Mito Uzumaki: Kurama's First Jinchuriki

Tailed BeastJinchurikiMito

Before Kushina and Naruto, another Uzumaki was already carrying Kurama. Mito, wife of Hashirama the First Hokage and a master of fuinjutsu, was the very first jinchuriki of the Nine-Tailed Fox — Kushina only comes second, Naruto third. The sealing takes place after the Valley of the End, with Madara defeated and the beast subdued by Hashirama. What remains is a largely forgotten matriarch of Konoha: Tsunade's grandmother, and the one who will pass her burden on to Kushina.

The very first jinchuriki of Kurama, long before Kushina and Naruto: meet Mito Uzumaki, wife of the First Hokage and forgotten matriarch of Konoha.

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Kurama's First Host

Mito Uzumaki is a kunoichi from Uzushiogakure, the home village of her clan. After emigrating to Konoha, she becomes the first jinchuriki of the Nine-Tailed Fox, one of the nine tailed beasts in the ninja world, following the events at the Valley of the End. Kushina Uzumaki succeeds her, then Naruto; the list of hosts does not stop there, since Minato Namikaze also appears on it, for the Yin half of the beast alone.

Her profile comes down to a few traits: a calm, composed person of marked dignity. Chapter 500 credits her with a strong sense of duty toward her husband and toward the village, and sees in her sealing of the Nine-Tailed Fox the direct expression of that duty. The fourth databook adds one more word: it describes her as gentle and reassuring, the exact register in which she will later comfort Kushina.

The databooks issue a ninja registration number only to characters with a complete biography, and only two ninja from Uzushiogakure have ever received one: Mito and Kushina. Mito appears there without a number — her age could explain it, though nothing confirms it — while Kushina carries one, but one that follows the numbering system of Konoha, where she was trained. So it is unknown whether Uzushiogakure ever used any. Mito's entry occupies page 36 of the fourth databook.

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The Sealing at the Valley of the End

After defecting from Konoha, Madara Uchiha finds the Nine-Tailed Fox and bends it to his Sharingan, forcing the beast to back him against Hashirama Senju (chapter 399, pages 11-13). The fight leaves a colossal scar in the ground that will come to be known as the Valley of the End. At that point the story refers to the beast by its number of tails, the Nine-Tails (Kyubi): its actual name, Kurama, will only be revealed to Naruto in the middle of the Fourth Great Ninja War.

It is after the duel, once Hashirama has won and the Nine-Tailed Fox has passed into his possession, that Mito seals the tailed beast inside herself and becomes its first jinchuriki. Chapter 500, page 6, gives the act its reason: to contain that power for the benefit of Konoha. The story also sees it as an act of duty — she makes herself a vessel to give power to her husband and to the village he has just founded.

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The Master of Seals

The story is sparing about her combat abilities, but Kushina considered her a powerful kunoichi. What is established comes down to fuinjutsu: she was exceptional at it, to the point of sealing Kurama whole inside her own body. The fourth databook adds that, even for an Uzumaki, her chakra was of a particularly powerful and unique type, which made her able to suppress the Nine-Tails. Once she became a jinchuriki, she gained access to even vaster reserves.

One gap remains that nothing fills. The Eight Trigrams Sealing Style, the very one Minato Namikaze will use on Naruto, is explicitly documented as a fuinjutsu of the Uzumaki Clan (chapter 500, page 3). But its list of users includes only Kushina Uzumaki, Minato, Obito Uchiha on the manga side and Orochimaru on the anime side. Mito's name does not appear there, and the technique by which she sealed the Nine-Tailed Fox is never named.

We do know what her clan's seals look like: their design takes the form of a spiral recalling the Uzumaki emblem. That mastery earned the clan as much respect as fear throughout the ninja world, and the fourth databook specifies that the Uzumaki supplied seals to Konoha whenever the need arose. The spiral motif, for its part, will later become an entire lesson in Mito's hands.

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The Seal That Nearly Broke During Her Childbirth

Chapter 500 attaches a caveat to the sealing: despite the strength of the seal, it nearly broke while she was going through childbirth. It is the only incident the story documents across her entire tenure as a jinchuriki, even though that tenure spans several decades. Nothing is said about how the breach was closed, nor about what it cost, nor about the birth that caused it: the manga dispatches the episode in a single sentence.

