Naga executes Jozen and his attendants

Naga executes Nebara Jozen and his attendants after a demonstration exposes the disciplined tactics of Toranaga’s musket regiment. The killing is both an act of revenge and an attempt to keep the new battlefield method from Ishido: Naga openly defies Yabu’s orders to spare the captives, while the different deaths of Jozen’s men expose competing claims to honor, obedience, and control of military secrets.

Causes and stakes

Yabu’s investment in the demonstration arose from the weaponry he had seized from the Erasmus. The cargo included five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, thousands of cannonballs, and crates of ammunition. He had the arms sent ashore and ordered them secretly conveyed to his castle at Mishima. For years, he had privately imagined using firearms not as isolated novelties but as the foundation of a trained unit: five hundred selected samurai supporting a much larger conventional force, with cannon handled by specially trained men.

That plan challenged the established prestige of individual, close combat. In the account’s description of Japanese warfare, guns had long been treated as a novelty, while the sword carried greater honor and the use of firearms could be condemned as cowardly and contrary to the samurai code. Yabu’s new formation therefore made a political as well as tactical claim. Its success could shift power; its disclosure could give an opponent the means to prepare against it.

Jozen and his men witnessed the demonstration as representatives of the political order around Ishido. Naga’s decision to kill them would consequently do more than settle a personal grievance. It would also decide whether those witnesses could carry knowledge of the regiment’s methods back to Ishido. Naga later acknowledged both motives: he wanted to recover his honor and repay the insults directed at his father and himself, but he also said he could not risk Ishido learning what the battlefield display had revealed.

The musket demonstration

The demonstration first lets Jozen misread the new force. Its attackers appear disorganized, and its men carry no swords. Jozen objects that samurai without swords would be massacred. The display then resolves into five tightly ordered phalanxes, each four ranks deep and one hundred men wide. Three formations advance while two remain in reserve forty paces behind.

On command, the attackers halt and fire together. The front rank kneels to reload as the following ranks fire over it in turn, producing successive volleys rather than a single discharge. Jozen initially believes the defenders are being killed, but the ammunition is blank and the combatants are acting out the battle. The simulation nevertheless makes the method legible: disciplined ranks can keep firing as other ranks reload, turning firearms into a coordinated system rather than individual weapons.

The exercise also stages the apparent failure of that system. When the defenders reform, commit their reserves, and charge with swords and spears, the musket formations break and flee. Jozen and his men join in the scorn. Then the fleeing soldiers regroup on command in a V formation and resume firing. The charge falters and stops. The demonstration ends with the participants sorting themselves out; the mock casualties rise, and there is laughter, groaning, limping, and some genuine injury. Jozen congratulates Yabu, saying in effect that he now understands what the others had meant. The performance has converted ridicule into recognition—and shown the onlookers why the formation matters.

Naga defies Yabu

The transition from staged combat to execution is abrupt. When one of Jozen’s men lunges at Naga from behind, twenty muskets fire at once, killing him. The shooters kneel to reload while the second rank prepares. Yabu demands to know who ordered live ammunition. Naga identifies himself and claims responsibility.

Yabu then orders Naga to release Jozen and his men and return to his quarters until Toranaga can be consulted about his insubordination. Naga refuses. He declares that Jozen must die first and that the others must die as well. Jozen invokes the Regents’ protection, arguing that his political standing makes the killing pointless. Naga answers that he is restoring his honor and repaying the insults. He also insists that Jozen’s men would have had to die because the battle display cannot be allowed to reach Ishido.

Jozen reveals that he has already sent a message by pigeon at dawn. Naga’s response is to have an old samurai 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. These objects turn Jozen’s claim into a failed attempt at protection: the message is stopped, and the messenger has already been killed. When another of Jozen’s men attacks, the muskets fire again, killing him and mortally wounding a man beside him.

Yabu refuses Omi’s offer to order his own men to attack. He judges that resistance would achieve nothing: Jozen and his men are already doomed. He gives Naga one last order to release them. Naga refuses again. Yabu accepts that the killing will proceed and tells him to report when it is finished, leaving the act unmistakably an insubordination rather than an order from Yabu.

Deaths and consequences

Jozen’s execution is deliberately prolonged. He is allowed to run, then bayoneted, released to run again, and hamstrung. After being allowed to crawl, he is disemboweled slowly and left screaming. The humiliation reverses the earlier scene in which he had laughed at the musketeers: the man who confidently interpreted the mock battle is now powerless under the force whose secrecy he threatened.

The surviving attendants meet death differently. Several kneel and prepare for ritual seppuku, with comrades serving as their seconds and decapitating them as they reach for their knives. Hirasaki Kenko instead makes a formal protest over Jozen’s death and the deaths of his men, then performs seppuku himself. Naga picks up Kenko’s head, cleans it, and orders that it be washed, wrapped, and sent to Ishido with full honors and a report of Kenko’s bravery. The report preserves an act of courage even as Naga destroys the party that witnessed the demonstration.

For the final young samurai, there is no second left. Naga sees that he has done his duty to his comrades and signals one of his own officers, Osaragi Nampo, to serve in that role. The young man accepts, and his death is quick and painless. This accommodation stands in sharp contrast to Jozen’s torture: Naga enforces a brutal decision against the group but permits a formal act of honor for the last prisoner. After the heads are collected, Jozen briefly seems to revive, his hands trying helplessly to close his wound; he is left for the dogs from the village.

The episode makes the regiment’s secret and its human cost inseparable. The demonstration shows that disciplined volleys can stop a charging force even after appearing to break; the execution ensures that this lesson cannot safely be carried to Ishido. Naga’s revenge, his defense of military secrecy, and his defiance of Yabu converge in one action. The ritual, reported death of Kenko and the painless death of the last man further distinguish formal honor from the cruelty inflicted on Jozen, without softening the violence that makes the new weapon system politically consequential.