Piss on the bargain

“Piss on the bargain” is Toranaga’s irreverent name for sealing a political agreement through a literal bodily act. The phrase turns negotiation into spectacle: Toranaga and Lord Yabu expose themselves on a high parapet and mix their urine over the garden below. The ritual is at once comic, perilous, and solemn in its function; the crude gesture gives physical form to a promise between two men whose political trust cannot rest on ceremony alone.

The Bargain Made Physical

Lord Yabu first pledges obedience by bushido and invokes the life of his mother, wife, and future posterity. Toranaga answers, “Let’s piss on the bargain.” He leads Lord Yabu onto the parapet, seventy feet above the inner garden, where even a slight touch might send them falling. Hiro-matsu watches aghast as the two men perform the act together. The danger makes the scene more than a joke: their agreement is enacted at the edge of death, in a setting where both the bodily exposure and the risk of a fall are unmistakable.

A Political Precedent

Toranaga recalls that his last bargain sealed in this fashion was with The Taikō, when The Taikō decided to give him Kwanto, the Eight Provinces. The grant was not a simple reward: the Hojo still held the territory, and Toranaga had to conquer it. In return, he immediately surrendered his hereditary fiefs of Imagawa, Owari, and Ise. Toranaga describes the exchange as a good bargain for both men, then points to its outcome: within a year, they had conquered the Hojo and taken more than five thousand heads. The story casts the ritual as the seal on a reciprocal political undertaking whose benefits depended on action and whose cost was borne in war.

Meaning and Limits

Toranaga’s recollection also magnifies his own role. He claims that The Taikō would never have become The Taikō without his help, and suggests that Lord Yabu might now help him in the same way. The ritual’s bawdy plainness therefore accompanies a serious argument about political power: bargains are not merely words but commitments to change the balance of rule. Yet Lord Yabu distinguishes between helping Toranaga become sole Regent and making him Shōgun; the pact does not erase that limit. The expression holds both sides together—the comic, taboo-breaking gesture and the grave political obligation it is meant to seal.