Chapter 1611: An Increasingly Urgent Prelude

"Father?" Empress Okiko looked up at her father. "What exactly is going on?"

"Is everything ready outside?" The Cloistered Emperor ignored his daughter, keeping his eyes fixed on Nijo Yasumichi.

"Everything is ready. We can take His Majesty and flee the Imperial Palace right now. There are people waiting outside to receive us, and together we'll use the chaos to leave Kyoto. Once we're out of Kyoto, whether we hide in the mountains or head south, as long as we can delay the shogunate's search parties for a while, the shogunate will soon be too preoccupied to worry about us anymore."

The Cloistered Emperor nodded slightly, but he showed none of the excitement Nijo Yasumichi had imagined — instead, his expression was solemn. "Everyone has worked hard. Today's events are only the beginning. I ask you all to guard against arrogance and impatience; there will be far more that needs to be done in the future."

"Yes!" Nijo Yasumichi and the others bowed their heads in unison.

Just then, the men Nijo Yasumichi had sent to retrieve the Three Sacred Treasures came running back. In the dim candlelight, the rusted objects gave off a strange gleam.

Without even glancing at them, Nijo Yasumichi bundled the objects straight into a cloth wrap he had padded beforehand with some soft cotton.

To the common people of Japan, these were sacred treasures embodying the entire nation, vessels of divine power and national destiny — but to the Cloistered Emperor himself, and even to Nijo Yasumichi, they were nothing more than mundane objects that required no special treatment. If they could be taken along, all the better; if not, they could simply forge another set themselves.

At that moment, the clamor outside rose again — clearly, people were rushing this way.

"Your Majesty, everything is in place. We must leave at once. Let's not create further complications; the shogunate's men will catch on sooner or later." Nijo Yasumichi hurriedly urged the Cloistered Emperor.

"Yes… yes…" The Cloistered Emperor's breathing quickened. Then, with a sudden movement, he seized Empress Okiko by the hand and pulled her toward the exit.

"Father?" Okiko winced in pain and asked in alarm, "Where are we going?"

"Don't ask so many questions — just follow your father!" The Cloistered Emperor shouted at her, dragging her out as he went.

Okiko's eyes widened as she stared at her suddenly hostile father, bewildered. Recently, because he had been personally tutoring her, the image of her father in her heart had greatly improved. Now, though she did not understand what was happening, that newly rebuilt image had come crashing down with a thunderous collapse.

With an instinctive flash of insight, she suddenly realized that the gentle, kindly face her father had shown her before might have been nothing but a mask.

Yet even heartbroken, she had no choice but to be forcibly pulled along by the Cloistered Emperor.

The palace was now in an uproar, palace attendants from all quarters rushing toward the main hall — but how could they possibly stand against this group of men, long prepared and bearing weapons? They could only watch in horror as these men, holding the Cloistered Emperor and the Empress hostage, made their way out.

For centuries since the Heian period, though the imperial court had lost its authority and the imperial family and court nobles had together been reduced to puppets of the warrior houses, whoever held power had at least maintained a surface respect for the imperial house. Storming directly into the palace to abduct the Emperor was something utterly unprecedented — who could ever have imagined it? Moreover, with the Tokugawa shogunate now so deeply entrenched and its rule over the realm growing ever more secure, who would think the imperial family was still worth exploiting?

No one had been prepared. Even those who tried to resist could only end up dead or wounded. They watched helplessly as this group departed, and from time to time someone broke into loud wailing.

The Cloistered Emperor kept silent, following his loyal ministers step by step. He had lived here for so many years and knew every tree and blade of grass intimately, so even in the darkness he walked with a light, swift stride.

This was his home — the place where, so many years ago, his ancestors had held the reins of state and issued commands to all Japan. Yet now it was also the cage that imprisoned him. To return as one who truly ruled all under heaven, he had to leave, for now.

Though his face was grave, his breathing grew heavier and heavier — partly because he had always lived in pampered ease and his physical strength was pitifully weak, and partly because his heart was now too violently stirred.

