Naruto, the hero of love
As a kid, Naruto was my favorite show to watch: the fight scenes were sick and every character’s design was unique and gave off a very distinct vibe.
Not only that, but the show could be as funny and lighthearted as very serious and emotional, even in the same episode, and still without compromising the quality of either of those moments. I honestly think that if you can watch Naruto until the end without laughing and crying at least once, you have a hole where normal people have a heart.
Upon rewatching the show as an adult, though, I realised that Naruto is actually way deeper than people seem to give it credit for. From what I’ve seen from video essays on YouTube and from conversations with friends, more serious fans recognise the depth to some degree: the Akatsuki and Pain’s speech about the cycle of hatred are frequently mentioned. But to me Naruto goes much, much deeper than just having someone give a philosophical speech about how much they suffered from time to time. The more I went through the show, the more I came to think that the whole story is a huge argument for the same point, from many different angles. Every character, every narrative arc and every plot and subplot is an instance of the same point, being put forth in a slightly different way, looked at from another angle. From where I see, Naruto develops a whole life philosophy in narrative form.
Like any life philosophy, the one Naruto develops starts with a fundamental problem, the spark that fuels the show to go on and brings rise to new problems to be solved. I argue that Naruto is, at its core, about the struggle the human soul goes through when it suffers. Naruto is a show about suffering and how to deal with it: in a way, every single character can be seen as an embodiment of an answer to the problem of how to deal with suffering. The characters are often one dimensional because we as people normally have more than just one answer to this problem, and the characters tend to embrace only one of them and bring it to the extreme, which is also what makes them so memorable and lifelike in their strangeness.
Because the show is about suffering, and because we understand what must have been like to go through what these people go through, we can understand exactly where they are coming from and why they feel and act the way they do. But at the same time, for the most part, we also have a gut feeling that what they are doing is still wrong. What I am going to do here is justify this gut feeling: my point is that Naruto was created with the purpose of sending a central message about the purpose of life (even when it is full of suffering) and the best way to live it.
When I hear someone say that the purpose of life is to love, I normally cringe and start thinking less of that person. This is a very cliche thing to say and can be extremely vacuous of meaning and intellectually lazy to say. But it can also be one of the deepest things to say, if we know how to answer questions people can make us after we say something pretentious like that. This is what Naruto (the character) does with his life, more so than with his words — although sometimes with his words as well.
As the show goes on, the philosophical challenges that can be made to this answer are made through the antagonists. A big part of what makes the show compelling is that, in their own way, all the antagonists have good points. The whole ninja world seems to agree, for example, that emotions lead to hate and then war, so that it would be better to write off any emotion, even love, to avoid hate. Others might think that love is impossible, that only the powerful rule and the weak obey.
These challenges present themselves to Naruto, tempting him to give up on his answer, tempting him to change his mind, but he finds a way to show how love ultimately wins, how most times these challenges are not much more than attempts to cover up for insecurity. It’s not like these attempts are not justified, though: no one likes to suffer, and everyone who is alive will inevitably suffer. In the world of Naruto, as in life, this is a brute fact. But it is also a very uncomfortable fact. No one wants to be vulnerable.
I think that right from the first episode we already get the gist of everything that will be seen in the remaining 719 episodes. Naruto is established right away as the fool: hated by all the adults, but still not afraid of them, he pulls pranks as a way of getting attention to himself, as a way of getting people to recognise he exists. He vandalises the faces of the Hokage precisely because he wants to become one: he understands that the Hokage are the most admired and loved in the village, and that he has no love or admiration whatsoever.
As soon as the first episode, the show already makes pretty explicit what are the main ideas at play: the worst thing that can happen to someone is to be lonely, to not love or be loved by anyone; and the best thing is to be recognized — which is, in the ultimate case, being the Hokage, who loves and is loved by all. The Hokage is loved and respected precisely because he loves the village, he possesses the Will of Fire. The first challenger to this idea is Mizuki, a Chunin from the Leaf who works at the Ninja Academy.
Naruto wants that love and admiration deeply, and works hard for it, but always seems to be one step behind. He fails the graduation exam from the Ninja Academy and cannot become a ninja, since he can’t perform the clone technique. After he steals the Scroll of Sealing, Mizuki tells him the “secret” about him being the container of the monster fox that attacked the village. Right then and there, he is confronted with his biggest fear: no one will ever recognize him, he is a monster who everyone hates. In that moment, he has a powerful weapon with which to take revenge against the people who hated and mistreated him for all his life. Mizuki, a jealous and resentful man himself (as we find out later), thinks Naruto must be the same as him, someone who won’t hesitate to take revenge once he has the power to do so.
