Yabu forms a musket regiment

Yabu forms a musket regiment by converting captured European weapons into a secret military project that challenges the sword-centered ideals of samurai warfare. The plan joins Blackthorne’s knowledge of European tactics to a disciplined unit of gunmen, while its hidden reserve and internal safeguards reveal that Yabu expects both a larger war and treachery among his own allies.

Weapons and a New Strategy

The project begins with the wealth aboard the captured ship. After discovering its armaments, Yabu orders the muskets repacked in their crates and concealed under nets or sacking. He intends to move the weapons secretly to his castle at Mishima, assigning Mura to provide porters and Igurashi to supervise the transfer. The inventory is formidable: five hundred muskets, abundant gunpowder and shot, twenty cannon, thousands of cannon balls, and crates of fire arrows. Yabu’s excitement comes not merely from possessing them, but from seeing a new kind of military power within reach.

Firearms had long sat uneasily within Japanese martial culture. The Portuguese introduced muskets and gunpowder when they first reached Japan in 1542, and Japanese manufacture followed within eighteen months. Yet guns remained a novelty, used mainly for hunting, while bows were considered more accurate. Warfare was imagined as ritualized individual combat, with the sword regarded as the more honorable weapon. The samurai code of Bushido demanded honorable life and death, unquestioning service to a feudal lord, and fearlessness before death; firearms seemed to contradict that ideal.

Yabu’s long-held theory is that guns could decide the coming war if they were used collectively rather than treated as individual weapons. He envisages five hundred selected samurai trained as a unit, spearheading twelve thousand conventional troops, with cannon operated by specially trained men. The innovation is therefore organizational as well as technological: discipline, coordinated fire, and specialist crews are meant to make weapons effective on a scale that isolated marksmen cannot achieve. Yabu’s question about Bushido remains unresolved; instead of abandoning the code, he presses ahead while recognizing the tension between inherited honor and military necessity.

Training and Secrecy

Yabu summons Igurashi, Omi, and four chief captains to set the training plan in motion. Igurashi is appointed commander, while Omi is to lead one of the hundreds. They also discuss how Toranaga’s men could be inducted into the units when they arrived, and how to neutralize them if they proved treacherous. Omi proposes a further precaution: three additional secret units of one hundred samurai each, trained on the other side of the peninsula as replacements and as a reserve against betrayal by Toranaga.

Yabu makes the safeguards personal and lethal. He says he will appoint five assistant officers for Toranaga’s men and give them responsibility for killing their commander if necessary. The signal for killing him and the other outsiders is Plum Tree. Igurashi is to select the men, but each must receive Yabu’s personal approval, and none is to know the overall strategy. The regiment is thus designed to contain the danger posed by its own uncertain loyalties: it is a force for war, but also a guarded structure in which information and command are tightly controlled.

Omi’s participation carries its own concealed threat. While helping prepare the project, he considers whom he should serve and whether Toranaga or Ishido could give him what he wants. He also savors the possibility of killing Yabu, provided the killing is coordinated so that his father or elder brother can take control of the clan and Izu. His role in building Yabu’s force therefore unfolds alongside a private succession calculation that makes the project’s emphasis on treachery more than theoretical.

Blackthorne as Instructor

Yabu recruits Blackthorne to teach his men to shoot and to explain how European armies fight. When Mariko notes that the guns will not arrive for six days, Yabu answers that he has enough weapons already and wants training to begin the next day. He asks for detailed instruction in European strategy, not simply a demonstration of how to handle a musket.

Blackthorne has fought on land in the Netherlands and France, and he agrees that he can train any number of men. His understanding of Japanese warfare has also been informed by Friar Domingo, who had studied both Japanese armies and the forces of the Spanish conquests. Blackthorne offers his assistance to Yabu and Toranaga, claiming he can make their armies unbeatable. Yabu promises to raise Blackthorne’s salary from Toranaga’s two hundred and forty koku to five hundred after a month if the information proves useful. Blackthorne, in turn, asks Yabu to rescind the decree against the village and to return his ship and crew within five months. The exchange ties military instruction to Blackthorne’s own precarious interests, without establishing that his requested terms are granted.

Tactical Proof and Significance

A later mock battle gives visible form to the method behind the regiment. Attackers gather into five disciplined phalanxes, each four ranks deep and twenty-five men wide, with three phalanxes forward and two held in reserve. The front rank fires together, kneels to reload, and yields the next volley to the ranks behind it. Though the ammunition is blank and the casualties acted, the sequence makes the effect of repeated, coordinated fire legible to the observers.

The demonstration also tests the formation against the samurai’s customary charge. The gunmen appear to break and flee before warriors with swords and spears, then regroup in a V formation and resume firing. The renewed salvos halt the attack; those watching recognize that under real conditions the charging force would have been slaughtered. The mock battle does not erase the conflict between firearms and Bushido, but it shows how formation and training can make that conflict a matter of battlefield power. Yabu’s project makes the musket regiment a wager on a changing form of war—and, through its concealed reserves and kill signal, a reflection of the political distrust in which that wager is made.