The revenge of the Forty-seven Ronin also known as the Forty-seven Samurai, the Akō vendetta, or the Genroku Akō incident took place in Japan at the start of the eighteenth century. The tale has been described by one noted Japanese scholar as the country’s “national legend.” It recounts the most famous case involving the samurai code of honor, bushidō.
The story tells of a group of samurai who were left leaderless (became ronin) after their daimyo (feudal lord) was forced to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) for assaulting a court official named Kira Yoshinaka, whose title was Kōzuke no suke. The ronin avenged their master’s honor after patiently waiting and planning for over a year to kill Kira. In turn, the ronin were themselves forced to commit seppuku — as they had known they would be — for committing the crime of murder. With little embellishment, this true story was popularized in Japanese culture as emblematic of the loyalty, sacrifice, persistence, and honor that all good people should preserve in their daily lives. The popularity of the almost mythical tale was only enhanced by rapid modernization during the Meiji era of Japanese history, when many people in Japan longed for a return to their cultural roots.
While sources do differ as to some of the details, the version given below was carefully assembled from a large range of historical sources, including some still-extant eye-witness accounts of various portions of the saga.
Fictionalized accounts of these events are known as Chūshingura. The story was popularized in numerous plays including bunraku and kabuki; because of the censorship laws of the shogunate in the Genroku era which forbade portrayal of current events, the names were changed. While the version given by the playwrights may have come to be accepted as historical fact by some, the Chūshingura was written some 50 years after the fact, and numerous historical records about the actual events that pre-date the Chūshingura survive. The popularity of the story is high still today. With ten different television productions in the years 1997–2007 alone, the Chūshingura ranks among the most familiar of all stories in Japan.
The bakufu’s censorship laws had relaxed somewhat 75 years later, when Japanologist Isaac Titsingh first recorded the story of the 47 ronin as one of the significant events of the Genroku era.
