The Ikko-ikki Art of War: as illustrated in the military chronicles

The Ikko-ikki or "Single-minded League", were the followers of Jodo-Shinshu, the "True Pure Land Sect" of Japanese Buddhism. Sustained by their passionate belief in the salvation guaranteed by Amida Buddha, the Ikko-ikki monto (adherents) welcomed fighting because their faith promised that paradise was the immediate reward for death in battle, and nothing daunted them. Together with allies from other Buddhist sects they fought a ten year-long war against Oda Nobunaga (1534-82), the first unifier of Japan.

This book contains 101 carefully chosen illustrations of their unique and often neglected military culture, presented in a published work for the first time in a century and a half. They show fighting of course, and many weapons from ancient naginata (glaives) to contemporary firearms are depicted in detail, but these topics are presented to a background of the sincere religious devotion that accompanied the military life of the Ikko-ikki. So we see (and can almost hear!) the chanting of the nembutsu (the invocation of Amida Buddha) as the monto go to war at the urging of their priests. Prayers are flung across the moats of castles as if they were bullets; a holy light issues from opened scrolls and ghostly apparitions of terrifying saintly men hover above noble victims felled by the swords of Buddhist warriors. This was the world of the Ikko-ikki, who went to war in a dramatic act of defiance against the leading samurai commander in Japan.