Nebara Jozen’s Mission to Anjiro brings a concealed military innovation into the open: Yabu’s effort to make firearms, despite their low status under samurai convention, decisive on the battlefield. Sent from Osaka to investigate Yabu’s training, Jozen is shown a carefully staged exercise that makes the new tactics legible even to a skeptical observer. Yet the inspection is also a contest over information: Yabu’s men reveal the plan while watching for leaks, and Jozen tries to carry its details back to Ishido.

Background and Mission

Twelve days after the preceding events, a courier and ten samurai rode into Anjiro under the cipher-bearing flags of the Council of Regents. Their horses were lathered and nearly spent. Their leader, Nebara Jozen, was a senior, ruthless lieutenant of Ishido; his Gray uniform was mud-stained, and fatigue reddened his eyes. He refused food and drink and demanded an immediate audience with Yabu. The hurried arrival and his insistence on an answer established that the matter was politically urgent, not a routine visit.

Jozen asked why Yabu was drilling Toranaga’s soldiers alongside his own and why the troops were practicing with so many guns. Yabu was affronted by Jozen’s bluntness, but kept his temper. He understood that the visitor had specific instructions and that his rudeness suggested Ishido possessed unusual leverage. More troubling to Yabu was the implication that security had failed again: knowledge of the training had reached Osaka.

The stakes were sharpened by Yabu’s larger design. After finding the Erasmus’s armament, he had ordered its contents moved secretly to his castle at Mishima: five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, five thousand cannonballs, and crates of fire arrows. He imagined five hundred selected samurai trained to fight as a unit, spearheading twelve thousand conventional troops, with specially trained crews operating the cannon. The scale of the weapons mattered, but so did the organization he proposed to build around them.

A Challenge to Samurai Convention

The mission unfolds against a military culture in which firearms had long been treated as a novelty. The Portuguese introduced muskets and gunpowder to Japan in 1542, and Japanese manufacture followed within eighteen months, but guns were initially used chiefly for hunting. Bows were considered more accurate, while warfare was understood as ritualized individual combat in which the sword carried greater honor. Under Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, the ideal joined honorable fighting and death to fearless, unquestioning service to one’s feudal lord. Guns, by contrast, were regarded as cowardly and dishonorable.

Yabu’s scheme does not resolve that conflict; it makes the conflict operational. He knows that the new weapons challenge the inherited prestige of the sword, and he has questioned the ghosts of his ancestors about Bushido even as he presses ahead. The mission tests whether musket discipline can overcome not only an enemy formation but also the assumptions that define honorable combat. Jozen’s visit gives Yabu an audience to persuade and a potential witness who can expose the plan.

The Demonstration

Jozen heard Yabu, Omi, and Igurashi describe the strategy openly. Naga, Toranaga’s son and the second-in-command, remained silent, stiff-backed and watchful. Jozen called the plan astonishing and asked Naga what he thought of its new mobility. Naga answered that his father believed every possibility in war should be considered. The exchange placed the exercise within a tense alliance: Toranaga’s troops were being trained with Yabu’s, while a member of Toranaga’s family observed the display without endorsing it outright.

The demonstration began by inviting the defenders to read the scene according to familiar expectations. When attackers dismounted, warriors stepped forward in equal numbers to meet them. Then the apparent disorder resolved into five disciplined phalanxes, each four ranks deep, with twenty-five men in each rank. Three formations advanced while two waited forty paces behind. The attackers stopped on command and fired together. The front rank knelt to reload as the second fired over it, followed in turn by the third and fourth. Successive volleys brought down more defenders in the staged battle, filling the valley with apparent confusion and cries of alarm.

Jozen initially believed the attackers were killing their own men. He was told the ammunition was blank and the casualties were acting, but asked to imagine the same attack with live bullets. The exercise then turned against the musketeers. The defenders re-formed, committed their reserves, and charged with swords and spears. The phalanxes broke and fled, drawing scorn from Jozen and his men. But the retreat was part of the demonstration: after running one, two, and three hundred paces, the musketeers regrouped on command in a V formation and fired again. The charge faltered and stopped. By the end, those watching understood that, under real conditions, the two thousand attacking defenders would have been slaughtered. Weapons were gathered and the pretend dead rose; laughter and groaning followed, and some participants limped or had been genuinely hurt in the exercise.

Intelligence, Secrecy, and Consequence

Jozen’s understanding of the strategy did not mean Yabu controlled what would reach Osaka. Yabu had developed a surveillance service: Jozen’s first carrier pigeon was observed, intercepted by falcons near the mountains, and its message decoded. It reported that events at Anjiro were as described and named Yabu, Naga, Omi, and the foreigner as present. Yabu did not disclose that he knew of the interception, preserving the appearance that Jozen’s communications remained private.

After the demonstration, Jozen prepared another report. Under a mosquito net in his brush lean-to, he rewrote his earlier message on thin rice paper and added that the five hundred guns were lethal and that massed surprise attacks were planned; he noted that a fuller report had already been sent with Masumoto. He attached the new message to a pigeon and handed the bird to one of his men, instructing him to hide it in the brush until dawn and warning him that watchers might be nearby. The evidence establishes the attempt and the precautions, not the success of this second dispatch.

The mission therefore ends its documented course with both sides trying to manage the same secret. Jozen has seen enough to recognize the military danger in Yabu’s formations, while Yabu’s surveillance has already shown that the visitor’s reports can be intercepted. The mock battle makes the new tactics visible; the hidden pigeon makes clear that their consequences will be decided as much by intelligence and political timing as by gunfire.