Nichiren’s writtings reflect considerable ambivalence about his country. On the one hand, he saw Japan as an evil place, full of people who slandered the Dharma by placing other teachings above the Lotus Sutra, and who were therefore destined to suffer great miseries such as attack by the Mongols. On the other hand, the Tendai tradition had long postulated a unique karmic connection between Japan and the Lotus Sutra. Nichiren carried this further in regarding Japan as the very place where—in his own person, as the Buddha’s messenger—the Great Pure Dharma for the time of mappō had first appeared. Thus far, he said, the Buddha-Dharma of India had spread from west to east. But its light was feeble; it could never dispel the darkness of the degenerate Final Dharma age. In the time of mappō, the Buddha-Dharma of Japan would rise like the sun, moving from east to west, and illuminate the world (Kangyō Hachiman shō in Risshō 1988, 2:1850). This image of a new Buddhism emanating from Japan like a resplendent sun was to prove compelling when, six centuries later, Japan began the struggle of defining its place in the modern international community.