The moment where Mizuki throws the shuriken to kill him is one of the most important moments in the whole series. If it weren’t for Iruka, his first master and reason to live, saving him and recognizing his pain, if it were not for Iruka seeing himself and Naruto as the same, then Naruto would have remained the same as before: lonely.
This conflict between Iruka and Mizuki is, in a compressed form, the conflict that goes on throughout the entire show later on: love versus resentment, friendship versus revenge. Iruka recognises Naruto’s feelings, which means he saw him as a person. Mizuki, on the other hand, saw Naruto as another pawn to use in his own plan for revenge and his own quest for power. When possessed by hate we no longer see people as people, but only as vessels to either take out our anger and resentment on, or use as pawns for our plans.
This is, I propose, the first principle of Naruto’s philosophy: love is the ultimate meaning of life. Throughout, we see many challenges that can be put to this thesis, and the way Naruto reacts and lives these challenges and comes up with his own answers. The one constant theme is that no matter how big the problem, how powerful the enemy, love always wins. We see how love is dangerous because it leads to hate, because to love is to be vulnerable; we see how love can be perceived as weak to those with power, how it can seem impossible to love your enemy. All of these are good reasons why someone would be dissuaded from the idea that love is the answer to life, but Naruto is not, even when it seems completely idiotic, and for that reason he ends up becoming the hero who saved the world.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is from the ground up, so to speak. When I say love is the best purpose for life, I first need to make clear what a purpose for life is. Whenever we do anything, our reasons for acting are directly linked to what we find important: while most things in the world are indifferent to us, there are a few of them to which we have some sort of connection that moves us to action. But the nature of the connection we have to the world can vary. When we act in order to avoid feeling pain, for example, we act from fear, it’s fear that links us to the world and makes us act. When we act in order to take revenge, our bond with the world is one of hate. When we act to protect something, the connection we have is one of love.
If we have no kind of connection to the world, everything is indifferent and we have no reason to act, which would probably mean a rather fast decay and death for anyone who got in that condition. But of course, just by being in the world, we instinctively feel connected to it in some way or another. A useful character to begin to illustrate this point is Gaara. In many ways a mirrored image of Naruto, a child Jiinchuriki who grew up alone and was hated by everyone, Gaara is, when he first meets Naruto, what he could have become if Iruka had not recognised him.
His own family tried to kill him numerous times, fearing his power. This made him seriously reconsider what was the nature of his connection to the world: “So what did I have in this life? Why did I keep living? When I asked myself that, I couldn’t find the answer. But, as long as you’re alive, you need a reason… If you don’t have one, it’s just the same as being dead.” He understood that life is a fight and everyone needs something to fight for.
Having no one who fought for him, the only thing he thought would make sense to protect and fight for was himself: he made the killing of those who wanted to kill him the purpose of his life. Only when feeling his superiority over someone else could he feel some kind of connection to the world: without killing others, he had no way of being connected to the world, of feeling alive. It might be easy to think this was lazy writing to paint Gaara as just some guy who is obsessed with killing only to make him a clear villain to be defeated, but I hope this explanation really shines light on why Gaara acted and felt the way he did. He chose bonds of hatred because he had no access to anything else.
Gaara grew up alone, but he did have one person who recognized and loved him: Yashamaru. Gaara never knew what physical pain was like, since his sand shield always protected him from any attack, regardless of his will. Upon asking Yashamaru what pain was like, Gaara thought he might be injured like everyone else: it didn’t bleed, but he felt his heart aching all the time. Yashamaru cuts his finger and tells Gaara: “Wounds of the flesh bleed, and they may seem painful… but as time goes by, the pain eventually disappears. And if you use medicine, the wounds will heal even faster. But the tricky wounds are the ones in your heart. Those are difficult to heal. (…) Unlike a flesh wound, there are no ointments to heal a wound of the heart, and there are times they never heal. But there is one thing that can heal a wound of the heart. It is a troublesome medicine and you can only receive it from another person.” It’s love. And what is love, you ask? “Love is the spirit of devoting yourself to someone important and close to you… It is expressed by caring for and protecting that person”.