Yes — every step forward brought him closer to freedom, closer to restoring the glory of his ancestors… The Imperial Palace was small, so the group soon arrived once more before the Gishu Gate.

Once they passed through this gate, they would have left the Imperial Palace and set foot upon a road from which there could be no turning back.

"Your Majesty! Your Majesty!" Just as the Cloistered Emperor was about to leave, a shrill cry rang out from behind.

The voice was far too familiar, and the Cloistered Emperor could not help but pause briefly and look back.

In his line of sight, Empress Dowager Tokugawa Kazuko was rushing after them with others. Her voice was full of frantic desperation. Though the torchlight was dim, from a distance she looked as if she had leapt straight from her bed, for she was dressed very thinly, and she seemed to be weeping.

"Your Majesty…" Empress Dowager Kazuko cried out as she charged forward at a speed unimaginable for an ordinary person.

The moment their eyes met, the Cloistered Emperor abruptly lowered his head, unable to meet her gaze.

"Your Majesty, do not leave this place!" Her steps too hurried, Kazuko tripped over a stone and fell to the ground. "Do not be deceived by those villains!"

She had fallen hard and could not get up for a moment, but the cries from her mouth never ceased — she was clearly frantic and grief-stricken to the extreme. Seeing this, the Cloistered Emperor felt, for an instant, that he could hardly bear it.

And yet, he did not stop walking.

"Your Majesty! Okiko… Okiko is still so young! Spare her! Do not drag her into this as well — Your Majesty, she is your daughter!"

As if she already understood the Cloistered Emperor's resolve, Kazuko no longer urged him to stay, only begged him to return Okiko to her.

Yet even this wish could not be granted. Though Okiko stopped in her tracks, the Cloistered Emperor seized her hand and forcibly dragged her outward.

"I want my mother! I want my mother!" Okiko struggled desperately, but she could not break free of her father's grip and was pulled along with him.

Seeing that she was about to be taken by force, she threw all caution aside, opened her mouth, and bit down on her father's hand.

"Ah!" The Cloistered Emperor cried out in pain and immediately released his grip.

Empress Okiko dashed at once toward her mother, but before she had taken more than a few steps, Nijo Yasumichi behind her caught hold of her and yanked her back by force.

"A daughter of the Tokugawa house, indeed!" Nijo Yasumichi cursed inwardly, and he showed her no courtesy whatsoever.

"Let me go, let me go!" Okiko's shoulders ached fiercely, and she burst into loud sobs.

Nijo Yasumichi ignored her pained cries, and heedless of the fact that she was the reigning Empress, he pulled her directly into his arms.

"Your Majesty, are you all right?"

"It's nothing, no matter — let us go at once." The Cloistered Emperor shook his head, though blood was already faintly seeping from his hand.

"Your Majesty! Okiko!" Amid the unending wails, Kazuko's voice was especially piercing, as if it could stab straight through the eardrums.

The Cloistered Emperor raised his head once more and glanced toward her, then steeled his heart and turned his head sharply away.

"Let us go quickly, and waste no more time!"

The party set off again at once and soon reached the gate. Because Okiko would not stop crying and fussing, Nijo Yasumichi simply stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, so that in the end all she could produce were muffled sounds — half like shouting, half like weeping.

As they drew farther and farther from the Imperial Palace, the sound of Empress Dowager Kazuko's weeping and her piercing cries grew more and more distant, until at last they could be heard no more.

Is this freedom? The thought suddenly flashed through the Cloistered Emperor's mind.

His hand still throbbed with a dull pain, yet he felt not the slightest resentment toward Okiko.

Only at the moment of escape did he realize that some things weighed far heavier in his heart than he had ever imagined. Kazuko's piercing, desperate cries still echoed in his ears, as if they were right before him…

He turned his head to look at Okiko beside him. She was now being carried forward in someone's arms. She had been crying and struggling moments ago, but after being snatched away, she had now ceased her resistance, merely lifting her head to gaze at the Imperial Palace growing ever more distant. Her eyes were wide open, but unfocused, her gaze utterly scattered, as if she had fallen into a daze.

