Adding an answer as some others have upvoted in the comments of the accepted answer they are getting this exception when attempting to cast to ObjectNode (myself included):

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: 
com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.node.TextNode cannot be cast to com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.node.ObjectNode

The solution is to get the 'parent' node, and perform a put, effectively replacing the entire node, regardless of original node type.

If you need to "modify" the node using the existing value of the node:

1. get the value/array of the JsonNode
2. Perform your modification on that value/array
3. Proceed to call put on the parent.

Code, where the goal is to modify subfield, which is the child node of NodeA and Node1:

JsonNode nodeParent = someNode.get("NodeA")
                .get("Node1");

// Manually modify value of 'subfield', can only be done using the parent.
((ObjectNode) nodeParent).put('subfield', "my-new-value-here");

Credits:

I got this inspiration from here, thanks to wassgreen@