Toranaga and Yabu’s Secret Alliance Negotiations turn a private dawn conversation into a military and political bargain: Yabu offers Toranaga his forces and an unorthodox gun strategy, while Toranaga offers him a possible expansion of his lands. The agreement is deliberately ambiguous. Yabu promises obedience as an ally and accepts Toranaga as his leader, but refuses to become his vassal or surrender his hereditary authority in Izu. Sealed with mixed urine on a castle parapet, the pact joins two men whose interests overlap without making their ambitions identical.

Background and Stakes

Yabu arrives at the negotiation with a weapon that is also a secret. After discovering the Erasmus’s cargo, he had ordered its armaments moved clandestinely to his castle at Mishima. He counted five hundred muskets, twenty cannon, five thousand cannonballs, gunpowder, shot, and crates of fire arrows among the European supplies. His excitement arose not simply from the wealth but from the possibility of making it the basis of a new army.

The idea challenged the prevailing martial code. Although the Portuguese had introduced firearms and gunpowder to Japan, guns had long been treated as a novelty, less accurate than bows and dishonorable beside the sword in warfare shaped by ritualized individual combat. Yabu had privately imagined five hundred chosen samurai trained to operate muskets as one unit, advancing ahead of twelve thousand conventional troops and supported by twenty specially operated cannon. In his view, firearms could decide the coming war; the old question of whether such weapons accorded with Bushido remained unresolved.

The negotiations also take place in the shadow of political violence. Toranaga asks Yabu about the Amida Tong, whose secret cells train members for a single assassination and whose methods make identifying a sponsor exceptionally difficult. Yabu explains how a prospective employer might solicit the society through religious sites and intermediaries, pay its demanded sum in advance, and receive only a guarantee that an attempt will be made within ten days. Asked what it would cost to kill Toranaga, he says that no amount of silver in Asia would tempt him; asked what another patron might pay, he estimates as much as one hundred thousand koku. The exchange makes the prospective alliance feel less secure than the lethal political environment in which it is being struck.

The Bargain and Its Limits

Toranaga tests Yabu’s ambitions directly, asking whether he would pay a hundred thousand koku to become Shōgun. Yabu dismisses money as beneath him but admits that, if the office were attainable, he would sacrifice his own life and those of his wife, mother, kin, and retainers—except his son—to claim it. He is equally uncompromising about his feud: he wants Ikawa Jikkyu’s head and rejects the value of Jikkyu’s province when Toranaga asks about Suruga. Toranaga then raises the possibility of granting Yabu Suruga and perhaps Totomi as well, changing the conversation from a test of appetite into a concrete offer.

Yabu is prepared to place his strength behind Toranaga, including through assassination if necessary, and argues that war with Ishido is inevitable. His stated purpose is to help Toranaga become sole Regent while Heir Yaemon is still a minor. Yet he draws a sharp line between accepting Toranaga’s leadership and accepting feudal subordination. He will commit his life and possessions to their common cause, but says Izu remains his own hereditary domain. The Taikō had reaffirmed that fief for Yabu and his successors, and Yabu had sworn not to take another liege lord before the heir came of age. His pledge is therefore substantial, but not unconditional surrender.

The military proposal gives the alliance practical substance. Yabu explains his plan for five hundred gun-samurai and twenty cannon, all trained and deployed as coordinated units. Toranaga asks why he should not offer the plan to Ishido instead; Yabu answers by distinguishing Toranaga as the more experienced and wiser leader. Toranaga, for his part, suspects that Yabu may already have disclosed the plan to Ishido and proposes that the troops be divided equally between them, with Yabu in command and Toranaga’s appointee as second-in-command. Yabu accepts. He also agrees that Anjin-san will train the men as gunners and cannoneers, while remaining in Yabu’s custody under Toranaga’s conditions and responsibility.

The promised territorial reward is tied to the plan’s success: Yabu expects Suruga and Totomi to become part of his fief if Toranaga wins, with Totomi expressly dependent on the outcome. Toranaga asks whether Yabu will accept him as leader and obey him with all his honor. Yabu assents by invoking Bushido, the Buddha, and the lives of his mother, wife, and future descendants. Their exchange turns broad declarations of loyalty into operational commitments—command, training, custody, territory, and a shared prospect of war—while leaving Izu’s status outside Toranaga’s grant.

The Parapet and the Precedent

Toranaga seals the bargain with a bodily act rather than a formal document. He steps onto the castle parapet, seventy feet above the inner garden, and beckons Yabu to stand beside him. They urinate together and watch the liquid fall into the garden below. The ritual is at once intimate, vulgar, and dangerous: the men stand close enough to be toppled by the slightest touch, while their agreement is made visible through a gesture that rejects the solemnity of conventional ceremony.

Toranaga recalls sealing an earlier bargain this way with the Taikō, when he accepted the Kwanto as his fief despite having to relinquish his hereditary lands in Imagawa, Owari, and Ise. The Hojo still held the Kwanto, so the grant required conquest; within a year, Toranaga says, they had taken five thousand heads and destroyed the opposing power. The precedent presents the crude ritual as a sign of bargains whose promises must still be tested in war. It also gives Yabu’s prospective service a historical scale: Toranaga suggests that he, too, might help make a greater ruler, as Toranaga once helped the Taikō.

Toranaga denies that he seeks to become Shōgun, despite his enemies’ accusations, and describes sole regency as the political objective. The denial does not erase the ambition Yabu has just confessed or the larger contest behind their agreement. Instead, it distinguishes the office Toranaga claims not to want from the extraordinary military authority he is actively assembling. For Yabu, the arrangement offers territory and the possibility of decisive influence without requiring him to renounce his own lordship.

Secrecy, Military Consequences, and Doubt

Toranaga orders the agreement kept secret and tells Yabu to leave within two or three days. Yabu is to travel by ship with the guns and Anjin-san; Hiro-matsu is told to prepare the galley, and reports that the ship is ready with the guns and powder still in its holds. Yabu privately interprets the arrangement as a windfall: he has obtained the weapons and the foreign gunner, and believes the delay before Toranaga can wage war may give him six months. His gratitude is sincere, but so is his calculation of what he has secured for himself.

Hiro-matsu objects after Yabu leaves. He is ashamed of the bargain and angry that his own counsel seems to count for so little; he sees Yabu as having manipulated Toranaga and resents the insolence of Yabu wearing his Murasama sword in Toranaga’s presence. He also privately resolves never to honor the agreement himself. Toranaga notices the sword but does not answer the larger accusation. The scene therefore closes not with a united command but with a pact whose witnesses already doubt its honor and durability.

The plan’s later demonstration shows why the bargain matters beyond the private room. In a mock battle, musketeers form five disciplined phalanxes, fire successive volleys as the front ranks kneel to reload, retreat under attack, and regroup in a V formation before firing again. The ammunition is blank and the assault is staged, but the observers recognize that under real conditions the coordinated formation could have killed two thousand attackers. Jozen, initially appalled by the apparent absence of swords and convinced the formation would be overwhelmed, congratulates Yabu once he understands the demonstration. The display gives tangible form to the strategy Yabu had proposed: the new weapon is not merely a cache of foreign guns but a system of collective training capable of confronting the established prestige and battlefield methods of the samurai.