Yabu’s submission to Toranaga makes a precarious political bargain visible: Yabu pledges himself and Izu, while Toranaga accepts his service without surrendering the power to reclaim the province. The scene’s decisive gesture is not only the kneeling vassal or the assembled host, but the Murasama blade Yabu presents as a token of filial duty—the sword he says killed Toranaga’s grandfather. Its disposal, followed by a grant of Izu and a tax settlement, binds personal allegiance to land, military strength, and an inherited threat.

Political Background

The pledge takes shape amid a looming war between Toranaga and Ishido. Earlier, Toranaga had been in Osaka for a confrontation with Ishido while Yabu waited in Yedo, where Toranaga’s absence placed the independent daimyos and their families under a quiet form of hostage pressure. The formal Council of Regents was meant to govern during the minority of the Taikō’s heir, Yaemon, but Toranaga and Ishido held the real power. Yabu’s position was therefore not a simple choice between two secure authorities: he was a regional lord navigating a contest in which his own safety and territory depended on which giant prevailed.

That danger is also visible from below. Mura thinks of Yabu as cruel and dishonorable, a ruler who cheats villages of their rightful shares of both the catch and the crops. He fears the villagers are trapped between Toranaga and Ishido and treated as pawns by both. Yabu’s eventual pledge may settle where Izu stands in the approaching conflict, but it does not erase the burdens that his rule has imposed on its people.

From Private Offer to Public Pledge

Toranaga first approaches Yabu privately, asking whether he would like to rule Izu, Suruga, and Totomi if Toranaga does not lose the war, and whether he would accept Toranaga as his liege lord. Yabu answers that he wants the provinces very much. The offer makes the bargain explicit: territory is the reward under discussion, but it is conditional on Toranaga’s victory and tied to personal vassalage.

The later public pledge gives that private negotiation military form. Toranaga asks Yabu what he has decided. Yabu says he will not go to Osaka until Toranaga does and has ordered all Izu mobilized. He argues that Ishido will impeach Toranaga first, and that if the Kwanto falls, Izu will fall with it. He invokes a solemn bargain and the Kasigi honor in keeping bargains to declare that he is on Toranaga’s side.

Toranaga replies that he is equally honored to have Yabu as an ally, but the narration makes clear that this is a lie: Toranaga is pleased because Yabu has once again done what Toranaga planned for him to do. On the following day, Yabu assembles a host and asks Toranaga to review it. Before all his men, he kneels and offers himself as a vassal. When Toranaga asks whether he acknowledges him as feudal lord, Yabu answers that he does—and includes all the men of Izu in the pledge. A private promise has become a public act witnessed by the force whose allegiance it claims.

The Sword and Its History

Still kneeling, Yabu offers the Murasama blade as a gift and a token of filial duty. He identifies it as the sword that murdered Toranaga’s grandfather. Toranaga initially cannot accept the claim. Yabu recounts the sword’s history, which had passed down to him, and explains that he only recently learned its true identity. He then summons Suwo, whose testimony reaches back to the death itself.

Suwo says that no one saw Obata’s father break the sword or cast it into the sea. He swears that he served Toranaga’s grandfather, Chikitada, faithfully until the day Chikitada died, and that he was there. His account does not merely accompany Yabu’s gift; it supplies an eyewitness’s claim that the blade had not been destroyed as supposed. Toranaga accepts it, and the sword seems to quiver with malevolence in his hand.

The blade carries a larger history of violence for Toranaga. He recalls that another Murasama blade nearly cut off his arm when he was six, and that a third decapitated his first-born son. These remembered injuries make Yabu’s gift more than a political emblem: it brings a family’s accumulated fear of the swords into the moment of allegiance. Toranaga, who had dismissed the legend that certain swords possessed a will to kill, now believes it.

Disposal, Reward, and Political Meaning

Yabu proposes that such a befouled blade should not be allowed to survive and offers to take it out to sea and drown it, so that it can never threaten Toranaga or his descendants. Toranaga accepts the proposal and orders him to do it immediately. Only after the sword has sunk out of sight in deep water, witnessed by Toranaga’s men, does Toranaga’s heart begin to beat normally again. The public witness matters: the dangerous object is not simply removed but seen to disappear.

Afterward, Toranaga thanks Yabu, orders taxes stabilized at sixty parts for peasants and forty for their lords, and grants Yabu Izu as his fief. The reward confirms Yabu’s place within Toranaga’s order, but the arrangement leaves ultimate authority with Toranaga: all power in Izu belongs to him if he wishes to take it back. Thus the pledge is both an advancement for Yabu and a consolidation of Toranaga’s control. The scene joins military mobilization, personal homage, a family relic, and the allocation of land in one transaction, while leaving the war—and Toranaga’s own fate by the sword—unresolved.