Carol Richmond Tsang sets herself an ambitious goal in War and Faith: Ikkō Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan. Tsang distinguishes her book from previous studies that focused, “from the top down,” on single ikki or on certain aspects of these military uprisings by commoners and claims that her book “treats the whole, broad phenomenon of ikkō ikki, and seeks to understand it on its own terms” (p. 7). Clearly, Tsang's intent is to give us a picture from the bottom up that will explain how a particular religious worldview translated, again and again for more than a century, into political and military action (or vice versa) in many different parts of Japan. Given the linguistic challenges of the field, especially those connected with the original documents, this is an extraordinarily ambitious project whose success will hinge on how well it describes and explains the mind-set of the Honganji believers that produced the phenomenon of the ikkō ikki.

The failure to do so is where War and Faith most disappoints this reader. In the narrative of the events that led to the militarization of the Honganji variety of the Jōdo Shinshū brand of Buddhism, what the believers themselves thought is only rarely explicated. The key to their worldview, it seems, is to be found in a collection of pastoral letters (ofumi) written by Rennyo (1415–99), the eighth patriarch of the sect. Although Tsang advises us of the crucial importance of the ofumi for the growth of the sect and refers to them at several points in her book, the only letter of Rennyo she actually translates is from another collection, Rennyo shōnin ibun (p. 66). Ultimately, the references to Rennyo's letters do little more than tweak the reader's interest, leaving one wondering what exactly the power of these letters was in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan that inspired ikko ikki, and why today “people still buy and read” them (p. 44). So unconcerned, really, is the author with the ofumi, that their total number changes throughout the book (eighty-eight on p. 44, eighty on p. 150).

If explaining the mind-set of the Honganji believers is a weakness of Tsang's book, its strength is her analysis of their socioeconomic background and dimensions. This reviewer found especially illuminating her conclusion, presented early on in the book, that the common assumption that the ikkō ikki were peasant movements is not sustained by the documentary evidence. Rather, for most of the stages of the growth of the Honganji sect, we see the crucial importance of a newly emerging social class of traders and shippers of goods in sengoku Japan for whom Honganji temples frequently became the nuclei of commercial “temple towns” (jinaichō) situated along trade routes. The temple towns enjoyed special privileges, such as exemptions from taxes and the right to bar entry to warriors, in addition to moats and earthen embankments (p. 24).

Here, however, Tsang treads gingerly, shying away from the question of whether this sectarian religion might have been just a way to bind together geographically dispersed social groups that lacked political representation. This reviewer was immediately struck by the parallel provided by the history of Christianity in Japan. Particularly in the sectarian variety brought by the Jesuits, Christianity proved to be viable for a period of time by performing essentially the same function as the Honganji sect, which was to facilitate communication between merchants. In the case of Christianity, of course, the connections were between foreign and Japanese merchants; nevertheless, functionally the Christian community in Japan resembled the Honganji sect down to the creation of its own jinaichō, Nagasaki, with a moat and walls for the town and special privileges and contacts with the region's power brokers for its priests!

The failure on the part of the author to point out and explore further these and other compelling parallels between the two religious organizations remains a puzzle until the very last paragraph of the book, when Japanese Christianity appears, as if out of the blue. Tsang's parting message to the reader is that the importance of studying the ikkō ikki is found not in learning about the mentality of sixteenth century, as they “had no direct heirs,” (p. 244), but in how the destruction of the political and military power of the Honganji sect prepared the way for the anti-Christian legislation of the period of unification and the subsequent Tokugawa era. “That is no trivial legacy,” she proclaims (p. 244). Was the Honganji sect, therefore, exactly what the Jesuits believed it was—a tool of the devil to destroy the only true religion?

At the end of the book, this reader faulted the ambition of the project. In taking on all of Japan and the whole of the ikkō ikki phenomenon, Tsang attempted more than could be carried off successfully. This resulted in both the large problems mentioned earlier and a number of small ones—for example, mistaken locations of the kuni of Japan on map 1, which has Izumi, Kawachi, Tosa, and Iyo all in the wrong places (p. xv).

In light of the strengths of the book, Tsang might well have produced a superlative book if she had done a case study of a particular ikkō ikki. Evidence of this can be found in the lively narrative account of Tokugawa Ieyasu's victory, early on in his career, over the Honganji sectarians on his home ground of Mikawa (pp. 201–20). Here, we suddenly see the original Tokugawa retainer band springing to life: the Honda, the Sakai, the Mizuno, even the Kira appear in their traditional role as troublemakers. Sections like these contain the real stuff of history, the reason why I am glad to read books like this.