When battling Gaara, Naruto knows that, loving only himself, Gaara’s hate is strong and he seems less vulnerable (since when we fight to protect something, we have an added risk in every fight: we may not only lose the fight, but also the reason for fighting, our bond with the world). Naruto doubts whether he has what it takes to beat someone like that and feels fear. How can you beat someone who will stop at nothing until he kills you? But eventually he remembers what true strength means and where it comes from. Love. The power you get to protect those who got you out of the hell that being lonely is, the hell of lacking connections to the world, becomes even stronger than merely having nothing to stop you. This thought that love gives you power might seem overly naive and optimistic, and it will be challenged later on.
The fight between Naruto and Gaara is paralleled with Orochimaru’s fight with his teacher Hiruzen Sarutobi for a reason. Both fights are, in essence, the same fight — only with different people fighting them. They manifest the same spirit: Orochimaru, as Gaara, is alone and fights only for himself and for his own ambition; Sarutobi, as Naruto, fights to protect the whole village with all his being.
The fundamental difference between them is that those who fight together leave a legacy, a group of people who love them and will carry their will after they are gone. Those who fight alone, on the other hand, leave nothing in this world after death. As Sarutobi says in his last words: “Where the leaves dance, fire burns. The shadow of the fire will flash over the village… and the leaves will grow once again”.
The Will of Fire, the strong desire to protect the village and those who live there, the feeling that everyone who lives in the village is family, might as well be called the Will of Love. The Third Hokage’s funeral is so touching precisely because we all feel that: we can all understand the importance of having something to us like what Konoha was to him, and the importance of what he was to everyone there. The importance of something they all fight to protect, the one thing that unites everyone there and keeps them from the hell that is being alone.
Naruto asks Iruka why people risk their lives for others. Iruka answers: “When one person dies… he disappears… Along with his past, current lifestyle and his future. Many people die in missions and wars. They die easily and in surprisingly simple ways. Hayate was one of them. Those who die have goals and dreams. But everyone has something else as important as those. Parents, siblings, friends, lovers… People who are important to you. They trust and help each other. The bond between the people important to you ever since birth and the string that binds them becomes thicker and stronger as time goes by. It’s beyond reason. Those bound to you by that string will do that. Because it’s important…”
From what was said I hope to have made it somewhat apparent that Naruto (the show) really does argue that love is the ultimate goal. The evidence of this is very abundant in the show, as will become clear as I go on here. But now that this is established and we have some evidence for it, we are ready to start taking on some challenges to this thesis, which will in turn reveal its true depth. First of all, we can ask why love would be the best bond. If what really matters is to be connected to the world, if that’s what we need to feel alive and to have a purpose, why would love be the best? Why should we assume there is one type of bond that is better than any other?
The answer we get from the show seems to be something like “Love happens inevitably when people share experiences and pain together. There is a chance of it corrupting to hate and resentment, but this is a risk we just have to be courageous enough to take” (this is not a quote from any character). No matter how much we try to shut our emotions down, we can’t help having them, that is just what humans are.
We see this clearly in Zabuza’s relationship with Haku, or later in Shippuden, with Sai. Both Zabuza and Sai (and many, many others) were taught that being a ninja means having no emotions in order to carry out the missions given in the most efficient way possible. But both of them could only manage to repress their emotions, not kill them. They were still there, causing them internal suffering, just in covert form.
But I think there is an even better answer, never explicitly stated by any character (at least as far as I can remember), but that can be clearly deduced from what they say and what happens in the show. This answer is: love is the best bond because it is the only one that allows us as humans to reach our full potential. Love is the bond that bonds us the most: all other forms of bonds still contain some sort of denial and distance, they are, in some sense or other, negative. It is only through love that we can be fully connected to reality. This is a rather bold claim, I think, so I will take my time here to make my point.
It’s easy to understand why Naruto would want love, since he was hated, but right in the second episode, after we get the story from the hated kid, we see the same thing from another angle. Konohamaru is the “honorable grandson” of the Third Hokage, and as he says himself, is tired of not being recognized as an individual. Konohamaru is treated very well by everyone, but not because of who he is — he is treated well because of what he is: the grandson of the Hokage.
The very fact of his important position in the village’s hierarchy puts him in a position that makes him a difficult person to reach. When people don’t see themselves as your equal, they have a hard time putting themselves in your shoes and see you as an instrument, a “thing”: someone to be treated well to get in the Hokage’s good favors. This good treatment is fake: like a fake smile to get people to get along with you.
Naruto pulled pranks and misbehaved at school because he wanted to be scolded: this is the only real feeling he could get people to feel about him. We only go through the trouble of scolding someone we care about. This is why Konohamaru instantly liked Naruto after Naruto hit him: he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of hitting him if he just saw him as the “honorable grandson”, even if he deserved it. Deep down, everyone wants to be recognised as a person and not as a thing, even if the thing we are seen as is a positive one. This is why having power isn’t enough to make people happy. But how is this connected to love? Isn’t love the will to protect something? How is love connected to seeing people as people and not as things? Couldn’t I want to protect a thing just as much as I would want to protect a person?
