The Death of Nebara Jozen and His Men transforms a staged musket demonstration into an execution, exposing both the battlefield power of disciplined firearms and the fragility of Yabu’s command. Naga kills Jozen and his party after they have witnessed the new tactics; when Jozen reveals that a carrier pigeon has already taken word to Ishido, secrecy can no longer explain the violence. Naga also names a more personal cause: revenge for the sneers directed at his father, Toranaga, and at himself.

Causes and Military Background

The killings follow a demonstration of a military system Yabu has long imagined. After discovering the weapons aboard the ship, Yabu ordered five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, and their ammunition secretly transported to his castle at Mishima. His plan was to train five hundred samurai as a unit, place them ahead of twelve thousand conventional troops, and support them with cannon crews trained for a special role. He regarded firearms not as a novelty but as a means of deciding the coming war.

That ambition challenged established ideas of honorable combat. The Portuguese had introduced muskets and gunpowder to Japan, and Japanese makers began producing them within eighteen months. Yet guns remained associated with hunting and were regarded as inaccurate beside bows. More deeply, warfare was conceived in terms of individual, close combat, with the sword carrying greater honor. The use of guns could therefore be condemned as cowardly and contrary to the samurai code. Yabu’s battlefield theory placed practical effectiveness against that inherited ideal; the demonstration would make the conflict visible to Jozen and his men.

The Demonstration Becomes a Crisis

The mock battle first appears to confirm the defenders’ confidence. Jozen sees attackers without swords and expects them to be massacred. Instead, the musketeers form five disciplined phalanxes, each four ranks deep and one hundred men strong: three formations in front and two held in reserve forty paces behind. They advance, halt together within range, and fire in sequence. The first rank kneels to reload while the following ranks shoot over it. The ammunition is blank, but the coordinated volleys make the imagined casualties—and the tactical threat—plain.

When the defenders regroup and charge downhill with swords and spears, the musketeers break and flee. The apparent rout turns out to be part of the drill: on command, the fleeing formations reform in a V and resume firing. Jozen then understands that, under live-fire conditions, the defending force would have been slaughtered. The exercise ends with the participants sorting themselves out; some laugh or groan, and several are limping or badly hurt. Jozen sincerely congratulates Yabu. But the drill has also revealed a military secret before a group of men whose loyalties lie elsewhere.

The confrontation begins when Naga insists that Jozen and his men cannot be allowed to leave. Yabu orders Naga to send them back to camp, but no one moves. As rain begins, one of Jozen’s men draws his sword and lunges at Naga’s unprotected back. Twenty muskets fire together and kill the attacker; the kneeling riflemen begin to reload as the next rank prepares to shoot. Yabu demands to know who ordered live ammunition. Naga answers that he did, openly identifying himself as Toranaga’s son.

Naga Defies Yabu

Yabu orders Naga to release Jozen and his men and go to his quarters while Yabu consults Toranaga about the insubordination. Naga refuses. He says that killing Jozen will restore his honor and repay the insults directed at his father and himself, but he also says the men must die because he cannot risk Ishido learning what they have seen. Jozen counters that he is protected by the Regents and reveals the decisive reversal: he secretly sent a message by pigeon at dawn, before the demonstration. Naga has ordered the witnesses killed, but their information has already escaped.

Naga produces evidence of the attempts to carry messages. His men throw a strangled pigeon at Jozen’s feet, followed by the severed head of Masumoto, the samurai Jozen had sent the previous day with a scroll. Jozen moans; Naga and his men laugh, and even Yabu smiles. When another of Jozen’s samurai leaps toward Naga, a volley kills him and mortally wounds the man beside him. Yabu considers ordering his own men to attack, but decides it would achieve nothing: in his view, the outcome is already settled. He again orders Naga to release the party. Naga again refuses, and Yabu tells him to report when it is finished. The exchange makes the breach in authority unmistakable: Yabu can issue commands, but Naga’s troops and the killing are beyond his control.

Executions and Aftermath

Jozen’s death is deliberately prolonged. Naga’s men let him run, bayonet him, and make him run again; they hamstring him, allow him to crawl, and gut him as he screams. The killing is surrounded by the laughter that the narrative contrasts with the fear Jozen can no longer conceal. His companions face a different end. Three kneel and bare their bellies for ritual seppuku, while their chosen seconds decapitate them with single blows as they reach for their knives. Another man is killed in the same manner.

Hirasaki Kenko, however, protests Jozen’s death and the deaths of the others before taking his own life. He prepares his knife carefully, performs seppuku in silence, and is decapitated by his second. Naga personally lifts Kenko’s head by the hair, wipes away the dirt, and closes the eyes. He orders that it be washed, wrapped, and sent to Ishido with full honors and a report of Kenko’s bravery. The gesture grants formal respect to a man who has spoken against the killings, even as Naga continues them.

The final surviving samurai has acted as second for others but has never killed; afraid and alone, he prepares to die. Naga recognizes that the youth has done his duty and signals one of his officers to serve as second. The officer introduces himself as Osaragi Nampo, of Toranaga’s Ninth Legion. The young man, Ikomo Tadeo, identifies himself as a vassal of Ishido and accepts. His death is quick and painless. Jozen, by contrast, is found still alive after the other men have died, his hands trying helplessly to close his wounds. He is left to the dogs that have come up from the village.

The event joins military innovation to political violence without allowing either to remain abstract. The phalanxes show how coordinated volleys can overturn a charge; the ensuing deaths show the cost of revealing that capacity to a rival’s agent. Jozen’s pigeon exposes the limits of killing as a means of containment, while Naga’s refusal exposes the limits of Yabu’s authority. What began as a blank-ammunition exercise ends with the real destruction of the audience that witnessed it.