Jozen rides in

Twelve days on, Ishido's lieutenant Nebara Jozen rides in under the Regents' cipher: Lord Ito Teruzumi is the fifth Regent, the Council meets in twenty days, and Yabu is summoned to Osaka. Yabu panics; Omi, gambling his life, argues that Ishido is a peasant who ran in Korea, that the Council is not yet legal, that Ito could be assassinated and Jozen's messengers and pigeons made to vanish. Blackthorne trains the regiment all morning and dictates a war manual all afternoon; in the bath with Mariko he learns kanji ("a roof with two women means discord"). Fujiko has a pheasant fried for him; over six flasks of saké the three grow flushed and silly. At the fortress Yabu lays the whole gun strategy open to Jozen, and Naga, taunted, declares he would outlaw guns and put the barbarian to death. Jozen hides a second pigeon in the brush. In the dark, Mariko slips under Blackthorne's mosquito net.

Clavell's domestic chapter, with the war arriving by cipher. The bath, the kanji lesson and the drunken pheasant dinner build the household the earthquake will destroy. Omi's counsel to Yabu, a peasant's Council and a disposable envoy, is his first move as the real strategist. The mosquito net closes the chapter on a secret.