Hana Kaka: The Schoolteacher Who Was an Assassin

Ten years after the Fourth Great Ninja War, a child from the Land of Bamboo is given her mission: settle in Konoha as a schoolteacher and wait there. A decade later, the shy teacher at the Ninja Academy struggles to command her students and doubts she is cut out for the job. She has no idea that the assassin sent after the princess sitting in her class shares her body.

A Character Born from a Reader Contest

Hana Kaka first appears in episode 261 of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, the one that opens the arc devoted to Kawaki and Himawari at the Ninja Academy. This arc is the twenty-third of the animated series and runs through episode 273. It all comes down to one sentence: a former assassin from the Land of Bamboo, planted as a schoolteacher in Konohagakure. Her profile lists her in the anime only: neither the character nor her arc exists in the manga.

Hana was not even born at the animation studio. She is a reader creation, the winning entry in the Borukura contest — short for Boruto Cluster — tied to chapter #28 of Boruto. The winning entries of this contest were then picked up in both the anime and the manga. The animated series has already given itself figures born outside the manga, such as the swordsman Raiga Kurosuki, the only originally anime-exclusive character that the manga eventually adopted.

Her name revolves around a single image: “Hana”, written 花, means “flower”, and “Kaka” doubles the character 華, which also means flower. Her wind techniques carry the same motif: Wind Release: Hanaarashi (風遁・花嵐, “flower storm”) surrounds the target with a petal-laden vortex to disorient them, while Wind Release: Hikarakuyō turns it into an attack. On the voice side, she is played by Mai Nakahara in Japanese and by Anairis Quiñones in English.

Fifty Orphans from the Land of Bamboo

The Land of Bamboo is a small country on good terms with the Land of Fire and, unlike most of its neighbors, it is ruled by a king rather than a daimyo. One of its ministers gathered fifty orphaned children there to turn them into his personal assassins. He did not care that most of them died in training. Hana was part of this group and is among the survivors.

What breaks her fits in one sentence: she was never able to bring herself to kill anyone. Forced to fight her comrades to the death, her gentle nature came into conflict with her desperate desire to live, and these two irreconcilable goals split her consciousness into two independent personalities. The second became the dominant one, then one of the minister's most effective killers. The first never knew anything about it.

Ten years after the Fourth Great Ninja War, while she is still a child, Hana is given her mission: settle in Konoha as a schoolteacher. The arc describes her as a sleeper agent who arrived in the village a decade earlier. The wake-up call comes from the Land of Bamboo: informed that the king is about to officially name his daughter Kae Yukiwari as his heir, the minister, former tutor of the princess's younger stepbrother whom he wants to see take the throne, sends his assassin after her.

The Shy Teacher at the Ninja Academy

On screen, Hana is a kind and gentle woman, shy, eaten away by doubt. She attends the welcome ceremony for the new students, then Anko Mitarashi goes with her to help her hold her first class. She struggles to command the room and then tells her colleagues she doubts she can do this job; they answer that everyone has had a difficult start. According to Anko, Hana had nonetheless done very well on the recruitment tests, with solid teaching knowledge.

Her sincerity is recognized by everyone. She takes an interest in what her students like and throws herself into solving their problems, even when she goes about it badly. When an exercise run by the team of Konohamaru, invited in as instructors, divides the class, she reads up on the two students who have fallen out, Eho and Soul, fails several times, finally gets through to them and cancels a day of classes for a picnic under the cherry trees. She is also ready to put herself in danger for her students.

The Konoha Ninja Academy has already had an instructor who betrayed the village, with Mizuki. Hana moves the problem up a notch: she really is an infiltrator, but the woman who teaches the class has no idea the infiltrator exists. This split explicitly recalls dissociative identity disorder, and the second personality is merciless, without fear or doubt, without attachment: she throws away a gift from the students without a glance.

An Arsenal of Wind Release and Fire Release

Trained since childhood, Hana is an elite ninja and assassin who excels at trickery and diversion. A clear limit does apply, however: only the second personality makes full use of that training. Her shurikenjutsu is described as advanced, able to throw volleys of lethal effectiveness, and her taijutsu just as much. On a mission, the silhouette changes completely: bandages over the body, a purple hooded robe, black gloves and an elegant mask with dark lips, shaded around the right eye.

