Hiro-matsu decides to defy Toranaga and launch Crimson Sky when he concludes that his duty as commander-in-chief is to protect his lord’s house even from the lord himself. The decision turns apparent submission into a concealed act of resistance: Hiro-matsu means to draw Toranaga’s heir and daughter-in-law into a campaign Toranaga has not authorized, while keeping Toranaga at Yedo Castle. The episode makes loyalty a dangerous form of disobedience, and leaves its intended war still in the future.

The Dispatch from Yokosé

General Toda Hiro-matsu receives a private dispatch from Mariko and breaks Toranaga’s seals. The message summarizes what happened at Yokosé, confirms Toranaga’s decision to submit, and orders Hiro-matsu to hold the frontier and the passes into Kwanto against intruders. It also instructs him to expedite messengers from Ishido or from the east, and gives directions concerning the renegade Christian and the Anjin-san. The dispatch therefore combines a public-facing retreat with immediate defensive orders: Toranaga is yielding, but Hiro-matsu is still charged with guarding the approaches to his territory.

Hiro-matsu reads the message twice, then asks Mariko first to recount what she saw and heard at Yokosé and next to explain what she thinks happened. Her report gives him more than the dispatch’s compressed account. Yet the explanation does not settle his doubts. In the castle donjon, high above the city, he stands at an arrow embrasure with his sword loose in his hands and says he does not understand. His bewilderment is specifically military and political: neither his son nor their lord, he observes, need submit, because they can defeat the armies Ishido puts into the field. Submission seems to him not the necessary consequence of weakness, but a decision that endangers Toranaga’s honor and house.

From Doubt to Disobedience

The decisive change takes place in Hiro-matsu’s private reasoning after his confrontation with Lord Zataki. The two have argued and cursed each other, nearly coming to blows. Hiro-matsu accuses Zataki of betraying his brother and the head of their clan. Zataki answers that he heads his own clan: he and Toranaga share a mother but not a father, and Toranaga’s father sent Zataki’s mother away in disgrace. Zataki refuses to help Toranaga, but says that if Toranaga abdicates and commits seppuku, he will support Sudara.

Hiro-matsu takes the exchange as a reason not to accept capitulation. In his inward reckoning, he rejects the idea that Toranaga must abdicate or submit while Hiro-matsu remains alive and holds command. He identifies his obligation as protecting his master’s honor and house even from Toranaga’s own decision. The conflict is not between loyalty and betrayal as simple opposites: Hiro-matsu deliberately names his act betrayal, but regards that breach of obedience as the means of fulfilling a deeper responsibility to his lord.

The Secret Plan

Hiro-matsu resolves to bring Lord Sudara, Toranaga’s son and heir, and Lady Genjiko into the plan. Together, he intends, they will order Crimson Sky once the rains cease, after which war will begin. The timing is part of the decision, not a claim that battle has already started: the weather sets a condition for action, while the order to prepare is Hiro-matsu’s intended next step.

He also decides to keep Toranaga safe in Yedo Castle, whatever Toranaga says and whatever the cost. That intention sharply qualifies the promise to wage war. Hiro-matsu does not propose simply to replace Toranaga’s judgment with his own in every matter; he plans to protect Toranaga physically and preserve his house while overruling the submission that he believes threatens them. The resolution is therefore both an offensive commitment and a restriction on his lord’s freedom of action.

Strategic Stakes and Narrative Role

The plan emerges from a contest fought through routes, fortifications, and control of movement as well as armies. Toranaga’s order to hold the frontier and passes into Kwanto gives Hiro-matsu a defensive responsibility even as the message confirms submission. Elsewhere, Osaka’s immense gates, moats, successive checkpoints, and maze of fortified approaches show how a castle can make movement difficult and expose an entrant to guards. In the earlier escape crisis, Toranaga’s secret troops gather near a wharf while Gray soldiers guard the galley; a proposed street fire is rejected against the risk of a blaze spreading through a city built largely of wood and paper. These episodes do not explain Hiro-matsu’s private decision, but they establish the material constraints surrounding the wider struggle: an order to hold territory, a position inside a defended castle, and the hazards of moving forces through crowded, controlled spaces.

Hiro-matsu’s resolution converts the uncertainty surrounding Toranaga’s submission into a concealed plan for renewed war. It also reverses the usual direction of command: the general-in-chief intends to mobilize the heir and Lady Genjiko without Toranaga’s consent, while presenting this insubordination to himself as protection. The account ends with the decision and its conditions, not with Crimson Sky’s execution or its outcome. Its tension rests in that gap between a lord’s declared submission and the war his most loyal commander has privately resolved to begin.