I think that to really understand what love is, which is necessary to solve this problem, we need to think a little more deeply into this. To love something is to be connected to it in a way that makes you want to protect it. But why would you want to protect it? Here we can’t just say “because we love it”: that would be nothing more than a play on words. There must be a process that happens between us and the object of our love that makes us want to protect it, and that process must be at the core of the true nature of love, that process is fundamental for us to understand what love is. Iruka tells us that over time, the more we share experiences and live with another person, the bond between us grows thicker and thicker. Another way of seeing that, since love is a type of bond, is that over time, the more we live with someone, the bigger our love for them grows. But why?
I think the answer is this: the more we live with someone, the more we see who they are. In a first meeting, we don’t have much more than a superficial idea of someone, but over time we begin to see more layers being peeled off, we begin to understand the person’s dreams and aspirations, what is important to them, what they like and dislike. The more we know someone in this way, the more we become familiar with their reality: their way of seeing the world. And in so far as we know their reality, it begins to become, at least partly, our reality as well: if I know my friend likes cake, I might think of buying him a cake when I see one, and I wouldn’t have had that thought if I didn’t know him that well.
But of course, I won’t buy him a cake just because I know him very well. As we share our existence, situations will happen when I will need his help, and he will give it to me, or vice versa. When we help others, they can feel grateful and want to help us back. When we show concern about something another cares about, they might want to do the same for us. His concerns start being my concerns, the more I know and care about him. Eventually, I can get to know my friend so well, and our chain of reciprocal help be so long, that his reality and mine become matched to a greater and greater extent. The more that happens, the more I will care about him, maybe reaching a point where our realities are the same and I care about him just as much as I care about myself. Protecting him is the same as protecting me: if he gets hurt, I will suffer too, because our concerns are matched.
But this kind of connection with someone can only begin to happen if I recognise someone as the same as me: an individual with concerns, dreams, hopes, aspirations, fears and regrets. If I see a boy strictly as the honorable grandson, there is no way I can care about what he cares, there is no way I will get hurt by seeing him hurt. Our realities aren’t the same at all because in my reality, he is not my equal to begin with. To solve this problem, Konohamaru wants to become Hokage “right now”, and constantly ambushes the Hokage for a duel of some kind or other. Just like Naruto, Konohamaru understands that the Hokage is loved and respected by everyone in the village and is deeply acknowledged; and he wants that love and respect for himself too.
Konohamaru’s teacher, Ebisu, insists that if he wants the shortcut to become Hokage, he needs to stick with him. But what both of them don’t understand, and Naruto does, is that no one will recognize a spoiled brat that hasn’t done anything and wants to be looked up to. Being a Hokage is not simply about knowing the techniques and being super strong (although it certainly is a lot about that too). The Hokage has this title because he is the person with the deepest connection to the village: he is ready to use all his power and give his own life to save the village, because the people there are that important to him.
When we love we want to help and protect. But for love to grow, there must be that first gesture: someone needs to initiate the chain of reciprocal help that will lead to love. In general, no one will love you “for free”, but you must love them for free at first, so that they can begin to love you later. The Hokage is loved by Konoha because he loves Konoha, because he has the power to protect everyone, because he is needed and cares about those that need him just as much as he cares about himself. To become Hokage, it takes hard work and guts and there are no shortcuts. You need to be prepared and willing to endure whatever it takes, and only when you become strong to protect the whole village, only when your love takes you that far, can you receive that much recognition.
So only through love can we be seen by people as what we truly are: people. In all other bonds, we see the people around us as things, in one way or another. When we fear, we see danger; when we hate, we see something to be destroyed, we reduce the object of hatred to the reason we have for hating it (to Sasuke, Itachi is not a person, but a demon who killed his clan and must be killed to avenge it. Sasuke never took the time to consider things from Itachi’s point of view, since that could wain his hatred of him). It’s because love is a matching of realities and concerns that when I love someone I can see this person for who and what she is. I see her not in terms of what she means to me (something to avoid, praise, kill, etc.), but in terms of what she is in herself. It is only through love that we can see people as ends in themselves, and not as means to our ends. Love is the strongest bond because it gets us beyond our self. When I am loved, my reality is lived by someone else.
