Ōtani Yoshitsugu had told him plainly. He was transported by palanquin because leprosy had taken his face from public view, but his mind remained one of the sharpest in Japan, and he had seen what others were too loyal to say: Ishida Mitsunari was hated. The warrior lords who would have to fight this war despised him — his bureaucratic manner, his reports from the Korean campaigns, his proximity to Hideyoshi's power. The men who had sued for his removal from office the year before were the same men whose swords Mitsunari now needed.

Yoshitsugu's warning was direct: if you raise an army, those who sued you last year will become your enemies. Mitsunari acknowledged the warning. He raised the army anyway.

While Tokugawa Ieyasu was performing inevitability in Edo, Mitsunari was doing something harder in the west: constructing a coalition from men who resented him, around an argument he believed was correct. Ieyasu had violated the rules Toyotomi Hideyoshi had laid down before his death — unauthorized political marriages, unauthorized castle occupation, unauthorized alliance-building. This was not merely a power struggle. It was, as Mitsunari saw it, a legal matter. And he was, above all else, a man who understood legal matters.

Around mid-August 1600, the western coalition was preparing its gekibun (gekibun) — a formal proclamation document, thirteen charges against Ieyasu, issued in the names of the Five Commissioners and three members of the Council of Five Regents. The authority behind the document was borrowed rather than freely given: most of the officials whose names appeared had not fully consented. Their names were used because a gekibun without the right signatures was just an angry letter, and Mitsunari needed it to be law.

On August 22, 1600, the Western Army entered Osaka Castle (Osaka-jo) and formally proclaimed its existence. Toyotomi Hideyori, Hideyoshi's six-year-old heir, was named as their ward and justification. Standing inside the greatest fortress in Japan, in the rooms built by the man whose legacy they claimed to defend, they declared that Ieyasu was a criminal.

Yoshitsugu, whose body had betrayed him, died at Sekigahara with a sword in his hand rather than surrender. Mitsunari was captured. He was brought to Kyoto and made to stand in the streets while the charges from his own proclamation — the document he had written to accuse Ieyasu — were read aloud, and then shouted back by him. The manifesto became the script for his humiliation. On November 6, 1600, he was beheaded.

He had been right about Ieyasu. It had not been enough.