The Cloistered Emperor suddenly felt a tightening spasm in his chest.

Yet he also knew that, with things having come this far, there was no turning back for him anymore. To achieve his goal, certain prices had to be paid.

After they fled the Imperial Palace, the greeters who had long been waiting outside led them through Kyoto's dark lanes and alleys, and amid the citywide panic they escaped from Kyoto.

When they had fled Kyoto and were about to vanish into the rural mountains and forests, the Cloistered Emperor looked back at Kyoto one last time. This was the city where he had grown up, and the national capital of Japan for nearly a thousand years. The great fire still had not been extinguished; on the contrary, it was growing ever larger, the flames sweeping upward into the sky, lighting up the heavens until they glowed.

This ill-fated city was today suffering yet another round of calamity — just like this country itself.

But… all these tribulations would end when he returned here next time, and then, under his governance and that of his ministers, it would shine forth with its brilliance once more, becoming the most radiant capital of this nation…

"Wait till I come back," he said softly, not knowing whether he was speaking to this city or to a certain someone in it.

As this group vanished into the darkness, the night wind swept through the mountain forest, and everything returned to stillness, as if nothing had ever happened. Who could have imagined what tempestuous waves were brewing beneath this tranquility?

On that same day, urgent reports from both Kyushu and Kyoto were dispatched to Edo. Though neither place yet knew what had befallen the other, both already understood with stark clarity that a colossal storm was bearing down upon Tokugawa Iemitsu — who, ever since ascending to the shogunate, had known only peace and prosperity and had never endured a severe trial. A monumental test, the likes of which the Edo shogunate had never faced since its founding, was rushing at them out of the darkness.

From the very day the Great Han envoys in Kyushu vanished, they had dispatched men to scour the entire island for the mission's members, while simultaneously ordering, with the utmost urgency, the Kyushu daimyo loyal to the shogunate to assemble at once and mobilize every force they could muster to resist a potential Great Han attack. Though baffled by everything unfolding before them, these daimyo carried out the shogunate's orders, mobilizing all the samurai retainers and ashigaru soldiers within their domains.

Yet by now, the strength of each domain had already waned; they could not compare to the Warring States era, when vast armies could be levied from the fiefs at will. In such haste, they could scarcely produce any military force of significance.

In ancient Japan, warfare and the lower peasantry were kept strictly apart. War was a game for noble samurai, and armies dominated by their elite arms and weaponry. Peasants were confined to the role of producers and subjected to extreme oppression.

Later, during the era of chaos and warfare — particularly under the Muromachi shogunate in the Warring States period — powerful local clans everywhere sought to expand and contend for supremacy. They therefore abandoned many time-honored practices and no longer relied solely on elite samurai trained over many years, instead beginning to seek any means to expand their military strength.

Endless warfare, relentless taxation, and plundering across the land stripped vast numbers of peasants of their land or drove them to the brink of death. For those peasants dissatisfied with their lot, the upheaval of the age offered a single way out: joining the army. Many of them enlisted in the daimyo's forces and became low-ranking ashigaru. As the term "ashigaru" — "light-foot" — suggests, these peasant-born soldiers lacked armor and other equipment, and were even short on weapons. They could only rely on surviving one brush with death after another, accumulating experience in battles with appallingly high casualty rates, and climbing their way up through the army's ranks.

