That's not entirely true. Toranaga needs the Anjin to keep the Portuguese neutral in Japan's affairs. So long as they fear Blackthorne can expose their trade route and blow open their exclusivity, they will implore Toranaga to geld the Anjin. The burning of the ship is the act of gelding. It brokers peace with the Portuguese. Without the Anjin, the Portuguese have no need to parlay with Toranaga. With the Anjin, they are forced to the table with Toranaga. Moreover, Anjin will provide a naval force or at least the threat of one. This makes the other Regents respect (even if over-estimating) Toranaga's prowess and military might. Anjin is both an ace in the hole and a straw man at the same time. Thus, Anjin holds great value.

Well, he's based on Tokagawa Ieyasu. Since there won't be a season 2, I'll say how that story ends. The sequel to the show is the 200 years of the Tokagawa Shogunate. So yeah, you could see him as the villain. He definitely seized power from the rightful Shogun, the heir commited seppuku. That said, he also retired after 2 years and handed the Shogunate to his son, so that there would be no civil war over the succession. It was as much as family legacy in a Tywin Lannister way as personal lust for power.

@@victorpradha9946 In other words the Anjin is just there to keep his enemies distracted. As long as the portugese are distracted by the Anjin they don't care about him. Plus the portugese being distracted means that their 2 puppets in council of regents are also distracted

But he also does it because he lives in an age of constant civil war and he wants to create a Japan that is at peace. He ultimately wants to end all the killing that is going on, but he is going to extreme lengths to get there. You can see him as a villain, but you can just as easily see him as a hero.

Not to mention he is killing and brutalizing villagers over a ship he secretly burned.

Then, who's the "good" guy here?

@@CrniWuk I believe there's no good guy here. Just who has the justified mean to conduct all the misdeed.

Whoever wins. Blackthorn says it early in the series.

@@DeptalJexus the council of regents are the good guys since they always knew toranaga was up to no good and just wanted power for himself , they were defending the peace of the realm.

@@Unregistered.Hypercam.2. didnt the real person give hundreds year of peace after all this?

More like Dorian Martell

Not really Tywin, he wasn't as brutal as him.

@@stevem2323 He had one of his most trusted advisors and oldest friends commit seppuku to sell his plan, he sacrificed Mariko to manipulate Ochiba even though her son is probably good as dead, and he used his owns son's death to further his own desires....seems pretty damn brutal to me lol

@@chargerscharlie1 When you put it like that sure, but not as Tywin, killing children, babies, women and children and people slaughtered at the wedding. Those people wanted to sacrifice for him and it's kind of complicated in Japanese culture, sense od duty for their lord etc.

​@@stevem2323 he was beheading every Christian in Ajiro before he found the culprit responsible for burning Anjin's ship. He did. He burned Anjin's ship.

Beautifully said.

@@SD-kw2bnit really was

He will use Hamon is S2 and get his stand in S3

He had a dream about wearing armor he’d never needed to use

*When you say tyrant, what you really mean is “the great unifier”*

If you actually knew history you'd know that Japan enjoyed decades of peace because of this "tyrant".

@@killbill5486 *centuries of peace

@@killbill5486that doesn’t mean he can’t be a personally bad person lol, the system is just gamed to endorse brutal acts

He was a dictator. Dictators are arguably tyrants because if you oppose them they will behave like a tyrant. There was peace only because nobody was left to oppose him. That’s just how the culture was in japan.

The show had a lot of intrigue. Yabushige was just comedy through and through...lol

@@arnoldmuvadi2364 And he was also one of the most human characters. He wasn't driven by ambition, just survival. He wasn't broken like Mariko or Fuji, or....or Buntaro actually. He wasn't driven by ambition like Anjin and Toranaga, who are basically the same. Look at Toranaga's bonehead son, bound by the romanticism of their warrior culture, despite all the generals and actual veterans being really tight lipped about how bad war actually is. Or Omi, who appeared to just be a normal soldier dealing with a crummy job. Yabushige was a bro there to not get killed, that was his goal. He failed but at least he died with his honor intact AND with remorse. Though that man was a true grunt master, a grunt artist, if you will.

that was my favourite part of the show especially when he said its Toranagin time before cutting off yabushitge's head

@@elliotreivaxnah I’m pretty sure he said “ it’s shogun time “ then cut off yabushige head

And the he shoguned all over the headless body

Ironically his biggest criticism of both Yabushige & John Blackthorne was that they were both short sighted, Yabushige thought before he died that perhaps his grand goal was to become Shogun but Toranaga's vision went even beyond that, he dreamed of a unified Japan enjoying a new era of peace & prosperity with his city Edo being at its center. Yabushige saw to the horizon but Toranaga was seeing & envisioning beyond the horizon.

