The Lofty Castle

Synopsis

The terms of the ceasefire means that the second and third lines of defence at Osaka Castle would be demolished and the outer moat filled in. The inner moat was also filled even though that wasn’t part of the deal.

After the demolition of the defensive walls, Todo came as Ieyasu’s messenger to demand that all the vagabond samurai are to be exiled and Hideyori to leave the castle. But of course, Hideyori refuses and in turn ends the ceasefire.

With this news delivered to Ieyasu, he calls on all the feudal lords again to fight. Nobuyuki agrees with his reasons for fighting and even decides to end everything by killing Yukimura himself.

Tokugawa’s troops gather and the summer siege of Osaka begins. Yukimura leads the charge to try and hold off Tokugawa’s advance. Whilst he put up a good fight, the Tokugawa’s tremendous numerical advantage pushes them back and Ieyasu reaches Osaka castle for the final battle.

Thoughts

With the defences at Osaka gone it would only be a matter of time before Ieyasu made up some excuse to take on HIdeyori again. It was inevitable, anybody could tell Ieyasu’s intentions by taking out the defences. And with that completely unreasonable demand, he got the excuse he wanted. Because even if Hideyori accepted he knew then he was a dead man, once Ieyasu has Hideyori where he wants him, then all he needs is an ‘accident’ to have him killed.

You know, as this series near its conclusion, I may have said it before, but I don’t blame Ieyasu for what he did. Whilst yes he obviously wanted power and it was a blatant betrayal of the clan that he allied with. I feel, from the anime, that he didn’t believe that people like Mitsunari or Hideyori had enough support and/or power to unite Japan and that they wouldn’t be able to do a good job. Sure he thought that Hideyori would be powerful enough but with the low amount of support that Hideyori had, compared with the Tokugawa, and plus the fact that he was still young was probably enough for Ieyasu to think actually, I can do a better job of fulfilling Hideyoshi’s dream. And also, it could be this anime portrayal of him, but it didn’t seem like he was just a power hungry warlord either.

And in the end, someone has to unify the country, Ieyasu was just the one. It is a shame that he couldn’t ally himself with Hideyori to rule, but you’re always going to get conflict when two people hold such power.

Reminds me of Liu Chan, because Liu Bei told Zhuge Liang that if Liu Chan wasn’t a good leader then Zhuge Liang has the power to take over. From this anime it doesn’t seem like Hideyori’s as bad as Liu Chan, but he was still young and inexperienced and Ieyasu I guess didn’t want to wait and decided to get rid of him like Zhuge Liang should have with Liu Chan. But Zhuge Liang was too soft and couldn’t do it which meant he wasn’t able to unify China. I mean sure he might still not have been able to even if he kicked out Liu Chan but with The Sleeping Dragon in charge it would’ve been a completely different story.

This is all assuming you understand romance of the three kingdoms, if not then feel free to skip it as it’ll just read off like I’m plucking names out of thin air. Might be a little too late to say that as if you’re reading this blog in a ‘normal’ fashion then you probably already read it. But at least now you know where it came from.

Also, I think Ieyasu wants to rush to the end because he doesn’t believe Hidetada can end it himself and that if it came down to it, Hidetada is definitely worse than Hideyori in war times. However in peaceful times, a leader who doesn’t like violence is a good thing. Which was a little disappointing as I wanted to see Kotaro Fuma and Hidetada do something, but he just sulked which is not what I wanted to see and Kotaro didn’t appear.

NOTE:

You may be wondering where my season preview blog went, well, that’s in London, and I kinda forgot to copy it onto a USB to bring it with me home to edit. So unfortunately that’ll have to wait until I get back to London next Tuesday. It will be a little late, but not too late, still in time as the season will have barely begun.

Second thing, apologies that this took a while, I came on to type this up and noticed that on wordpress the classic editor had disappeared and only the horrendously designed new one was there. So I decided to wait a couple of days to see if I could get classic back, no I couldn’t. So I tried typing it up on the new editor and ran into a couple of problems regarding tags and category that resulted in me giving up and delaying it further. However today I finally found a temporary fix that allows me to edit in classic editor so I’m happily posting this without further issue. And this means the other blogs will come shortly too. I have written them, it’s only the stupid new editor that delayed me.