rônin

Is Rônin on your baby name list? Here’s everything you need to know!

Updated: May 5, 2025

The last-named reason seems to have been what prompted the revolt of 1651, when Ietsuna, aged ten, had just succeeded in the shogunate his father Iemitsu who had exalted the power of the Tokugawa at the expense of their military houses. The ronin headed by Yui Shosetsu and Marubashi Chuya plotted to set fire to the city of Yedo and take the shogun's castle. The plot was discovered.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

They, of course, were only too glad to avoid any hindrance to their onward journey, and all with one voice agreed to what the Rônin had proposed; and so the matter was settled.

Baron Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford Redesdale - Tales of Old Japan

These precautions were soon seen to be necessary, for the partisans of the Toyotomi seized the occasion to attempt a coup. There seems to have been a large admixture of something very like European chivalry in the make up of these ronin, for some of them seem to have wandered about merely to right wrongs and defend the helpless.

F. (Frank) Brinkley - A History of the Japanese People : From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era

But in the story of a homicide exacted by the sentiment of duty or gratitude to a dead master, there may be circumstances which can make appeal to our higher moral sympathies, to our sense of the force and beauty of unselfishness, unswerving fidelity, unchanging affection. And the story of the Forty-Seven Ronin is one of this class....

Lafcadio Hearn - Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation