Danjō

Somewhere in his fifties, Danjō carries enormous bulk, with loose fat drooping from his jawline and spreading across the whole of his frame.

Greedy and unscrupulous, Danjō schemes to overrun the Land of Flowers, slaughtering its people to feed his hunger for authority. Handing back fertile land the Land of Fire seized long ago does nothing to cool him, since calling off the assault would cost him money. Threats unsettle him easily, and Tekkan, the daimyō of the Land of Lightning, sets him flinching with a single angry gesture; even so, he is too pig-headed to bow before the Hokage or his fellow rulers. To his mind a daimyō owes the Kage neither imitation nor compromise and is free to forge pacts or wage war on a whim, and he treats a ninja's capacity for bloodshed as a handy excuse for cruelty. Preferring struggle to talk, he is a warmonger at heart, insisting shinobi need regular clashes to keep power balanced and grumbling that their Union only dulls their edge as fighters.

In the events of Shikamaru Shinden, the trouble starts when Danjō commands Kurotsuchi, Iwagakure's Tsuchikage, to seize the Land of Flowers for its rich soil. Once Iwa mobilises and Konoha exposes his role in the plot, he joins an unusual Five Daimyō Summit by video link. Pressed on his motives, he glares at Ikkyū Madoka and argues that daimyō should never ape the Shinobi Union, insisting they may ally or fight however they please and that ninja have no business meddling in their politics. He and Tekkan trade barbs over the campaign, and though Tekkan's manner keeps rattling him, he will not abandon it. When Ikkyū offers to give the Land of Earth back a few small fertile tracts, Danjō balks, complaining that he has already sunk money into raising his army. He calls the gesture pleasant but suspects the Land of Fire of ulterior aims and again spurns the deal. His nerve only begins to fail when Ikkyū floats a Continental Summit that would gather every leader on the continent, paired with the danger of the two lands turning into open foes. At that summit, after Mifune speaks, Danjō addresses the assembled hundreds with ease, granting that shinobi are a people trained from birth to kill and to lie and have soaked the continent in violence, yet promising to spur their instincts rather than curb them, reasoning that fair competition wards off far worse disasters. He yields the floor to Ikkyū, Naruto, and Kurotsuchi, and after their words strike home, he quietly drops the invasion, accepts the offered territory, and levies fresh taxes on it.