising alarmed the shogunate enough that the following year they banned Portuguese ships from Japanese ports and implemented a policy of national seclusion.