Just to quickly bring you into the story. It takes place roughly 30 years in the future. Not much has changed, except terrorism and organized crime has increased drastically. Because of this, the world has become a dangerous place. The only place relatively safe is the Eastern Asia Region (Japan, Korea and China + Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao). After North Korea became increasingly violent, Japan, China and South Korea joined forced and gathered a special force group that are basically modern day ninjas. Thanks to this group, they managed to defeat North Korea and Korea is now one country. Both in order to protect the world and to spy on the increasingly corrupted US government, one part of the Japanese branch is lent to the US in order to defeat a terror organization. Now for my problem. There is a ranking system in the ninja group, which I have purposely ignored because I can't really think of anything. Currently they only have vague titles that sounds really off. However, it suddenly looks I'm actually about to finish it (the first draft anyway) and I don't want to put it off any longer. So... There are three branches. One in Japan, one in China and one in Korea. Each branch has three equal leaders that follow the orders of their countries' leaders. All nine leaders have a second-in-command to take their place when they retire/die. And all the second-in-commands...? have a third-in-command under them again. Under that is the regular “foot soldiers” (using “” because I don't want to call them foot soldiers). All the members off the group are orphaned children, and under the “foot soldiers” are the still unranked children being trained (and the people training them should probably have a title of their own). I tried using military ranking such as general and sergeant (etc), but I don't think it fits the story, and I want to keep this group separated from the military. Does anyone have suggestions for titles/ranks? Sorry if something is confusing or misspelled. I'm like, really tired right now. I shouldn't be allowed near a keyboard.
Since they are Asian (most likely?), why not use Asian titles or titles that reflect on Asian history? "Emperor", "Shogun", "Duke", etc. etc. Especially since this is a sort of a more secretive group, I'm assuming, having non-standard or unusual titles might work to either make it harder for outsiders to guess who's in charge, or to just make them sound a bit more mysterious or badass. Heck, you might even want to make up your own titles based on the new slang of the era and also because a lot of real-world groups use weird titles in order to confuse their enemies.
You could use animals - real or not. Say the top boss would be a dragon, then the snake (close in shape to a dragon, but not quite there yet), tiger etc. Each animal has it's own associations, so maybe find ones that befit the people carrying the title.
As they are orphaned children I think things like Arch-Duke, Duke, Marquis, Earl, Viscount, Baron etc has potential to add pathos Or maybe religious? Abbot, Prelate, Prior, Vicar etc ? I know Buddhist monasteries have Abbots.
Just a few suggestions. Shinobi (literally "shadow" or "night" warrior) = Foot Soldier Chunin (literally "mid rank ninja") Jonin (literally "top rank" or "high rank" Ninja) Nukenin (literally it means "rogue" ninja, but with a little imagination "rogue" could become "commando") Kageanbu (KA-GEE-AN-BOO) (literally a merging of the words Kage and Anbu. Kage meaning "shadow" and Anbu, which technically means "dark side" but has been used in Manga to represent "Black Ops", to form a new term for "Shadow Ops"). Be advised, I do not speak Japanese. I dug these terms up from a google search on various anime and manga, therefore translations may not be exact.