@alexsurber3424 nice analysis. He definitely saw further than that horizon. If someone like yabushige had some how become sho gun, turmoil and chaos would continue.

Making lasting peace is worth it.

@@InnaSpace777 Something i just realized recently, but i kinda understand now why he kept John Blackthorne around, although in many ways he viewed both John & Yabushige as both being equally short sighted John was different in at least one way, John's belief in what victory could do to achieve one's dreams & visions, even if he went about achieving it poorly, but from Toranaga's point of view he was still at his core right & arguably saw something that even he didn't see despite being the master of trickery who could outwit his opponents. So when Toranaga finally did achieve victory he kept John around even though he perceived him as a hopeless fool made to be his servant through force & manipulation through the web of lies he created, but this was only possible through Toranaga's newly gained power, & his newly gained power was only obtained through the realization he arrived at because of him. John i would say was walking irony in his eyes hence why he says he keeps him around because it makes him laugh & also something of a good luck charm i suppose, kind of like Elon Musk's Dogecoin, something he created purely as a joke to make fun of crypto currencies with no real goal in mind for it to become successful, but getting a kick out of it if it did happen to become successful because of a joke he made making fun of the very behavior the coin was designed to mock.

That's what Yabushige said to his nephew right at the beginning about Toranaga.

@@voidw4lkeryup… he let him know right then he knew about his treachery from the start…

Its funny that Toranaga does the exat oposite, he is ONLY telling him the truth bcs he is about to die… and that speaks to both their characters. Toranaga understood the importance of keeping his true motives hidden from everyone else. This show is amazingly written

That line means Yabushige's nephew was a stitch.

Agreed. Many of this people don't just understand, since Toranaga knew and live during the Sengoku Jidai which was basically close to living in hell to an ordinary person. Sacrifices maybe high, but at the end he made his dream a reality.

That is often the case for most historic/period series as most people have little to no knowledge of the actual history.

“Tyrant”, “villain”, Ieyasu must be rolling in his damn grave lmao

@@sirlongshanksthelongshank8786 if they read about Tokugawa Ieyasu's story they'd never mention those words. Dude was so loved by many during that period as he wasn't a tyrant like the other Daimyo

Can you explain?

@@VmsRms Yoshii Toranaga is based off of real life Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, people keep writing off Toranaga as some villain or evil tyrant yet in reality, the Tokugawa shogunate brought relative peace and growth to Japan for over 200 years. Furthermore, people seem to have this perspective over Toranaga as if he is supposed to be some saint who has no stain on his morality when in reality he just did what he had to do to win. Wars are not won by honor, not most of the time.

No not really. You need to learn to control your emotions, something lords not to mention everyone else in Japan would’ve had to have mastered, plus if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re right and you’re the only one who can save Japan (or you country) you’ll risk everything and sacrifice everything to do so. It doesn’t make him a psychopath, it makes him a smart, calculating, patient and beyond that caring. Caring to sacrifice your friends and family to get rid of the rot and corruption to actually help the people of your country.

Narcissistic people love LOVE to voice what they do etc… Toranaga doesn’t do that he is patient and very controlled… you can say he is cunning but not narcissistic

@@tarn1135great observation

@@tarn1135 sounds like a psychopath to me....pls research my statement...

He brings long term peace to a warring Japan. Nothing wrong with that. Ishido is assassinating opponents in case you've already forgotten this "detail".

He literally is lol. His historic counter part later annihilated the successors entire bloodline and become the new shogun.

