Toranaga–Yabu alliance

Toranaga and Yabu’s alliance is a bargain between powerful men who need one another but do not mistake necessity for trust. It joins Toranaga’s bid to defeat Ishido with Yabu’s determination to preserve Izu and build a new kind of army. Its promises are substantial—territory, military command, and a place beside Toranaga—but its durability is always in question. Yabu can imagine serving Toranaga without surrendering his hereditary domain; Toranaga, in turn, must make that distinction work for his campaign while guarding against the possibility that Yabu will choose a more profitable patron.

The alliance and its terms

Yabu’s value to Toranaga lies partly in his position and partly in a military plan he has held in reserve. While reflecting on the wealth taken from the ship, Yabu sees that it has given him power he had never expected to possess. That change in his fortunes sharpens an older ambition: to make firearms decisive through disciplined collective use rather than treating them as novelties or instruments for hunting. In the world described around him, Japanese warfare has long prized individual, close combat, with the sword regarded as honorable and the gun as cowardly and contrary to Bushido. Yabu’s plan challenges that inherited understanding by making organization, training, and coordinated fire—not individual swordsmanship—the basis of a new battlefield advantage.

His original conception is large in scale: five hundred chosen samurai with muskets, trained as a unit, leading twelve thousand conventional troops, with twenty cannon operated by specially trained men. The force is meant to make guns decisive in the coming war. This is not simply an arsenal acquired from a foreign ship; it is a proposal for changing how soldiers are organized and how power is won. For Toranaga, the proposal makes Yabu useful as a military ally. For Yabu, the prospect of controlling the guns promises influence that his hereditary title alone cannot provide.

Their agreement takes shape in private, under the threat of a larger conflict. Toranaga asks Yabu about the Amida Tong and how its members might be employed, but Yabu tires of the probing questions and concludes that Toranaga may intend to take his head. Rather than pleading, he offers himself to death and asks that their talk end. Toranaga instead raises the possibility of granting him Izu, Suruga, and Totomi if Toranaga wins the war. The offer turns an apparent execution into a negotiation over land, survival, and command.

Yabu accepts alliance and leadership by Toranaga, but draws a hard boundary around Izu. He will remain subordinate to Toranaga, put his life and possessions on the alliance’s side, and fight as an ally; he will not give away authority over the province he inherited. He grounds that refusal in his oath to his father and in the Taikō’s confirmation of Izu as the hereditary fief of Yabu and his successors. His answer defines the alliance’s central limit: loyalty can be pledged, but Yabu will not purchase a place in Toranaga’s coalition by renouncing the source of his own authority.

Shared enemies and competing calculations

The common enemy is Ishido, but the two men do not approach the danger from identical positions. Toranaga knows, through spies in Ishido’s household, of a bargain that would include responsibility for the assassination of his sons Noboru, Sudara, and Naga. The disclosure makes the political contest personal and existential. Toranaga asks whether Ishido’s offer contains anything beyond support, and Yabu declares his intention to commit all his strength to the ally whose success he is promising to secure. He argues for a sole Regent during Yaemon’s minority and regards war between Toranaga and Ishido as inevitable.

Even while professing that commitment, Yabu continues to calculate. Toranaga wonders whether Yabu has disclosed his plan to Ishido and notices a practical danger in the proposal: if it went forward, the men would be divided equally between Toranaga and Yabu. The question is not merely whether Yabu will fight, but whether he will be accepted as a subordinate, whether the force will be divided in a way Toranaga can trust, and whether the alliance would leave Yabu with room to pursue his own advantage. When Yabu asks if Toranaga would accept him as leader under his plan, the question exposes the hierarchy embedded in their bargain. Toranaga rejects the proposed arrangement by declaring the bargain void in a crude, deliberately physical gesture: he and Yabu urinate on it. The act does not end their relationship; it marks a renegotiation of its terms and reinforces how little formal language alone can secure between them.

Toranaga instructs Yabu to keep the discussions secret and leave within two or three days. Secrecy is essential because their understanding is not yet a stable public alignment. Later, Yabu says that the arrangements discussed in Osaka have been carried out and invites Toranaga to stay with him for several days, inspect the two hundred and fifty men selected for the Musket Regiment, and meet their commander. The invitation offers a concrete opportunity to advance the military partnership, but also places Toranaga in Yabu’s territory with only fifty guards.