This is why Hiruzen leaves a legacy and Orochimaru doesn’t. This is why Orochimaru needs to try to become immortal and Hiruzen can accept death with a smile. Hiruzen loved the village deeply, his reality was the Village Hidden in the Leaves, and it continued to be lived after he died, because it went beyond him.
Granted, love is a beautiful thing and all, but the train doesn’t stop here. If love is so clearly the best bond to have, the one that makes us the most alive, even allowing us to transcend our individuality to some degree, how come so many people reject love and live their lives by other types of bond? How come there are so many hateful and inconsiderate people, so many resentful and vengeful people? Are they just dumb or blind? No. In fact, it is often the smartest people, and the most sensitive, who end up rejecting love. And there are reasons for that. Many things can get in our way to love, there are many obstacles along the way that can make the prospect of ever achieving something like love practically impossible, a naive and idiotic dream.
A good example of this is Neji, the genius of the Hyuga Clan. Neji thinks people are born with a destiny and never change. He tells Hinata, his cousin: “Everyone judges you by how good your face, head, abilities, body shape and personality are. There are things that cannot be changed. People suffer due to their limits, and live. Just like how we can’t change the fact that I am from the branch family and you are from the head family. My Byakugan has seen many things. That’s why I know!” This is actually a good opportunity to point something out: in Naruto, all doujutsu users symbolize the arrogance of superior insight and intelligence. Because their eyes see things other people don’t, they think they have access to deeper levels of reality than the foolish sheeple. Neji and Sasuke are examples of this in Naruto, Itachi, Nagato and Madara are examples from Naruto Shippuden. They all turn out to be wrong, though.
Neji thinks people should just let themselves go and surrender to their destiny, which is something they can’t change. There is no point in trying to protect the things we love. Some people are failures, some are elites; some people are head family, some are branch family. Things will happen and we have no control over it. But as Hinata sees, contrary to what he says, he is the one suffering the most about this — he is the one, more than anyone, who can’t let himself go.
He really struggles with being a member of the branch family, and arguably this whole discourse is just something he tells himself to cope with it. In reality, he is resentful for being from the branch family and assumes no one can change anything because of the rigorous structure of his family. As Naruto says when they fight, he was the one trying to fight against fate when he tried to kill Hinata during the preliminaries to the Third Exam (something the rules of his family did not allow him to do).
But of course, if we know anything, even before watching the fight, we know Naruto won’t lose to that guy — the show isn’t called Naruto for nothing. There is an interesting point that this brings, though. Out of most if not all of the match ups in the Third Exams (preliminary matches included), Naruto is the only underdog who actually overcame the odds, and he is the main character. We are supposed to buy into the whole talk about how we can change our future, but then the only one able to change his future is Naruto. And maybe not even Naruto, since we later find out he was “the boy from the prophecy” that the Sage Toad told Jiraya about — he was supposed to change the world, that was his destiny all along. Is this some sort of performative contradiction on part of the show?
I think part of the answer to this comes from Hinata herself. Naruto has to fight Neji in the Third Exam, and finds Hinata in his old training ground before the fight. She says to him that when he cheered her on during her fight, she felt stronger, she was able to like herself a little more afterwards, for not having given up. “If a stranger looked at me, it might seem like I haven’t changed… But I think I was able to change”. Even if the outcome was the same, she went from someone who gave up easily to someone who never abandons what is important to her. With that attitude, she is affirming the importance of her reality: of what she loves, what she fights for. She is affirming that the things she fights for are worth every dying breath, every desperate attempt. By acting out the importance of those things, she affects the people she is connected with, they begin to see that importance more clearly too.
The change that matters is not in the result you get, but in your belief in your worth, in the belief that what you are and value, your way of doing things, is worth all the effort you can possibly muster to give it. As Guy says to Lee when Lee doubted himself one day, in his training as a Genin: “hard work has no value if you don’t believe in yourself”. Making mistakes is not a problem in itself. As Hinata says to Naruto, “Even if you did make a mistake you were always, from my point of view, a proud man who makes lots of mistakes. When I looked at you, there was this impact on my heart. You’re not perfect… You make mistakes and you get stronger from them. I believe that is true strength.” Even with the same outcome, our way of seeing what the mistake means can differ: one may see it as a sentence, another may see it as a correction.
