Weird glitch making my playthrough problematic

Today I was playing Gekokujo and ran into a strange problem.  I don't think the game was intended for this to happen, it certainly isn't game breaking, but it is making things difficult.


As you can see it has a green tag around it suggesting they are friendly.

When I talk to them I still get this screen:


But when I select surrender or die, all I get is this:


I get this for Monk Rebels, Looters, and any guildmaster quest bandits.

The guildmaster quest bandits are especially problematic because you need a relationship of 5 with a town before you can set-up a business.

I went into debug mode and it says I have a relationship of 5 with the monk rebels.

I've tried joining other AI lords or saving villagers from these bandits but it doesn't seem to lower my reputation with them enough for them to be hostile again.
Does anyone know of a way I could trick the game into lowering my reputation with them or a TweakM&B value I can change? I don't want to start the whole playthrough over again.

Question to others -- does this ever happen to anyone else? I sometimes have trouble figuring out if something is a consistent error (that I can fix) or if it comes from an glitch during startup that lasts the rest of the game (something that I can't fix). This is a pretty serious bug if it's the former. Have you tried starting a new game to see if it happens there too?

Had this too, happens if you join these parties in a battle between someone else (like an enemy faction - the enemy of my enemy is my friend) too often.

Two things to make it unhappen:

a) look for battles against this party/faction type and join against them (takes really long, believe me, getting good rep with them is much faster)

b) grab savegame editor, check the faction, set the reputation towards you (and yours towards them) negative

Maybe phlpp kann tell us which factionnumber is which party/faction, else one needs to track it down.

I did it once, checked
factions > #28(fac_player_faction) > relations and looked for positive entries, checked the number in the factions above and if I thought it would be the right (usually, you are the only faction then they are friendly towards), changed their relations to #28 and #29 (it was positive, too no idea why) to negative and the relations of #28 and #29 towards that faction to negative (hope it's not confusing)
example what I am talking about (can't provide the correct factions for monk rebels now as I don't know them)

Thank you Melphiz, I will try your solutions.  Also you are correct, I started a new playthrough to test what Marty is saying and they are not 'friendly' with me in a new game.  If I recall I did a troublesome bandit quest from a guildmaster.  Kyoto patrol attacked them first, and  not wanting to fail the quest I attacked the patrol with the bandits.  Only realizing afterward I couldn't attack the bandits.  I've done this in previous mods...floris comes to mind, and didn't run into this before but it's something to keep in mind.