Rule requiring five regents for the council to exercise power

The Rule requiring five regents for the council to exercise power makes the Council of Regents’ membership a condition of its authority, not a mere matter of ceremony. Toranaga exploits that condition when he resigns: with only four members, the Council is hamstrung, and Ishido cannot yet wield it as a functioning body. The temporary gap buys Toranaga time, but it is fragile. Once all four regents agree to appoint Ito Teruzumi, the Council becomes legal again and prepares to meet in Osaka, turning a vacancy that had obstructed power into a route for Ishido’s return.

The Council’s Authority and Its Limits

The rule is made legible through its consequences. After Toranaga’s resignation, Yabu recognizes that the Council could take away Toranaga’s fief and life if it chose. The threat is substantial precisely because the Council has the authority to impose political and personal consequences; its inability to act does not erase its powers, but suspends their effective use while its membership is incomplete.

The distinction matters in a political order where lawful authority and immediate control are not identical. Toranaga accepts that the Council can strip him of his domain or condemn him, yet his resignation changes whether the Council can presently exercise that power. The vacancy thus creates neither safety nor a permanent exemption. It creates a contested interval in which the threat remains, while the institution that could carry it out is unable to function as before.

Toranaga Turns Resignation into Leverage

Yabu first reads the resignation as catastrophe. He tells Toranaga that he has destroyed his cause, endangered his vassals and allies, buried Izu, and effectively murdered Yabu. His alarm reflects the apparent political logic: without his place on the Council, Toranaga seems exposed to the remaining regents and to Ishido’s growing influence. Yabu also understands that the danger reaches beyond Toranaga personally, since the Council could take his fief and life as well.

Toranaga instead explains that the resignation has disabled the Council. Until it again has five members, he argues, there is no Council capable of exercising its authority; Ishido is therefore neutralized for the moment, as is Ikawa Jikkyu, whose ambitions threaten Yabu’s position in Izu. Toranaga presents the vacancy as time Yabu can use to train his guns and consolidate his holdings in Suruga and Totomi. The offer is pointedly practical: rather than answer Yabu’s fear with reassurance alone, Toranaga connects institutional paralysis to military preparation, territory, and the prospect of defeating Jikkyu.

The maneuver depends on Yabu accepting Toranaga’s account before he can fully weigh its risks. Toranaga calls for an honor guard and offers Yabu his long sword as a token of friendship, interrupting the moment in which Yabu might recognize that Toranaga’s own vulnerability could still be valuable to him. The vacancy affords Toranaga leverage, but does not make him invulnerable: a rival might gain enormously by delivering him alive to Osaka. The rule buys time, not immunity.

Restoration Through Ito Teruzumi

The Council’s paralysis proves temporary. When Jozen brings Ishido’s message to Yabu, he reports that Ito Teruzumi is taking Toranaga’s place and that Ishido will become the new President of the Regents. Yabu had understood Toranaga’s claim to mean that the four remaining regents could never agree on a fifth. The appointment overturns that assumption: the four agree, and their agreement supplies the missing member needed to restore the Council’s legal standing.

Ito is described as a minor daimyo from Negato Province in western Honshu, but his ancient family descent makes him acceptable as a regent. Yabu’s private assessment is that Ito is ineffectual and likely to act as a puppet. The appointment therefore shows that restoration does not require an especially powerful or independent fifth member. What matters for the Council’s operation is that the vacancy be filled in a way the four regents can accept; the political character of the appointee remains a separate question.

Jozen says the Council will meet again on the first day of the new moon, in twenty days, and that the other daimyos are also being summoned to Osaka to renew their oaths of fidelity. An imperial authorization for a Flower-Viewing Ceremony accompanies the summons, giving the meeting a public and ceremonial frame as well as a political one. The restored Council is not simply an abstract legal body: its renewed authority is to be enacted through attendance, oath-taking, and an assembly of the daimyos.

A Rule That Creates a Political Clock

The vacancy gives Toranaga a temporary advantage, but the appointment of Ito starts a countdown. Yabu realizes that the Council is legal again and that the meeting is twenty days away. In response, Omi proposes that Toranaga should have Ito or another regent assassinated at once. The suggestion exposes the pressure created by the rule: if the Council’s ability to act depends on having five members, removing a member might appear to reopen the vacancy. Yet it would also mean turning a constitutional weakness into a direct act of political violence. Yabu’s shocked reaction marks the proposal as an escalation, not an ordinary administrative solution.

The rule therefore structures conflict through membership itself. Toranaga’s resignation interrupts the Council’s authority; the four regents’ agreement restores it; and the approaching meeting gives both sides a deadline. Its force lies in that cycle of interruption and reconstitution. A single seat can hold the state’s decision-making machinery in suspense, but filling it can rapidly convert an apparent stalemate into renewed coercive authority. The episode makes the Council’s law a resource that political actors try to disable, restore, and exploit, rather than a neutral procedure standing outside their struggle.