A generation later, the same weak point reappears, this time announced in advance. It is the anime that puts the warning in someone's mouth: in Shippuden episode 247, "The Coveted Nine-Tails," aired on February 2, 2012 and drawn from chapters 499 and 500, Biwako Sarutobi, wife of the Third Hokage, warns Minato and Kushina that the Eight Trigrams Sealing Style will weaken during the delivery and that the birth must therefore take place outside the village, under the protection of a barrier.

The manga, for its part, reports the same precautions without having anyone voice them: with the seal at its weakest at that moment, Kushina leaves the village in secret to give birth in a remote place, with Minato maintaining the seal and the Anbu guarding the surroundings. The arrangement comes from the Third Hokage, who assigns Kushina two midwives, Biwako and Taji (chapter 500, pages 9-17). Nothing explicitly links this warning to Mito's precedent; the two episodes are merely laid out in that order.

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Three Hokage Reigns: How Long She Held Kurama

Uzumaki longevity is not a figure of speech: chapter 579, page 12, attributes it to an extraordinary life force, which gives the clan very long lives and slow aging. Mito is the example given. Born before the founding of Konoha, she lived into the reign of the Third Hokage, and her hair had kept all its color by then.

Her own entry gives the same scale differently: as an adult, she lived through the reigns of the first three Hokage — Hashirama, Tobirama Senju, then Hiruzen Sarutobi, the first three names in the village's Hokage lineage. On the tailed beast side, the chronology reads differently again: her tenure over the Nine-Tailed Fox spans the First and then the Second Great Ninja War. That is how the story measures its length.

On her aged appearance, manga and anime diverge. The manga keeps her bright red hair, longer still in old age, part of which she lets fall down her back, the two buns preserved. The anime, for its part, draws her with brown hair in her old age, in Shippuden episode 247. Hair color is therefore the precise point where the two versions contradict each other, and it is the manga's still-colored hair that serves to illustrate the clan's longevity.

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Never Controlling Kurama: Sensing Negative Emotions

Her entry is clear on this point: Mito never obtained full control of Kurama, but she had access to one of its faculties, the sensing of negative emotions (chapter 545, page 1). The technique makes it possible to perceive hostility, hatred and other bad emotions in others. On the manga side, it has only three users — Kurama, Mito and Naruto — the other cases belonging to the anime or the movies.

The comparison with Naruto does not come from the narrator but from a character. In chapter 545, published in Japan on July 18, 2011 and collected in volume 58, Tobi recalls the report of Kisame and declares that Naruto's faculty is the same as Mito Uzumaki's. The technique itself debuted a few chapters earlier, in chapter 496, and in Shippuden episode 245 on the anime side.

Two clarifications frame this kinship. Minato Namikaze, who nonetheless fully mastered the Yin half of the Nine-Tailed Fox sealed inside him, never demonstrated this technique. Naruto, for his part, accesses it through the Nine-Tails Chakra Mode: that is how he flushes out Kisame Hoshigaki hidden inside Samehada, even though the man and the sword share exactly the same chakra signature (chapter 505, pages 9-10). On Mito's side, the story reports no comparable demonstration.

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What Kurama Remembers: Madara, Hashirama, Mito, Kushina

The point of view flips once, and only once. During the fight pitting Killer Bee and Naruto against Tobi and the reanimated jinchuriki, the Nine-Tailed Fox deliberately stops consuming its host's chakra to let him fight alone, and refuses to listen to the request for help sent to it by the Eight-Tails (Hachibi). It is in this interval of withdrawal, while it keeps out of the fight, that its memory comes back.

It thinks back on its past encounters with Madara, Hashirama, Mito and Kushina. From these four experiences, the manga credits it with one conclusion: whatever words humans use, they always mean the same thing — Naruto excepted, a thought that silences it. The sequence occupies chapter 568, adapted for the screen by Shippuden episode 326, "The Four-Tails, the Monkey King!", aired on August 22, 2013, which condenses chapters 553, 567 and 568.

It is there, chapter 568, page 8, that the manga quotes Mito's words addressed to the Nine-Tailed Fox: if it uses its power, nothing but hatred will come of it, and it must stay quiet deep inside her. In the same episode, Naruto speaks with Son Goku, Tobi's prisoner, and on that occasion learns the Nine-Tailed Fox's actual name.

