Character · Naruto
Iruka Umino
The first adult in the village to buy the loud orphan dinner, and the reason the story has a beginning at all.
In Otakana the clue reads: Academy teacher with a scar across his nose
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Iruka Umino teaches at the Leaf's ninja academy, which mostly means keeping a room full of children from setting one another on fire. He has a scar across the bridge of his nose and a raised voice he uses often. He also lost both parents on the night the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked, which gives him every reason to resent the boy the fox was sealed into.
He does the opposite. The first episode turns on Iruka deciding out loud, while bleeding, that a child treated as a monster since birth is a child. Ramen at Ichiraku becomes their standing arrangement. In a series stuffed with prodigies and legendary ninja, Iruka never gets stronger and never needs to, and the story is better for leaving him alone.
His job is structural. Kishimoto needed one person to establish that Naruto was worth someone's time before asking readers to spend seven hundred chapters on him, and a teacher is the cheapest and most honest way to do that. Iruka keeps turning up afterwards at graduations, promotions and ceremonies, usually crying somewhere near the back.
Spelling IRUKA
IRUKA is five letters and the Japanese word for dolphin, イルカ. His family name Umino means of the sea, so the whole thing is a marine joke stacked two deep. The spelling is clean: no long vowels, no doubled consonants, and the row alternates vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel from the I straight through to the A.