Lord Shimura disapproves. He has been disapproving since Jin's first departure from samurai form, but in this session the tension becomes explicit. The jito sees what his nephew is becoming and understands it as failure — a failure of discipline, of honor, of everything he spent a lifetime transmitting. He is not wrong about what he sees. He is wrong about what it means.

The samurai who died at Komoda Beach died with their code. They went out into the field and they fought correctly and Khotun Khan killed them. The ones who kept fighting did so by other means, and Ghost of Tsushima takes the position that keeping fighting was the right choice, even at the cost of the form. The argument with Shimura is the argument at the center of the game, and it does not resolve neatly.