During the course of his life, the samurai could expect to be known by a series of names. Sometimes confounding to the historian, this tradition occasionally produced a myriad number of tags for a single well-known samurai. Each name carried with it a certain significance, as we will see in the following, brief overview of this topic. As the samurai of the 15th to 16th Century provide us with the best-documented examples, these will be drawn on for cases in point. Taken generally, these customs may be assumed to have been historically universal (with the exception, of course, of Christian names).

Childhood. At birth, a samurai was given a name by which he would be known until his coming of age ceremony. These were occasionally chosen to sound fortuitous or simply by fancy. In a well-known example of the former, Takeda Shingen was born Katsuchiyo, or '1000 Victories in Succession', or, simply, 'Victory Forever'.

These childhood names were often superceded to an extent within a samurai's household by a certain nicknaming custom. By tradition, the eldest son in a household was known as 'Taro', the second, 'Jiro', and the third, 'Saburo'. (Fans of Akira Kurosawa's films may remember this convention being applied in the movie Ran). These familial names might even linger into a samurai's adulthood, especially while his father was still in charge.
Famous samurai and their childhood names….

Some samurai, especially lords, might opt to change the characters in their name at some future date, often as a result of the sort of reward mentioned above. Occasionally this name change might be made to mark a fortuitous event, or for political expediency. This could even extend to family names. Date Masamune, for example, was given the honorific family name Hashiba by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. During the 1590's he became close to Tokugawa (Matsudaira) Ieyasu and as a way of demonstrating his loyalty in a unsubtle gesture, he changed his family name to Matsudaira.

Uesugi Kenshin provides us with a nice example of the various reasons a daimyô might change his name around. Originally called Nagao Kagetora, Kenshin later changed his name to Terutora when he was honored by the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshiteru (Kenshin being exceptionally filial to the Ashikaga). He changed his name again, to Masatora, when he was adopted by Uesugi Norimasa around 1551.

Religious names. Of course, the name Kenshin is the best known, and this provides us with an example of a Buddhist name. Many samurai - both daimyô and retainer - adopted Buddhist names at some point in their life, at least nominally taking up a monk's habit and shaving their heads. Some daimyô took this much more seriously then others (Kenshin being one of those), while a certain few, including Ôtomo Sorin, went from layman to Buddhist monk to Christian - and sometimes back again to Buddhist monk.
The following are some better-known daimyô who adopted Buddhist names (their secular names in parenthesis)...