@@johnson7156 True but lets be honest, the Toyotomi clan were never going acquire the Shogunate as they were low born. It was either Tokugawa or Ishida that were going to get the power and it turned out to be Tokugawa as he played his cards right as he always did throughout his life. Dude must've had godmode on when you look at all the scenarios that he somehow survived.

@@guneytopal7076 I think Toyotomi's hope was to make the title irrelevant. The position was vacant from 1588 to 1602, and my guess is he planned to keep it that way for long enough that no one would care about it anymore. Eventually, Japanese clans would come to accept the position of Chancellor (which a low-born like him could and *did* hold) as the de-facto ruler of Japan.

@@johnson7156 Yeah, but the Toyotomi clan was being unreasonably difficult after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. Tokugawa Ieyasu tried to get Hideyoshi's heir (Toyotomi Hideyori) to acknowledge him as shogun, but his regent-mother refused to allow it. And then when the boy became an adult, he himself refused to unambiguously acknowledge the Tokugawa shogunate. The Emperor himself granted that title to Ieyasu and his clan. At that point, you've got to admit you've lost the battle for supremacy and accept the peace offering. But he didn't. Instead, he started recruiting an army. At that point, you're asking for it. No one wanted a return to the bad old days of civil war.

@@danclassic7065 I don’t think they are being unreasonable, more like desperation. Unlike other highborn, their lowborn origin make them having nothing to fall back on to and will soon fall into irrelevance if he decide to agree with Tokugawa.

“He will have no banner” means he won’t have an army to fight with

That a TV show can weave depth of character like this into a few episodes is a rare treat these days. Disney or Netflix couldn't have made it. Sometimes the price of peace is very high, Toranaga brought 200 years of peace and an end to a century of civil war so he paid a very high price indeed. If he hadn't acted the wars would have continued, more death and suffering, more chaos and when the Americans come 200 years later to forcibly end Japanese isolation they'd have found a nation on the brink. In his mind, the only way to stop the violence was to take control. It worked. There's a lot of comparison to Tywin Lannister because guys that win often have to do some really nasty actions. I'm NOT a proponent of the ends justify the means, but in Toranaga's case he played the game of thrones and won, and the benefit for the country was centuries of peace. The question is, did he really care or was all this for himself? Do those goals have to be exclusive? There's a saying: Strong men bring Good times, Good times bring Weak men, Weak men bring Hard times, Hard times bring Strong men. Toranaga was strong, the 200 years of peace and isolation brought good times but also weakness, the American intervention brought a correction and the rise of the Japanese empire, defeat of Russia and China and the horror of WW2 Pacific conflict. Then there was peace again and now are faced with a neighbour that would turn Japan into a vassal if it could. Arguably that phrase was as true for Japan 300 years ago as it is for all of us today and sometimes we have to ask ourselves what we're prepared to sacrifice for the peace and prosperity of others? Gang violence, Tyrannical Govts, Global Corps that see their customers as consumer slaves, some might even argue we all need Strong Men right now?

Not shown in the episode sadly

In the series it doesn’t show or say anything about that but yes, after the battle he captures ishido and hurries him up to his neck

And after randos sawed his neck, he died very old

after this Toranaga went sicko mode and changed japan to what it is today a unified nation.

@@srai5333 The Commodore Perry comes along and f*cks it all up. lol

She didn't help him .... She just wouldn't let her child lead Ishidos army. He was a young child ,she didn't do that to help Toranaga .

Trump supporters are retarded.

Maybe Emperor Palpatine, bring an end to the war "and we will have peace"? I need to read the book, but did the guy do this for himself, his country or both? Are these aims exclusive? The result was an end to civil war and 200 years of peace and prosperity until the Americans showed up. With guns. Probably screaming USA USA ... I mean do I need to go on lol? Love that Toranaga isn't a 2D villain but a person with a lot of motivations. It's tough to imagine the turmoil of civil war but for some loosing a son and a couple of trusted 'friends' to end it all, might just be worth it. Oh and you get to be absolute ruler [sort of] as a bonus! Sold!

What a strange thing to say. You sound lost.

Well they all said the same thing about the book, then the 1980's TV show ... some things never change. Hopefully some will do research and maybe get a taste for history, wouldn't that be cool?