Butsuma Senju

Tall and strong-jawed, Butsuma has dark eyes and shoulder-length black hair pulled back by a strip of pale green cloth bound at the brow. For war he dons the red plate armor typical of the age, stamped with the Senju crest across the chest and shoulders and backed by mesh beneath. A sword rides over his right shoulder, sometimes joined by a tanto on the left guard, while indoors at the clan's stronghold he switches to plain black robes.

Outwardly composed and level, Butsuma is nonetheless severe and quick to bristle. He strikes Hashirama in anger for questioning the practice of sending children to war, insisting the boys who died did so as true shinobi. To him, forging his sons into the finest warriors they can be is the purest love a parent can offer. He and his Uchiha counterpart Tajima are near mirror images in ability and outlook, each willing to cut down the other's child to open a fatal gap. Yet beneath the harshness he genuinely loves his sons, keeping Hashirama's friendship with an Uchiha hidden to spare him a traitor's mark, and he stays his hand from a second blow once Tobirama explains that his brother is simply grieving.

Butsuma stands over fresh graves after another round of losses, among them his son Kawarama, and rebukes his youngest, Itama, for weeping, holding that shinobi must bury their feelings. When Hashirama challenges him for sending so young a boy into battle, Butsuma answers with a blow, declaring that Kawarama fell as a true warrior and that anyone bearing a weapon counts as an enemy. Only Tobirama's intervention cools him. Later, learning that Hashirama has been meeting a stranger, he sends Tobirama to trail him and discovers the boy is the Uchiha Madara.

He orders Hashirama to keep watch on the youth and kill him should their clan's secrets slip. The rivalry boils over when Butsuma and Tobirama meet Tajima and Izuna Uchiha, and both fathers lunge to slay the other's son, their strikes turned aside by the boys themselves. Butsuma looks on in astonishment as the young Madara awakens his Sharingan. Little is recorded of his combat, but the sword and tanto he bears point to skill in kenjutsu, and his reputation is said to match that of the Sharingan-wielding Tajima, a standing that surviving into adulthood in so lethal an age only reinforces.