Her two chakra natures are Wind Release and Fire Release. In Wind Release, she drives her targets back with powerful torrents of air and blurs their sight with flower-laden attacks. Her most powerful wind technique is a barrier of dark paper that seals the area under a dome: inside it she strikes from any angle and throws her voice to mislead her opponent, but the chakra cost is such that she cannot hold it for long.

In Fire Release, her Dark Flames, black and blue, redirect in mid-flight with a simple point of the index and middle fingers, and concentrate into whirling spheres, the Chaotic Falls. She also uses the Shadow Clone Jutsu, smoke bombs for escape as well as for the surprise attack and a stock of weapons ranging from the shuriken to the kama and chakra blades. She rigged the side of a building with a chain of explosive tags organized around one giant tag, and marks her targets with these same tags to set off the Tenchu, the divine punishment.

The Flame Bear She Cannot Beat

During a day of practical exercises, Hana splits her class into teams of three on a hill near the Ninja Academy and forbids them to go deep into the nearby forest. Kae strays from it anyway, called away by a note from her classmate Konashi Nerikiri, and Himawari joins her: the two of them run into a flame bear. Hana steps in to let them escape, but her petal-laden wind vortex falters against the animal, in keeping with the relationships between chakra natures, where fire beats wind.

Unable to overcome the bear, she owes her rescue to Kawaki, who then lectures her for her helplessness. The scene is the clearest sign of the split: the original personality finds itself in trouble against real opponents, while the second manages to give trouble to Kawaki himself, described as a very high-level fighter. Her clumsiness is therefore not an act, since Hana does not know the other exists.

Getting Kawaki Out of the Way to Reach Kae

Kawaki is not at the Ninja Academy to become a ninja: Naruto and Shikamaru gave him a secret mission, protecting Kae while posing as a student, and chose him because his face was still little known in the village. Hana's second personality eventually learns of it. To gauge the threat, she manipulates rogue ninja into kidnapping the student Osuka for ransom — Himawari is captured along with her —, then watches from a distance as Kawaki takes down the kidnapper.

She then tries to get him out of the way. An anonymous note sent to the student Eiki spreads the rumor that Kawaki is a real shinobi; while he is struggling with it, the assassin goes after Kae as she sleeps in the infirmary, and Kawaki arrives just in time. The third attempt takes the form of a bombing: on the day of the festival where the class is to perform a play about the Sannin, the Ninja Academy grounds are rigged with a series of explosive tags.

Hana, who has no memory of her own actions, discusses the options with the rest of the teaching staff, then leaves to look for missing students. The second personality then takes over, drowns in smoke bombs a festival where the play could not even begin and charges at Kae. Himawari sees through the threat with the Byakugan and gets the princess out, Kawaki drives the assassin off. To break free, the latter sets off a volley of explosive tags and ends up wounded by the rubble from her own explosion. At the hospital, asked about the assassin's face, she remembers nothing.

The Assassin's Faked Suicide

An accomplice from the Land of Bamboo joins the assassin. The two of them agree that, things being what they are, the safest way to wrap up the mission is to make everyone believe the assassin is dead. The man takes his own life and Hana dresses his body in her own killer's outfit — hooded cloak, bandages, purple mask —, a backup plan she keeps in reserve.

She then attacks Kae's residence and quickly takes the butler Batora Kuromori out of the fight, before Kawaki once again stops her from killing. The fight moves outside: she first puts him in trouble with her flames, but he dodges and takes the upper hand. She then switches to her fallback plan and opens her cloak on several explosive tags stuck to her body.

Kawaki backs off. Hana summons the disguised corpse and sets off the tags placed on it. The Tenchu is normally a sacrifice technique, in which the user covers their chest with tags and blows themselves up within range of the enemy; she repurposed it by sticking the tags on an ally's body rather than her own, in order to create a decoy. Shortly after, the evidence gathered by Batora gets the minister arrested by the authorities of the Land of Bamboo, and the case appears closed.

The Secret Room in the Apartment

Out of the hospital, Hana finds a class that has prepared a welcome for her and is glad to have been missed. Over the course of the day, fragments of her fights against Kawaki come back to her. On learning that another attempt has targeted Kae, she connects herself with all the incidents, turns her apartment upside down to settle the matter and finds there a secret room filled with assassin's gear.

