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The leaden skies of the last few days had vanished, and the seventh day of the fifth month of the year 1615 dawned exceptionally clear and still.

The fall of Osaka castle was now simply a question of time. Most of the more distinguished captains among its garrison—men like Gotō Matabei, Kimura Nagato and Susikida Hayatonosho—had been killed in the desperate fighting of the previous summer, and now only Sanada Saemon, Chōsokabe Morichika, Mōri of Buzen, and a handful of others were left to face the final onslaught.

The Shōgun, Lord Hidetada, rose early this day and set out from his quarters an hour before dawn. At once he ordered the detachments of Matsudaira Toshitsune of Chikuzen, Kato Samanosuke Yoshiaki, and Kuroda Nagamasa of Kai to move forward to the Okayama pass and take up positions as the first line of attack.

Shortly after dawn Ieyasu appeared, borne from his quarters in a palanquin. He wore a short jacket of brown silk, a thin white kimono, and formal overskirts bound tightly at each ankle. Tōdō Takatora, meeting him by chance, expressed concern at this unwarlike mode of dress.

“Today, surely, Your Excellency should be wearing armour?”

Ieyasu grinned, and in his eyes was the usual glint of sly mockery.

“Armour?” he said. “I need no armour to finish off the little fellow in Osaka.”

In one hand he held a priest’s horse-hair flapper, and with this he beat off the flies which kept swarming about him. Some thirty of his most trusted retainers, including Naitō Kamon-no-Kami Masanari, Uemura Iemasa of Dewa, and Itakura Naizen-no-sho Shigemasa, walked in attendance upon the palanquin. And at the end of the procession, dressed exactly as Ieyasu and carried in a similar but lighter palanquin, came Honda Masanobu of Sado.

Drawn up across the plain, between the Okayama and Ten-