MORI

Japanese: variously written, but most often with a character meaning ‘forest’, and denoting the sacred grove around a Shintō shrine. The character used to list the name in the Shinsen shōjiroku means ‘guard’ or ‘keeper’. The name is mostly found in west-central Japan, the island of Shikoku, and in the Ryūkyū Islands. Another name, properly Romanized as Mōri, is written phonetically with the characters for ‘hair’ and ‘advantage’, but bearers of this name are also of the original Mori family. There were several daimyō families named Mōri, the greatest originating in Aki (now part of Hiroshima prefecture). From their base in Chōshū (Nagato: now part of Yamaguchi prefecture), they ruled much of western Honshū in the 16th century, until restricted by Shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu to Chōshū.