Sanzoku Ippa

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Guard 1: "The locals fell behind on their taxes. Now what was theirs is ours."

Guard 2: "Serves them right for calling us the Sanzoku Ippa. Thieves indeed!"

—Two guards discussing the group's nickname

The Sanzoku Ippa (山賊一派, lit. "bandit group") was the exonym given to a short-lived Japanese brigand collective led by the Japanese Templar Kimura Yukari that regularly harassed and extorted civilians on Awaji.

History

The Sanzoku Ippa as a concept began in 1582, when the Japanese Templar Kimura Kei entrusted his surviving daughter Yukari with training the Saisesha, a group of loyal rōnin which he intended to use as a personal army in a coup against the Portuguese Templars Nuno Caro and Duarte de Melo, his Templar benefactors whose cause he felt was better carried out by himself instead of through their interference in Japanese politics. While Yukari showed prowess and ambition in training the regiment, one of Kei's subordinates tasked with covertly observing her warned him that she may have had other plans with them beneath her veneer of familial loyalty.

After Oda Nobunaga's retainer Yasuke slew Kei for affiliating with, and to seek revenge on, his former slaver de Melo, Yukari fled to Awaji, where she courted its governing daimyō before usurping control when he was called away. Thereafter, she began assembling her group to exploit the island's residents for her own ends, using her experience in training Kei's army to ensure a strict chain of command was followed. Positioning herself at the group's head, she commanded the bandits through a taishō (大将, lit. "general") triumvirate comprised of her aggrieved bodyguard Imagawa Tomeji as her enforcer, the disguise adept Yasuhira as her spymaster, and Nowaki, a Templar orphan whom she raised to be a fanatically-loyal ambusher.

When she heard rumors that a stranger had visited the island to find and hide the Imperial Regalia's legendary sword Kusanagi no Tsurugi, Yukari captured the interloper and learned her quarry was the Kakushiba ikki member Fujibayashi Tsuyu. Believing that recovering the sword would help her climb higher in the Templar ranks, Yukari kept Tsuyu imprisoned for years, repeatedly interrogating and torturing her for the sword's location.

Some time after, the Assassin Hattori Hanzō found a lead on Tsuyu's possible location through a puppet play that was touring Izumi Settsu and had his contact Konatsu forward the information to Tsuyu's daughter Naoe, fulfilling an earlier promise he had made to her. Naoe promptly sailed to Awaji and learned that the Sanzoku Ippa were keeping Tsuyu locked up in Sumoto Castle. However, in her eagerness to find her mother, she failed to consider that Yukari had intentionally "leaked" the information to bait her in a trap and meant to blackmail Tsuyu into revealing the sword's hiding place by threatening her daughter's life.

When Naoe did not return, Konatsu contacted Yasuke, who likewise sailed over and proved instrumental in freeing the Fujibayashi women from captivity. With more help from Hanzō and Konatsu, and supplemented by Tsuyu's knowledge of the island and its peoples, Naoe and Yasuke worked together to kill Yukari's taishō, eliminate the bandits' assorted captains, incapacitate the majority of her forces with a strong sedative, and sabotage the weapons stocks of those left unaffected before finding and killing Yukari. Despite the group's leadership being eliminated, it did not sway the remaining pockets of members, who wandered the land and persisted in threatening the locals until Naoe and Yasuke tracked them down and killed them, finally eradicating the group.

Behind the scenes

The Sanzoku Ippa is the name of an enemy faction in Claws of Awaji, the downloadable expansion to the 2025 video game Assassin's Creed: Shadows, though its members never refer to themselves as such either through in-universe notes or in conversation with each other. Its etymology derives from the word 山賊 (sanzoku, "bandit") and the compound word 一派 (–ippa), which is comprised of the mora 一 (hi, "one"), with its kun'yomi ^{[citation needed]} reading denoting it as a singular entity rather than in the plural tense, and 派 (–ha, "group, school of thought").

Members

• Kimura Yukari
  • Nowaki
    • Ando Masamune
    • Chiba Hachibei
    • Goto Ginpachi
    • Inoue Yonekichi
    • Ishida Shota
    • Nitta Koheiji
    • Suganuma Tenma
  • Yasuhira
    • Kobayakawa Heitaro
    • Ryuzoji Den
    • So Sachihiko
    • Yamane Ichi
    • Yamanouchi Tobei
  • Imagawa Tomeji
    • Amano Buza
    • Fukushima Mosaku
    • Hachisuka Norimasa
    • Hasegawa Magobei
    • Honda Mosuke
    • Ikoma Matagoro
    • Kagae Koheiji
    • Kaiwara Heitaro
    • Kuki Shinpachi
    • Osagawa Masakichi
    • Shimazu Masujiro
    • Suganuma Heihachi
    • Tozawa Yataro
    • Watanabe Kinji

Gallery

• 
  Two Sanzoku Ippa members watching Naoe

Appearances

• Assassin's Creed: Shadows – Claws of Awaji