Iō

A grey-haired little man whose scalp has thinned with age, Iō sports both a modest moustache and a goatee. His workshop dress runs to a raised-collar jacket, dark trousers, and sandals, with bandaging wound over his gloved forearms. Stamped with Konoha's emblem, a smith's apron completes the look.

Eccentric to the core, Iō pours himself into building armaments and rarely pauses to weigh the fallout, which is why so many of his creations end up either unusable or wildly excessive. He chafes at the limits placed on his tinkering, yet his devotion to Konoha never wavers. Even barred from freely experimenting, he flatly declines to arm outsiders, reserving every design for his own village.

Because his experiments tend to produce sudden blasts, which he cheerfully frames as part of the creative challenge, Iō was moved out to the village's edge. Many of his so-called weapons cannot be carried at all or accomplish nothing useful, yet his command of tool-craft is genuine: he engineers strange but potent devices such as Tsurukame, Dakō, and Jidanda, sets clever traps, and stores his inventions using the Enclosing Technique.

When Neji Hyūga, Tenten, and Naruto Uzumaki visit the Konoha Ninja Tool Research Facility to collect equipment, they find Iō and Shōseki hard at work below on his latest project. Two rogue ninja, Gameru and Kusune, force their way in demanding fresh weapons, each already wielding a prototype that Shōseki had sold off. Iō handed Tenten his newest build, Jidanda, and she used it to beat both intruders, after which he reclaimed it, insisting it still needed refining. Three years on, following the village's devastation, Tenten and Neji return to gather more of his tools.