At the same time, with the massive influx of gunpowder weapons into Japan, the shape and methods of warfare began to change dramatically. Many powerful clans equipped themselves with firearms. These weapons required only the most basic training to use and possessed immense power, enough to greatly diminish the value of elite samurai trained over many years — and the ashigaru, born from the peasantry, naturally saw their status steadily rise by virtue of their numbers.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who would later become the paramount figure of the Warring States, was the son of an ashigaru. His father served in the army under Oda Nobuhide, father of Oda Nobunaga. Wounded in the leg during a battle, he was forced to withdraw from military service entirely. As a result, he lost his existing ties to the Oda clan and returned to being a peasant. His son Hideyoshi, however, continued to serve, gained the trust of Oda Nobunaga, rose steadily through the ranks, and ultimately became one of Nobunaga's top generals.

After Nobunaga's death, Hideyoshi, through a series of campaigns and political maneuvers, ultimately became Oda Nobunaga's true successor and went on to rule all of Japan. But the moment Hideyoshi achieved his goal, in order to consolidate his rule, he began to kick away the very ladder that had allowed him to climb to the top, moving to sever the link between the peasantry and the military. As his conquest of the nation neared completion, he issued the Sword Hunt Edict, ordering the confiscation of weapons from all peasants across the country. This was an extraordinarily bold move — no ruler had ever done such a thing before (in the earlier era of contending warlords, no one would have dared to so deliberately weaken their own military capacity). But thanks to Hideyoshi's immense power, the measure largely succeeded, not only in his own domain but elsewhere as well. Peasants were thus forcibly and gradually severed from military affairs, thrust back into their roles as producers and the exploited.

By the time Tokugawa Ieyasu established his shogunate and ruled Japan, far from reversing this trend, he pushed the policy even further. The domains were subjected to ever more restrictions, and their finances grew ever more strained. Under Tokugawa shogunate regulations, a daimyo with a fief of around a hundred thousand koku could maintain an armed force of only a little over two thousand men — and their equipment grew increasingly shoddy, sufficient merely to keep the peace within their own territory. Even the shogunate itself began to rely on the hatamoto — lifelong hereditary military officers — and their attendants as the core of its forces.

Thus, after the abandonment of large-scale mobilization, peasants had been entirely excluded from the military sphere. Moreover, with Japan experiencing no major wars for many years, a single generation — two at most — had been enough to make them forget the flames of war and the training of those days. Even if the domains now wanted them to fight, how could they, in such haste, be made into soldiers of an army?

Though the various domains were frantic with urgency, they could only hurriedly assemble their close samurai and attendants, scraping together a few thousand men within days and rushing them to Nagasaki — most of them poorly equipped. Furthermore, because the shogunate prohibited the domains from privately trading for weapons with foreign nations, their firearms had gone unreplaced for many years. Most were decrepit and decayed; whether they could even fire was an open question.

When they discovered that the men the domains had assembled were this shoddy and pathetic, Naito Tadashige and Soga Koyu did not know whether to rejoice at the success of the shogunate's policy of restraining the domains, or to despair at the dire predicament they now faced. They were caught somewhere between tears and laughter.

Yet however pessimistic they felt, what had to be done still had to be done. The two of them could only suppress the anxiety and fear in their hearts while earnestly setting about organizing the defense. As their place of residence and posting, Nagasaki harbor was naturally the top priority. They stationed the bulk of the assembled forces in Nagasaki, then began moving the remaining portion northward, hoping to provide some support to Fukuoka Domain — the Bay of Hakata, where the Yuan forces had twice landed in history, lay within Fukuoka Domain's territory, so Naito Tadashige and his colleagues naturally would not relax their vigilance there. Fukuoka Domain's own forces were also kept in place, with the plan being that these two key defensive zones would support each other if trouble arose.

Once the preliminary preparations of the pro-shogunate domains were largely complete, Naito Tadashige, with no time to consider anything else, began dispatching envoys to notify the other daimyo of Kyushu, calling on them to ready their forces at once and defend their home territories to prevent a Great Han incursion through any gap. This order likewise stirred up tremendous commotion.

Yet, to their great puzzlement, although every domain in Kyushu had by now been notified and was assisting the shogunate authorities in the manhunt, not a single one of the escaped officials from the Great Han trading post had been caught. It was as if they had all been spirited away.