Character · Naruto
Minato Namikaze
The Fourth Hokage could cross a battlefield faster than anyone on it could report that he had left.
In Otakana the clue reads: The Yellow Flash, fastest Hokage on record
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Minato Namikaze made his name in a war where enemy forces were given standing orders to flee on sight rather than engage. The technique behind that is the Flying Thunder God: he marks a place or a person with a seal, then moves to the mark instantly. Scatter enough marked kunai across a valley and there is no useful distance left between him and anybody in it.
He invented the Rasengan and died before finishing it, having meant to add a nature transformation to the sphere. He was Jiraiya's student and Kakashi's teacher, and he had been Hokage only a short while when the Nine-Tails attacked the village on the night his son was born. What he did about that cost him everything and left the baby carrying the rest.
The resemblance is the joke the series plays on its readers for years. Naruto is blond and loud and nobody in the village puts the two faces together, or at least nobody admits to it. Minato is written with a character meaning harbour, and Namikaze reads as wind of the waves, a quieter naming scheme than most of the cast gets.
Spelling MINATO
MINATO is six letters and also an ordinary Japanese noun, a harbour, as well as one of Tokyo's central wards. Three beats, mi-na-to, with a vowel on every even tile. Nothing is doubled and no long vowel goes missing. The game wants the given name rather than NAMIKAZE, which is the rarer of the two in conversation anyway.