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A gold fan with a red sun on it, raised high on a pole. Ieyasu's men carried it so the army could see where he was. Behind it his officers sit on the ground, counting the heads brought in to them.

Two years ago the ruler of Japan died in his bed, leaving a five-year-old heir and a council of five regents sworn to protect him. Everyone understood the arrangement was a fuse. The eldest regent, Tokugawa Ieyasu, has spent a lifetime watching bolder men go first: he served beside Nobunaga, who conquered by fire, and Hideyoshi, who conquered by charm, and outlived them both by being neither. Against him stands Ishida Mitsunari, the late ruler’s brilliant, unloved administrator, a man who can move 100,000 soldiers’ rice by paperwork but has never won a battle. Through the autumn their coalitions have marched back and forth across the middle of Japan. Tonight, in cold rain, both armies converge by accident and design on a mountain valley where every road in the country crosses: Sekigahara. The fog at dawn is so thick that the two largest armies in Japanese history nearly walk through each other in the dark. Some 160,000 men stand in the valley, and when the mist lifts at eight o’clock, the killing begins. On paper, Mitsunari has the numbers and the high ground. Ieyasu, old and patient, has something better: letters. For months he has been writing to the lords on the other side, and he knows, roughly, what each one’s word is worth. The one man on the western side who knows it too is Ōtani Yoshitsugu, so sick he commands from a covered litter. He has already turned his small division to face not the enemy but the hilltop where his own ally sits. On that hill is Kobayakawa Hideaki, 19 years old, with 15,600 men and promises from both sides in his baggage. All morning he watches the valley and chooses nothing. At the battle’s hinge, Ieyasu, gambling the war on a hunch about a teenager, orders his gunners to fire on the hill. The volley makes the argument. Kobayakawa charges downhill into his own allies, straight onto the one man who expected him. Ōtani’s division throws back the first attacks. Then four neighboring lords flip in the space of an hour and it is over. Ōtani opens his belly on the field, and a retainer hides his head so no enemy will ever show it as a trophy. The western line folds from its center outward. Not everyone runs the right way. The Shimazu clan of the far south, 1,500 men who have stood unmoving all morning, cut their banners and charge forward. They go straight through the Tokugawa army, out the far side of the battle, and ride for home. Some 80 of them live to reach it, and their escape is studied for centuries. Mitsunari is caught in the hills days later and beheaded in Kyoto on a riverbank scaffold. Three years on, the emperor names Ieyasu shogun, the title he pretended not to want, and his family holds Japan through 15 shoguns: borders sealed, wars ended, swords slowly becoming ceremony. The road to 260 years of Tokugawa peace runs straight through the mud of Sekigahara.