Bamboo Minister

Baldness and a trimmed dark beard mark the minister's face, which carries a detail hard to miss whenever he speaks: a pair of gold teeth.

Ambition and cold calculation drive him. He schemes to seat Kae's younger stepbrother on the throne rather than the princess, and he is prepared to arrange her death to reach that goal. His cruelty runs deep, laid bare by the way he raised a whole crop of orphans into killers while treating their deaths during training as an acceptable cost.

The minister quietly assembled roughly fifty parentless children and drilled them into a private corps of assassins. Hana Kaka emerged as one of the few to survive that ordeal and was chosen to serve him. A decade past the Fourth Shinobi World War, he dispatched her to slip into Konoha under the guise of an Academy instructor.

When word reached him that the king intended to name Kae the official heir, he sensed his plans unraveling and sent his assassin after her. The scheme collapsed once Kawaki thwarted a third attempt on Kae's life, and evidence collected by Batora Kuromori exposed the minister as the mastermind. Authorities in the Land of Bamboo took him into custody. His remaining allies then plotted to seize Kae alive as leverage for his release, but Team 25 arrested them before the plan could work.