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The Honganji Network and a Century of Self-Rule in Kaga

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The Honganji Network and a Century of Self-Rule in Kaga

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Ikko-ikki Wars were a series of conflicts across Sengoku period Japan in which leagues of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priests, peasants, merchants and local warriors, organized under the Honganji temple's network of local temples, rose against regional daimyo to defend or expand their own religious and political autonomy. In 1488 the leagues overthrew the Togashi clan governing Kaga province and held it as a self-governing, temple-led territory for nearly a century, one of the movement's most striking successes against a succession of regional daimyo, including the Togashi and Asakura clans, in its earlier risings.

The movement's political and military independence ended in the following century. Oda Nobunaga's campaign to unify Japan under his own rule made the self-governing territories the Ikko-ikki had built an obstacle he set out to remove, and his vassals broke Kaga's century of self-governance in the 1580s. The ten-year Ishiyama Honganji war that closed the conflict was fought in explicit defense of the movement's own fortified headquarters temple, ending in 1580 with its surrender, mediated by imperial intervention, after a decade of siege.

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Sources
War and Faith: Ikko Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan (Tsang)
Carol Richmond Tsang, Harvard University Asia Center, 2007
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