This same point is made when we find out the truth about what happened to Neji’s father, Hizashi. Hinata was kidnapped and Hiashi, the head of the main family, her father and Hizashi’s twin, killed the kidnapper — a man from the Land of Lightning. The Land of Lightning did not recognize the kidnapping and made unreasonable demands as compensation for their man killed. To avoid a war, they wanted Hiashi’s dead body — that was in reality a ploy to get the secrets of the byakugan. Hiashi was willing to do it, but Hizashi offered himself to die as Hiashi’s lookalike, since when he died the byakugan would be sealed away with him. He wanted to do it, not to protect the head family (which he still hated), but to protect his older brother, his clan and his village. The action was the same, but he was able to choose it for his own reasons — that was the first free act of his life, by his own account. By dying to protect the main family, he was able to affirm the values he held dear, and this, in turn, would affect the way his son Neji saw the world.
Neji thinks everything is predetermined at birth, that the people who become Hokage are born with that fate and there is nothing we can do about it. To that, Naruto answers “So what? I don’t give up that easily!”. What I take that to mean is this: sure, you can argue that everything is predetermined at birth, but that doesn’t mean we already know what our destiny is. We all could have some hidden potential yet to unlock if we just try hard enough. In essence, what matters isn’t so much to actually become Hokage, but to act as though you are going to — because, even if the future is determined, it is still unknown, and you very well could turn out to become the Hokage, if you choose to take the right path for it.
As Naruto says, Neji is “a coward who blames everything on fate and other crap”. Neji says Naruto could never understand what it is like to have a seal that can never be broken, but Naruto is literally “the demon fox kid”. When he uses just that demon fox power to beat Neji, the message isn’t that he is using a power not gained through hard work, but rather that he is using exactly what was held against him as a source of power. He had to work hard not to be resentful for it — but this hard work was more spiritual than physical, so to speak.
The idea is nicely explained by Genma after Naruto beats Neji: “He left a Kage Bunshin in the hole and dug his way to victory. Although beaten, he believed in victory, and kept thinking of a next move. The power to believe in yourself. That will become the power to change fate. He knows that, and he knows it instinctively.” After this, Neji saw the light. Instead of a bird caged by fate, he was able to fly out of his mental cage. As Genma says, “When captured birds grow wiser, they try to open the cage with their beaks. They don’t give up, because they want to fly again.” The prison Neji was in was really only a mental one.
When we love something, that something becomes a part of our reality and we want to protect it. But life can happen in a way that makes you doubt your ability to protect the things you love: life can make us seem powerless. Confronted with the apparent futility of our efforts, we might not want to keep fighting, pulling our weight and toiling endlessly, since it might all end up being in vain. I think this kind of thinking is especially common in more reflective and intelligent people, the ones who don’t stay trapped in the present all the time and are able to see into the future, so to speak: to wonder about the final consequences of things. But that is just what it is: wondering. No more, no less.
No matter how smart we are, we can’t know the future. We are limited and finite beings, and we are vulnerable to the seemingly random twists of fate. That is the truth we must accept. Good eyes always have a blind spot, as Neji himself knows very well: everytime he tries to see how many birds there are around him with his Byakugan, he misses one. Our vulnerability is both our curse and our blessing: it makes us subject to suffering and death, but also to choose what to suffer and die for. In fact, knowing our blindspot can be an advantage for us, as Neji finds out in his fight against Kidomaru, where he uses his blindspot to lure an attack from Kidomaru to then counter it.
The show makes this same point over and over again. I’ll just talk about a few more to prove my point. Of all the characters, the one I was most disappointed about was Rock Lee. He was always one of my favorite characters: the genius of hard work, a good for nothing kid, with no ninja skills at all, who still didn’t care about what people said about him, because he had a goal and fought really, really, REALLY hard for it. His energy was contagious, every scene he appeared in would get me hyped for him. But still, even with all the youthful passion in the world, he lost to Gaara in devastating fashion. He proved to be a wonderful ninja, but still not enough to play in the big league, so to speak. He had to endure watching his friends overcome obstacles while he could barely walk.
After being hurt by Gaara in the preliminaries, the only hope he had of becoming a ninja again was if Tsunade, the great medical ninja, came back to treat him. When she does, she tells him to quit being a ninja — the only way for him to heal would involve a surgery with, at most, 50% chance of going well, and if it went badly, he could die. That’s interesting for one reason: surely, it’s a great thing to be as determined as Lee is in reaching his goal and protecting and abiding by his ninja way; surely, hard work and self belief can get you very far in life and fulfill you. But what about the times when that is not enough? Sometimes, hard work and self belief don’t cut it. When tragedy strikes, we can be left, like Lee, asking ourselves “Why am I the only one who’s turned out like this!?”.
