Toranaga’s public submission to Nakamura was an act of apparent defeat that secured a new political position for him. Before the daimyos, he offered his sword, lands, honor, and heritage, bowed into the dust, and begged to serve Nakamura and his house forever. In Toranaga’s recollection, the gesture was not the end of his ambitions: he had already gained what he wanted and planned for, and the submission opened the way to a consequential exchange of territory, allegiance, and symbols of authority.

The bargain behind the submission

Toranaga remembers Nakamura pressing him to choose between becoming a vassal and refusing the offer. The choice carried more than a change in title: Nakamura demanded that Toranaga place himself beneath a new liege, while the promised rewards included the Kwanto once it had been conquered. Toranaga’s public abasement followed this private bargain. Before the assembled daimyos, he made his service appear unconditional, offering not only his lands but also his honor and heritage.

Nakamura accepted the submission, took Toranaga’s lands, and then granted him the Kwanto as a fief to be awarded after its conquest. He also ordered total war against the Beppu for their insults to the Emperor. The reversal made the scene more than a declaration of obedience: the surrender led to a new territorial claim and a military mandate, while the public display gave the arrangement a visible form before the daimyos.

The sword and the restored standing

Nakamura’s gift to Toranaga was a sword from an Imperial treasury, made centuries earlier by the master swordsmith Miyoshi-Go. It had belonged to Minowara Yoshitomo, remembered as the first of the Minowara Shōguns. The weapon connected Toranaga’s new position to an earlier line of rule. Alongside the Kwanto, it made the outcome tangible: Toranaga had submitted, yet received both a great fief and an object associated with shogunal authority.

The episode’s contrast between humiliation and reward is sharpened by the public setting. Toranaga bowed abjectly before the assembled lords, but the outcome of that gesture was not simply dispossession. Nakamura’s grant of the Kwanto and the historic sword turned submission into a route toward renewed power, even as the order to wage war against the Beppu attached that grant to a future conquest.

Toranaga’s recollection and the interrupted design

The submission returns during a later private conversation with Yabu, when Toranaga offers him rule over Izu, Suruga, and Totomi if Toranaga does not lose the war. He asks whether Yabu will become his vassal. Yabu refuses that status: he is willing to be Toranaga’s ally and leader’s follower, but insists that Izu remain his own. He grounds his refusal in an oath to his father and in the Taikō’s confirmation of Izu as a hereditary fief for his family.

That exchange throws the earlier submission into relief. Toranaga had once publicly accepted the position of vassal to Nakamura, whereas Yabu draws a boundary around his hereditary lordship. The contrast does not erase the difference in their circumstances; it reveals how allegiance, land, and inherited obligation remain contested even between prospective allies.

Toranaga’s memory then moves beyond the bargain to the births that changed its consequences. Lady Ochiba gave birth to a boy, and after Nakamura’s first son died, Yaemon was born as well. Toranaga recalls that this development ruined the plan. The submission had gained him the Kwanto and the sword of a famed predecessor, but the succession it was meant to serve did not remain as he had expected. Its ending is therefore double-edged: a public defeat became a political gain, while a later birth reopened the question of who would inherit power.