rōnin

plural rōnins

1. alternativeAlternative spelling of ronin.

   After many secret consultations, it was determined among the rōnins that they should separate and dissemble.

   1895, Katharine Schuyler Baxter, In Bamboo Lands, New York, N.Y.: The Merriam Company, […], page 166

   4 more examples

   Boiling over with patriotism, bands of assassins, mostly rōnins, roamed the country, ready to slay foreigners, or the regent, and to die for the mikado.

   1876, William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], page 307

   The rōnin phenomenon of this era has been likened to a movement for social equality in a suppressive society. Many rōnin had been motivated more by a desire to wear the two swords and look like samurai than by lofty political aspirations. They fulfilled this desire by becoming rōnin under the false pretext of “loyalty.”

   2005, Romulus Hillsborough [pseudonym; Jeff Cohen], “Newly Selected Corps”, in Shinsengumi: The Shōgun’s Last Samurai Corps, North Clarendon, Vt.: Tuttle Publishing, →ISBN, page 35

   The shōgun, aware of what they had done—and why–and also aware of the rōnins’ growing fame, allowed them to die through seppuku and be buried next to their lord.

   2021, Albert Liebermann, translated by Russell Andrew Calvert, Ganbatte!: The Japanese Art of Always Moving Forward, Tuttle Publishing, →ISBN

   Greey wrote and translated a number of plays and books, among them A Captive of Love (1886), a retelling of one of the dramatic and popular yomi hon (books for reading) by Takizawa Bakin, and Tamenaga Shunsui’s The Loyal Ronins: A Historical Romance (1884), the classic story of the forty-seven rōnins, which he translated with Shiuichiro Saito.

   2021, Sybille Jagusch, Japan and American Children’s Books: A Journey, Rutgers University Press, →ISBN