Lee then remembers how Kakashi told Gai that luck is also part of one’s strength before they played Rock, Paper, Scissors. Gai lost and promised to do 500 laps around Konoha on his hands. Why talk about the self-rule when Lee was in this dilemma? The self-rule is just a way to force yourself to put serious stakes on the line even in trivial situations, forcing yourself to train if you lose. Isn’t that exactly what failed Lee in the first place? Yes and no.
It is true that he faced a situation he wasn’t strong enough to face and came out seriously injured. But it is also true that if it were not for his hard work and self belief in the first place, he would not have had the strength he did. In the end, he decides that fighting for what is important to him is worth risking death and gambles his life on his dream. Tsunade, who was a cynical woman, learned from Naruto that being a ninja means enduring, having the guts to never give up and putting it all on the line for the people you love.
Another example of this can be seen after the Sasuke retrieval mission fails, when Shikamaru and Naruto have parallelled moments. Shikamaru decides to give up being a ninja because he couldn’t protect his friends and doesn’t want to go through being at fault for someone he loves being hurt again. His father calls him a coward and says a true friend would train harder not to fail his friends next time — since the missions would go on and it would simply be someone else in charge instead of him. But if it was him, by training and preparing himself, he could increase the chances of everything going perfectly. Shikamaru learns his lesson about taking responsibility for what he loves, about never giving up on what is important to him.
Jiraya, on the other hand, tells Naruto to forget about Sasuke, his best friend who left the village. He had gone through the same thing with Orochimaru and couldn’t bring him back in the end. “Finally after all the suffering, the only things left were my own helplessness and regret.” Jiraya says if Naruto tries to chase Sasuke, he won’t train him. “Give up on Sasuke. It was destined to turn out this way sooner or later. Don’t suffer anymore. Forget him and ditch the bond you had. There aren’t just techniques or power… Ninja must hone the ability to make the proper judgements and choices. If you are going to live as a ninja, become wiser. If you remain an idiot, it will be tough to live in this world. That’s the harsh truth.”
To which Naruto responds: “All right… If that’s what it means to be wise, I’ll be an idiot all my life!”. An idiot who loves at least has something important to live for, while a “wise man” who gives up on love loses his purpose and becomes cynical.
It is very common for people to say cynicism is a bad thing and so on, but why? The answer Naruto gives is the following: cynics can’t become heroes. There is no better demonstration of this than the first narrative arc in Naruto, the mission in the Land of Waves. In ep. 4 we meet Tazuna, the expert bridge builder who team 7 is supposed to protect in their first mission outside the village. In ep. 10 we meet Inari, Tazuna’s grandson, a kid who has grown cynical since the death of his father, a great hero of the town, at the hands of Gatoo, super rich villain and gangster. Ever since seeing his hero die in front of him, Inari lost all hope of anything being saved, coming to the conclusion that the best we can do is resign ourselves to the powers that be. For him, people who stand up to stronger foes end up being martyrs, not heroes — there’s no David and Goliath in real life.
The Land of Waves is the embodiment of hopelessness and decay: poverty, unemployment and petty crimes all over the place. Markets barely have any food and the people are going hungry. Not only that, but the people have an air of resignation: since being invaded by Gatoo’s crew, everyone seems to have given up in trying to get better. As Tazuna says, the adults have all become cowards. But it didn’t use to be like this. The town had a hero.
One day, some kids threw Inari’s dog in the water and he didn’t jump to save it because he couldn’t swim. So the incredibly mean kids threw him in the water too. The dog learned to swim and saved itself, but Inari was about to drown when a man saved him. Inari told him about how he wanted to save his dog but didn’t have the courage, for he was scared of drowning. The man told him that it’s ok for a kid to be scared, but that if you are a man, you should live in a way you won’t regret. His philosophy, by his own words to Inari that day, is: “Protect whatever is important to you with these two arms, no matter how tough or sad it is, even if it costs your life” — sounds familiar? His name was Kaiza.
One fateful day, the dam of the town broke because of the rain and the town was about to be flooded. The only way to prevent the flood was to attach the dam back together with a rope, by swimming to the other side and pulling it. But the torrent was strong and anyone who jumped in there would almost certainly die. Of course, Kaiza went there with a rope, swam for his life and saved the town in front of everyone, in a proper dramatic moment.
It was around that time that Gatoo came. To make an example of Kaiza, Gatoo’s men smashed Kaiza’s arms and literally held him up in a cross and killed him in front of the whole town (wink wink, Jesus of Nazareth — arguably the first ever and best ever hero of love).
