Term · Japanese culture
Ronin
A samurai with no lord, which in a system built entirely on service meant a man with no function.
In Otakana the clue reads: Masterless warrior, or a student retaking exams
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
The characters read as wave person, someone drifting. A warrior became one when his lord died, lost his lands, or threw him out, and the Tokugawa peace produced them in large numbers as domains were dissolved and their retainers dismissed. Some found new employers. Many did not, and turned to teaching, bodyguard work, farming or crime, since the class system left few legal doors open.
The famous case is the Ako incident. Forty-seven retainers lost their lord in 1701 after he drew a blade in the shogun's castle and was ordered to kill himself. They waited nearly two years, killed the official they held responsible, then surrendered and were ordered to die in turn. Japan has been retelling it as a play, a film and a moral argument ever since.
The word survived the samurai. A student who fails university entrance exams and spends a year at a cram school studying for another attempt is called a ronin, no lord and no school, and the usage is completely ordinary. Every year a fresh cohort of teenagers gets described with a term coined for unemployed swordsmen.
Spelling RONIN
RONIN carries a long first vowel in Japanese, so the careful romanisation is ROUNIN or an O with a bar over it, and neither fits the row. Five letters with the N repeated at positions three and five. The second vowel is an I. If you know the shape of the double N, one green letter usually settles the rest.