This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Suppression of Japan's Christian communities unfolded gradually rather than in a single act. An edict from the regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1587 was the first warning, though it went largely unenforced at the time. Persecution turned openly lethal a decade later, in February 1597, with the crucifixion of twenty six Christians at Nagasaki.
The decisive turn to systematic, nationwide suppression came with Tokugawa Ieyasu's expulsion edict of 1614, driven by fear that Japan's Christian feudal lords owed a foreign pope loyalty standing above the shogun himself. Organized resistance ended outright with the Shimabara Rebellion of October 1637 to April 1638, an uprising rooted in oppressive taxation as much as in religion, crushed with the killing of more than thirty seven thousand people. The sakoku policy that followed in 1639 sealed the country against missionary access entirely, driving the surviving Christian communities permanently underground.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the reversal, within little more than half a century, of the growth that Francis Xavier's mission had built: a convert population that had once reached several hundred thousand was driven from open practice into two and a half centuries of secrecy, a suppression thorough enough that its survivors would not surface again until the nineteenth century.