Toranaga’s decision to launch Crimson Sky turns a looming political defeat into an immediate military gamble. After learning that Ishido has neutralized the Council of Regents and that his enemies may unite against him, Toranaga chooses not to wait for the season to favor conventional campaigning. He will move while the rains still make the plan seem impossible, trusting surprise, mobility, and firearms to change the balance before his opponents can assemble their strength.

The Trigger: Sugiyama’s Death and the Council’s Collapse

The news reaches Toranaga in a message from Kiri, carried by the last surviving carrier pigeon. The others had been killed when traitors set fire to the pigeon coop; this bird escaped because it had been sick and Kiri had been nursing it privately. Its survival makes the report both urgent and precarious: Toranaga is receiving a decisive account through the final working link in a disrupted communications network.

Kiri reports that Lord Sugiyama resigned as planned, but Ishido’s ronin trapped him near Osaka before he could escape. Ishido offered a bargain: Sugiyama was to delay his resignation until after the Council of Regents convened and could legally impeach Toranaga; in exchange, the Council would grant Sugiyama the Kwanto, and Ishido would release him and his family. Sugiyama refused to betray Toranaga. Ishido then had Sugiyama’s children and consort tortured in front of him. They were killed, followed by Sugiyama himself. Kiri acknowledges that there were no witnesses and that the account is hearsay; Ishido denies involvement and claims he will pursue the murderers.

The message also explains why the killings do not preserve the Council’s authority. Toranaga and Sugiyama had arranged for copies of Sugiyama’s resignation to be distributed: Kiri sent them to Kiyama, Ito Teruzumi, and Onoshi, another openly to Ishido, and four more among the daimyos. Ishido initially argued that Sugiyama had not truly resigned and that the Council could still meet. The copies defeated that claim. By the time Toranaga receives the report, the Council is legally dissolved, even as Ishido’s violence has made the political danger more immediate.

Toranaga reads the message to the assembled commanders and retainers, withholding only the private portion concerning Kiri and Lady Sazuko. They sit in a semicircle around him on a plateau, without guards close by and with sentries posted two hundred paces away. His willingness to share the news openly gives the gathering the character of a council at a moment when his regular counselors are absent in Yedo. He asks those present to advise him about what will happen and what he should do.

The Threat and the Decision

Toranaga’s forecast is not that the Council will remain powerless. He expects it to gather an overwhelming allied force once the rains end. He believes that force will attack the Kwanto while bypassing Izu, then take Izu afterward. Only when he is dead, he predicts, will the daimyos turn against one another. The immediate danger, in his view, is precisely that his enemies have a reason to unite before their own rivalries resume.

He explains their motive in terms of fear. He has too many enemies, holds the Kwanto, and has fought for more than forty years without losing a battle. They believe he intends to become Shōgun, although he says he does not; he also insists that he is no threat to Yaemon. The irony, as he presents it, is that his reputation and position make him appear to endanger the heir even when he denies that ambition. He regards the coming war as unnecessary, but sees that his opponents may wage it against him regardless.

When Naga asks what he will do, Toranaga answers with the campaign’s name: Crimson Sky. His next decision is the one that makes it an immediate offensive rather than a plan for a more favorable season. He will not give the enemy time to gather. The rain is no longer a reason to wait: the army will reach Kyoto wet, hot, and stinking. Toranaga invokes surprise, mobility, audacity, and timing, and agrees that Yabu was right about the guns being able to blast a way through the mountains.

The commanders spend an hour discussing whether a large-scale campaign in the rainy season is feasible, an unprecedented choice in their deliberations. Once Toranaga has announced his decision, Naga and Buntaro appear particularly enthusiastic. Omi remains reserved and unconvinced. Toranaga discounts Igurashi as bound to follow Yabu’s orders and regards Yabu as treacherous but still a pawn; he considers Omi the only one whose judgment is worth watching. After sending the others away, he keeps Mariko and asks her to find out tactfully what Kiku’s contract would cost. The shift from a public decision for war to a private question about Kiku leaves the scene with two ambitions in view, without making the personal request a stated part of the campaign plan.

Firearms, Discipline, and the Campaign’s Logic

The decision draws force from a military possibility developed earlier through Yabu’s secret interest in firearms. After discovering the weapons and ammunition aboard the captured ship, Yabu counted five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, five thousand cannonballs, and abundant ammunition. He imagined five hundred selected samurai trained as a unit, leading twelve thousand conventional troops, with cannon crews drilled for a particular use. The scale matters: in this conception, guns are not merely added to an existing force but organized into a disciplined formation that could make a new strategy possible.

That strategy challenges the established ideal of combat. Firearms had reached Japan through the Portuguese, and Japanese manufacture followed quickly, but guns were long treated as novelties, used mainly for hunting; bows were considered more accurate. Warfare was bound to individual hand-to-hand combat, with the sword regarded as the more honorable weapon. The use of guns was considered cowardly and contrary to Bushido, which demanded honorable conduct, loyalty to one’s lord, fearlessness before death, and the preservation of one’s name. Yabu’s private question about what Bushido would make of his theory captures the conflict between inherited martial honor and the weapon he believes may decide the next war.

The Anjiro demonstration supplies a practical model for Toranaga’s reference to guns in the mountains. The regiment forms five disciplined phalanxes, each four ranks deep, with three formations forward and two held in reserve. At command, the front rank fires and kneels to reload as the ranks behind fire over it. When the defenders’ charge drives the musketeers back, they retreat before regrouping in a V formation and firing again. The demonstration uses blank ammunition and staged combat, but the observers are meant to understand its consequence: under real conditions, the two thousand defenders would have been slaughtered. Crimson Sky’s rainy-season gamble therefore rests not only on a weapon’s destructive force but on training, formation, and the ability to keep firing while an enemy advances.

Significance and Limits of the Choice

Crimson Sky is presented here as a decision, not as a battle already won. Toranaga’s immediate aim is to deny his enemies the time they need to unite and attack his lands; the plan’s stated route and conditions remain spare. He expects to reach Kyoto in the rain and says the guns will open a way through the mountains, but the assembled men spend an hour testing feasibility rather than recounting a completed march or victory.

The choice binds political urgency to military change. The Council’s legal dissolution does not remove the coalition Toranaga fears; Sugiyama’s fate demonstrates the cost of resisting Ishido, while the anticipated alliance threatens to overwhelm Toranaga if he waits. Against that threat, he places a campaign whose timing is deliberately audacious and whose weapons unsettle the conventions of samurai warfare. His declaration makes the danger immediate: the coming contest will be decided not only by loyalty and position, but by whether disciplined firearms can turn a seemingly impossible season into an advantage.