危険を冒す kiken o okasu Take Risks

危険 kiken is danger, cited from 737; を marks the object; 冒す okasu is to do a thing knowingly in the face of danger, the verb Japanese also uses of defying weather and profaning the sacred, so the phrase has more edge than take risks: it is what a person does knowing the cost. It is a set expression with its own dictionary entry.

危険 is neither singular nor plural, so the title's risks has no counterpart to lose.

The phrase came in with the translators of the early Meiji years: 中村正直 wrote it for braved dangers in his 1870 Japanese of Smiles's Self-Help and for Mill's incur the risk in 1872, and the English-Japanese dictionaries set it beside to run a risk by 1904.

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