Naga-noh-Toranaga

Naga-noh-Toranaga’s significance lies in the tension he embodies: he serves his father faithfully, yet judges military innovation by the honor and human cost it may impose. As Toranaga’s son and a samurai expected to observe, obey, and learn, he brings a wary ethical counterpoint to Yabu’s plans for a new kind of warfare.

Identity and Background

Naga is Toranaga’s son and a young samurai whose position places him inside, but not in command of, the military decisions taking shape around him. When questioned by Nebara Jozen about Yabu’s proposed strategy, he explains that his father believes every possibility in war should be considered. Naga does not claim authority to decide which possibility will be used; he says he was sent to obey, observe, listen, learn, and test. His disciplined silence at first is therefore not assent. It marks the difference between his role as an observer and the judgment he later chooses to voice.

That judgment rests on a deep suspicion of firearms as instruments of war. The novel sets his stance against a wider tradition in which Japanese forces had adopted muskets after the Portuguese introduced them, while samurai warfare remained associated with individual hand-to-hand combat and the sword. Guns were regarded as dishonorable and at odds with Bushido. Naga’s resistance is not simply a refusal of novelty: he recognizes that firearms could transform the conduct of battle, and fears what that transformation would do to the people and code bound up in it.

A New Warfare and Its Human Cost

Yabu’s armament gave Naga-noh-Toranaga’s concern a concrete shape. After discovering the ship’s cargo, Yabu ordered five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, five thousand cannon balls, powder, shot, and crates of fire arrows carried secretly to his castle at Mishima. He wanted the weapons repacked and concealed, and imagined five hundred selected samurai trained to fight as one unit, leading twelve thousand conventional troops while a specially trained cannon corps supported them. For Yabu, this was a strategy for a new era; for Naga-noh-Toranaga, its effectiveness could not be separated from the kind of warfare it would create.

When Nebara Jozen pressed him for his judgment, Naga-noh-Toranaga allowed that surprise might win a skirmish, perhaps even a battle. The danger, he argued, began after that first success: every side would copy the method, and men would die in vast numbers, killed at a distance by attackers who might never know whom they had struck. Such deaths seemed to him not merely tactically ugly but severed from the reciprocal encounter and honor that gave combat its meaning. He doubted that Toranaga would authorize the plan in a real battle, while carefully distinguishing that forecast from any claim that his father had said so.

His alternative was not a simple defense of the existing order. Naga-noh-Toranaga agreed that a new era required new methods, but proposed using law to prevent firearms from remaking society. He would outlaw guns for anyone outside the samurai class and impose death on both a person caught with or trading them and every member of that person’s family in every generation; he would also prohibit their manufacture and import. He would bar foreigners from bringing guns ashore and confine foreign presence, apart from a few priests, to a single fortified trading port. Finally, he would put John Blackthorne to death so that the foreigner’s knowledge could not spread, describing that knowledge as a disease. The severity of this imagined program reveals how seriously Naga-noh-Toranaga took the threat: he sought to contain the military transformation by controlling its weapons, teachers, traders, and channels of entry.

Yabu’s demonstration to Nebara Jozen made the argument visible on the battlefield. The attackers formed five disciplined phalanxes of four ranks, each rank holding twenty-five men; three formations stood forward and two in reserve forty paces behind. They advanced together, halted on command, and fired in sequence, with the front rank kneeling to reload as the ranks behind it delivered their volleys. The demonstration used blank ammunition, but its staged casualties and noise briefly made the danger seem real. When the defenders finally charged with swords and spears, the musketeers appeared to break and flee; then, on command, they regrouped in a V formation and fired again. The mock battle ended with the spectators understanding that, under actual conditions, the two thousand defenders would have been slaughtered. Naga-noh-Toranaga’s warning about imitation and mass death thus stood beside a practical display of the very advantage that made Yabu’s innovation so difficult to dismiss.

Guarding the Household and Accepting Blame

When an assassin broke into Toranaga’s quarters and reached the room where John Blackthorne lay, Naga-noh-Toranaga intervened before the intruder could strike. Wearing only a loincloth, with his hair tousled, he leapt between Blackthorne and the attacker, sword raised, and ordered the man to surrender. The assassin instead invoked Amida and drove his knife beneath his own chin. Naga-noh-Toranaga then cut off the dying man’s head. His action protected Blackthorne and turned a confused night alarm into an immediate test of the household’s defenses.

Afterward, Naga-noh-Toranaga ordered a samurai to follow him and bring the head, already wondering how he would tell his father what had happened. His relief that Toranaga had survived was personal, but Toranaga’s response made clear that protection of the household was also a matter of collective responsibility. The guards on watch were demoted, forbidden to commit seppuku, and condemned to live publicly with their shame; the dead guards were ordered dragged through the castle and city to the execution ground. Toranaga held Naga-noh-Toranaga responsible as well, fining him half his yearly revenue because every samurai bore responsibility whether on watch or asleep. Naga-noh-Toranaga accepted the judgment and asked to be demoted, saying he deserved contempt for his failure. Toranaga refused that request and instead ordered him to leave for Yedo that night with twenty men and report to his brother. The episode joins Naga-noh-Toranaga’s willingness to act in danger with his readiness to accept the burden of command, even when he believes he has failed.

Political Position and Narrative Role

Naga-noh-Toranaga’s position in Yabu’s force is also a matter of political scrutiny. Through Nebara Jozen, Ishido asks why Toranaga’s son has been made second-in-command and what force he commands, while also questioning why John Blackthorne appears to be directing the training. Naga’s presence links Yabu’s military experiment to Toranaga’s house, making it difficult to treat the new force as a local undertaking detached from the wider contest for power.

Jozen’s visit carries the same political pressure into the coming Council of Regents meeting: Yabu is formally summoned to Osaka to renew his oath of fidelity, while Jozen explains that Toranaga has resigned and Ito Teruzumi will take his place as president. Against this shifting authority, Naga’s conduct remains carefully bounded. He says he was sent to obey, observe, listen, learn, and test, not to offer opinions; when he does speak, he explicitly marks his criticism of Yabu’s strategy as his own judgment rather than his father’s instruction. The distinction gives Naga a narrow but consequential role: he is both a son placed inside a rival lord’s military preparations and an observer whose independent assessment exposes the ethical and political costs those preparations may carry.