Toranaga refuses to treat hospitality as proof of safety. He considers himself more vulnerable in Yabu’s power than in Osaka, where Ishido is at least predictable and constrained by rules. He believes Yabu’s bargain may have no lasting force if Yabu thinks Ishido can offer better concessions, and calculates that handing Toranaga’s head to Ishido could bring Yabu more than Toranaga is willing to promise. Their alliance therefore runs on a persistent tension: Yabu must be powerful enough to serve as a genuine ally, but that same power makes him dangerous to Toranaga.

Guns, territory, and the price of loyalty

Yabu’s calculations are tied to the fate of Izu. Toranaga argues that Ishido’s eventual power would endanger both Yabu and the province, since Ikawa Jikkyu covets Izu. He also tells Yabu that Ishido does not yet hold power and explains why he resigned. Toranaga presents political developments as changing the terms of Yabu’s choice: Ishido and Jikkyu have been neutralized, there is no functioning Council until it again has five members, and Yabu now has time to train his guns. Toranaga says that Yabu owns Suruga and Totomi and promises that Jikkyu’s head, along with the heads of his kin, will follow in the coming months. These are assurances attached to Toranaga’s expectation of victory, not proof that every promised consequence has already occurred.

The weapons and the territorial offers reinforce one another. Yabu’s musket project gives him military leverage; Toranaga’s promised grants and support give that project a political setting in which it can develop. Later, Yabu takes satisfaction in his new position in the eastern armies, second only to Toranaga. He expects to get the guns back quickly, sees himself as out of Ishido’s trap, and regards Toranaga’s famous sword as evidence of his elevated standing. At the same time, Toranaga’s departure by galley leaves Yabu watching him go. The alliance has produced visible tokens of confidence and rank, but the scene also leaves Yabu calculating what he can recover and what his new position can yield.

The scale of the military undertaking becomes clearer as the regiment is put through its motions. Five phalanxes form, each four ranks deep and twenty-five men wide, with three phalanxes ahead and two in reserve. The attackers fire in sequence: the front rank shoots and kneels to reload while the ranks behind it fire over them. Under the pressure of sword-and-spear attacks, the formation appears to break and flee, only to regroup in a V formation and resume its volleys. The demonstration presents discipline and coordinated fire as a system rather than a single discharge. Its implication is that a conventional charge could be stopped by men who know when to fire, withdraw, reform, and fire again. That tactical promise explains why control of the regiment matters so much to Yabu—and why it is also a source of leverage within his relationship with Toranaga.

A conditional partnership

Yabu’s allegiance remains subject to immediate pressures. When a summons threatens him with death if the Council convenes in his absence, he says that he needs at least two months to train the regiment and that even a trained force could not defeat all the other lords if Toranaga and he stood alone. He therefore concludes that he must support Ishido. His stated reasons are concrete: the threat to his clan, the time required to prepare the soldiers, and the disparity between their prospective force and their opponents. The statement exposes the gap between a pledge to fight for Toranaga and a decision made when Yabu believes the alliance cannot protect him.

Yuriko counters this case by comparing what each side would mean for Yabu’s future. Toranaga favors ships and trade and would give Yabu Jikkyu’s province; Ishido, by contrast, would give Izu to Jikkyu and close the Empire. She points to Toranaga’s gift of his sword and his control of the guns as signs that Yabu has already been treated as a principal ally. Her argument turns the alliance from an abstract oath into a choice with consequences for Yabu’s inherited domain, military advantage, and standing. The need for such persuasion shows that Yabu’s decision is not settled by one private bargain. It has to be renewed against fear, rival offers, and the risk of losing his clan.

Significance of the relationship

The alliance is both a political compact and an experiment in power. Yabu wants to preserve a hereditary fief while expanding his independence through firearms; Toranaga needs Yabu’s strength without granting him a position from which to dictate the terms of the war. Their negotiations move between vows of service, promises of territory, intelligence about assassination, and the practical handling of guns and troops. Even the bargain’s rejection is expressed bodily, as if its worth can be measured by what remains once its words have been discarded.

The relationship also links military change to political allegiance. A disciplined musket regiment challenges the older ideal of honorable individual combat, but it also gives Yabu a reason to bargain as more than a provincial lord. Toranaga’s support can make the new force part of a larger campaign; Yabu’s command of it can make him indispensable. Neither man can simply absorb the other. Their alliance persists as an unstable exchange of protection, military capacity, land, and status—strong enough to shape their preparations for war, but never so secure that either can stop watching for betrayal.