Ever since Kaiza’s death, the whole town, Inari most of all, changed and lost all hope in heroes — which is the same as saying: they became cowards. Naruto, unsurprisingly, becomes turned on by hearing this story and decides to prove to Inari that there are still heroes in this world.
Inari, on the other hand, seeing Naruto train his ass off to get stronger to protect Tazuna and become Hokage, gets mad at his naive hopes. “No matter how hard you try and say those good-looking words… weak people are going to lose against strong people!”, says Inari, accusing Naruto of not knowing real pain and just posing as a hero while laughing all the time. Naruto replies: “Is that why you’re pretending to be the main character of a tragedy and just crying?”. As we know, Naruto knows pain, very much. What he eventually realised is that only looking at your own pain gets you nowhere. It is because he knows pain that he knows that it isn’t worth it to just wallow in it.
Tazuna seems to know it as well, which is why he will not give up building the bridge to help the town get the resources it needs, as a symbol of hope to everyone. Knowing he didn’t have enough money, Tazuna went to Konoha anyway and requested whatever ninjas he could, even lying to have the most chances he could. He knew that by insisting on building the bridge he was risking death, but still, even when all his coworkers were giving up, he never did.
And Kakashi, the team leader, decided to help Tazuna even though his team was unqualified for the job, potentially risking his friends’ lives. When Tazuna asked him why, Kakashi answered with words from the Fourth Hokage: “Not doing right when you know it is right is a coward’s way. There are no weak soldiers under a valiant commander”. A nice way of interpreting this quote in the context of the philosophy we are developing here is this: whenever we see that something is right, we do it, because our very notion of what is right will be informed by what we love and care about.
He decides to risk what is most precious to him because not risking it then would make the importance of that thing lose its point. If his bonds of love are based on mutual help, how can he see a good man who needs help and decide not to? Even if his decision is to protect his loved ones, the very fact of his love is based on the relationship of help he has with them. Denying a good man the help he needs would weaken the strength of the bonds of mutual help he has with others.
When Gatoo’s men come a second time, to take Inari’s mom for a hostage and force Tazuna to resign, Inari is again, at least initially, scared of dying, and does nothing. But Naruto’s words echo inside him and he feels different. He goes after the men who took his mom and charges after them like an absolute fool. Little did he know that Naruto was, as a proper hero always should, just in time to save him and his mom, and wouldn’t have had that opportunity to do it if it weren’t for Inari getting their attention with his sudden display of bravado. Even the weakest of the weak can make a crucial difference if they are foolish enough to try, it seems.
Although, of course, it can be argued that Inari could have just as easily been killed right then and there. Courage is not the same as rashness, and the will to protect without the power to do it won’t get too far. This “war” between love and power is something that is much more developed in Naruto Shippuden, but we already have some hints about it.
After finishing the Second Exam of the Chunin Exams, team 7 enters the tower and gets to read a little riddle of sorts. “If you do not possess Heaven, gain knowledge and be prepared. If you do not possess Earth, run through the fields and seek strength. If you open both Heaven and Earth scrolls, dangerous paths turn into safe paths. This is the secret of something something…[person/human being/Chunin] It shall lead you on your way.” As Iruka explains, Heaven refers to the head, Earth to the body. A human being needs to cultivate both to do well in life and turn dangerous paths into safe ones, that is, to be able to deal with whatever problems life throws at them. This same yin yang relationship works with love and power: power without love is tyrannical and only leads to hate, love without power is weak and only leads to defeat.
However, it is still better to seek love before seeking power. A man who becomes powerful without bonds of love is likely to see them as a weakness and dispense them altogether. On the other hand, a man who seeks power because of his love, that is, in order to protect what is important to him, will become powerful in the best way. Inari’s willingness to risk his life to protect his mom and town touched the hearts of the rest of the people and they decided to help him — as often happens in Naruto when someone has the courage and resolve to take the first step. When we have a bond with someone, we naturally want to help them when they have a hard time. And Inari was fighting for something that was important for everyone, not just for him. He was fighting for a reality they all shared.
It was after this mission that Naruto decided what his own ninja way would be: “I’m going to run straight down the path where I’m not going to regret anything!”. Essentially, he would spare no efforts to protect what he wanted: this way, there will be no could’ve should’ve would’ve stuff. He will always know that he did all he could to protect the things important to him, he would give his love everything he had. He never went back on his word since then…
Stay tunned for the second edition on Naruto Shippuden, where I will talk about Sasuke (not exclusively, of course), whom I decided to ommit in this one.
