A minor feudal lord was so grievously insulted by a more important lord that in rage he drew his sword and wounded his tormenter. To have drawn his sword within the castle grounds of Edo was an offence punishable by death, and the Edo authorities ordered the unlucky man to commit suicide and confiscated his fief. His feudal retainers lost their status as full-fledged samurai and became ronin, which was a term for a masterless samurai who had lost his normal place in society.
Forty-seven of these ronin vowed to take vengeance upon the lord who had caused their master’s downfall, but realizing that the police would be watching for just such a move on their part, they decided first to lull the suspicions of the authorities. They bided their time for two years, while their leader took up a life of debauchery and degradation to prove that nothing was to be feared from him. Then, on a snowy winter night, they assembled at Edo, broke into the residence of their lord’s old enemy, and avenged themselves fully by taking his head and the heads of several of his samurai. By this act they of course flouted the authority of Edo, but their self-sacrificing loyalty to their master made them at once national heroes, living up to the best traditions of personal loyalty of the warrior class. After much debate the government finally permitted them to atone for their crime by the honorable death of seppuku, commonly called harakiri, which is suicide by the painful method of cutting open one’s stomach. This they did, and today the simple graves of the forty-seven ronin stand side by side in a quiet little temple compound in Tokyo.
The two centuries of strictly enforced peace under