Her reaction is immediate: she wants to turn herself in to the authorities. That is when the second personality speaks up and lays out the whole truth to her, their shared past, the reason for their presence in Konoha, and the fact that Hana's ignorance was precisely what kept all suspicion away from her. Judging her useless from then on, the assassin takes full control of the body, locks away the original's consciousness and plays the schoolteacher herself.

The divide is not airtight, however. During the next attempt on Kae, Hana briefly takes back control and makes the attack fail, which earns her being muzzled again. Later, as the assassin threatens the princess, the kind Hana starts to cry through the other's eyes, who is openly irritated by this softness. This second personality has a sadistic streak: she offers false hope to her targets the better to crush them.

The Island, and the Personality That Wins Out

The assassin organizes a survival camp for the class on a former island training ground, then sabotages it: the food supplies disappear, Kikuchiyo, the ninja dog of the student Mimi Inuzuka, is lured with his own food then wounded by a trap, Neon's drone is damaged to reduce surveillance, all against a background of rumors of murderous rogue ninja prowling the island. In the evening, Kae gives her a flower arrangement; she throws it away, claims to have mislaid it and leads the princess away from the group on the pretext of looking for it with her.

It is the drone recording that gives her away: Kawaki spots petals in a corner of the screen. Unmasked, she carries Kae off, stabs her on a bridge before their eyes and blows up the structure. The scene is a ruse: with the minister behind bars, his allies now want the princess alive as a bargaining chip. In the cave where she is holding her, Hana taunts her and plants near her face a kunai left there deliberately, which Kae uses to cut her bonds.

The final fight turns on the Byakugan: Hana seals the trio under her paper barrier, Kae opens a breach in it with an explosive-tag kunai, Himawari spots her through it and Kawaki puts her down. Sai and Batora then announce that her allies have been arrested by the Anbu. The assassin tries to take her own life, but the exhaustion of the fight lets the teacher resist her, and the encouragement of the whole class gives her back control. Hana then refuses to have her second personality erased and cuts her ties with the Land of Bamboo to live at last as a schoolteacher.

Summary Table

FAQ

• Does Hana Kaka appear in the Boruto manga?
  No. She is known to appear only in the anime: her debut is episode 261 of Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, and the whole arc that features her, from 261 to 273, is anime-original. The character herself comes from a reader contest, the Borukura, tied to chapter #28 of the manga.
• Why does Hana have two personalities?
  As a child, she was taken in among fifty orphans by a minister of the Land of Bamboo, then forced to fight her comrades to the death. Since she could not bring herself to kill, her gentle nature and her desire to survive came into conflict, and these two goals split her consciousness. This split in fact recalls the clinical picture of dissociative identity disorder.
• Does Hana really kill Kae Yukiwari?
  No, the blow struck on the bridge is staged. The minister had just been arrested and his allies now wanted the princess alive, to trade her for his release. Kae reappears as a prisoner in a cave and takes part herself in Hana's defeat, by opening a breach in her paper barrier.
• Who unmasks the assassin?
  Kawaki, while reviewing Neon's drone recording with Himawari: petals appear in a corner of the image, in the sequence of the attack that had damaged the device. Earlier, it was the butler Batora Kuromori who had gathered the evidence that led to the arrest of the Land of Bamboo's minister.
• Which techniques does Hana use in combat?
  She combines two chakra natures. In Wind Release, torrents of air, petal-laden attacks and a dome of dark paper closed over the area, too costly in chakra to be held for long. In Fire Release, black and blue flames that a simple point of the index and middle fingers redirects in mid-flight, and their version concentrated into whirling spheres, the Chaotic Falls. Added to these are the Shadow Clone Jutsu and a heavy use of explosive tags.
• What becomes of the assassin personality at the end of the arc?
  Hana is offered the chance to have it erased and she refuses. She prefers to keep it under control, without resentment: she is credited with the hope of teaching her double to live for something other than her mission, and one day of making a friend of her. She then cuts ties with her home country to take up the job of schoolteacher for good.

In summary

Key takeaway: the infiltration is real, but her clumsiness is no less so. Hana is not playing a part, since she does not know about the other, and the arc closes on the teacher, who keeps her second personality rather than having it erased and cuts ties with her home country.