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Hashirama's Wife, Tsunade's Grandmother

Mito marries Hashirama Senju, who will help found Konoha and become its First Hokage. The Uzumaki and the Senju are distant relatives who have long maintained close ties, with marriages between the clans on several occasions: theirs is the example chapter 500, pages 3-4, holds up. Konoha and Uzushiogakure will remain allies through the following decades.

The swirl the Hidden Leaf ninja wear on their backs does not come from the marriage. It is after the founding of the village that the Senju Clan chose to add the Uzumaki emblem to the village's vests. The nuance matters: the alliance of the two families long predates the union of Mito and Hashirama, while the insignia only comes after the founding of the village. The swirl speaks of a friendship between two clans, not a marriage.

From this union descends Tsunade, the future Fifth Hokage, granddaughter of Hashirama on the Senju side and of Mito on the Uzumaki side. A second name accompanies hers: Tsunade and her younger brother Nawaki are both descendants of the Uzumaki through their grandmother. The blood tie therefore runs through both siblings, and not only through the one who eventually produced a Hokage.

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The Diamond on Her Forehead: A Seal Never Confirmed

Mito's profile keeps a long head of bright red hair, large black eyes without pupils, dark lipstick — and, on the forehead, a diamond-shaped mark. Her entry presents it as recalling the Strength of a Hundred Seal (Byakugo no In, 百豪の印) of her granddaughter Tsunade. The wording is cautious, and it remains so everywhere else in the documentation.

That seal, for its part, is documented. An S-rank fuinjutsu technique whose origin goes back to the era of the Sage of the Six Paths (Boruto, chapter 36), it requires extremely delicate chakra control: the user accumulates vast amounts of chakra over a long period at one point on the body, most often the forehead, and the diamond-shaped mark is its visible manifestation (second databook, page 201; chapter 632, pages 15-18).

The resemblance stops there. The Strength of a Hundred Seal seems modeled on Mito's mark in appearance, but it is unknown whether Mito's is one; its list of users names only two people, Tsunade and Sakura Haruno, trained by her. Sakura took three years to build hers, an effort Shizune, Tsunade's first student, was never able to make for lack of the required control (chapter 632, pages 12-15). The question therefore remains open.

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The Handover to Kushina

Toward the last years of her life, it was decided that a new host would have to be found for the Nine-Tailed Fox: the story does not give the reason for this decision. Kushina Uzumaki, a member of the same clan, is chosen for this role because of her particular chakra — indeed it was for that chakra that she had been brought from Uzushiogakure to Konoha (chapter 500, page 5).

Terrified at the idea of having been torn from her village to become a jinchuriki, Kushina is comforted by the woman she is to replace. To counter the Nine-Tailed Fox's hatred, Mito tells her, you must fill yourself with love — find love and fill the vessel with it before anything else (chapter 500, pages 5-6). Kushina grows attached to her, and Mito teaches her about their clan as well as how to find her own path.

The end is reported cautiously, and it must be reported the same way. The beast is said to have been extracted from Mito some time after that exchange, then sealed inside Kushina, and that extraction is said to have caused Mito's death. The story says no more: neither the date, nor how the operation unfolded, nor the identity of those who carried it out is established. What she leaves behind, on the other hand, is explicit: it is Mito who understood that the Nine-Tailed Fox's ability to overwhelm its host with negative emotions had to be met with love, and that lesson will help Kushina, then Naruto, to subdue the beast.

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The Spiral, the Helix, and the Name of the Rasengan

Mito's lesson has a long version, and it is recent. It appears in "Naruto Gaiden: The Whorl within the Spiral," a one-shot written and drawn by Masashi Kishimoto, published in Weekly Shonen Jump issue 33 of 2023, dated July 31, 2023. This bonus chapter is the reward from the worldwide NARUTOP99 poll, open for voting from December 17, 2022 to January 31, 2023 and won by Minato Namikaze.

In it Mito draws out the comparison between the clan emblem and their residence: a spiral is two-dimensional and stays in place, whereas they must be a helix, three-dimensional, able to rise by filling itself with love. The fourth databook completes the picture by noting that she climbed the stairs of her residence to see her husband's face on the Hokage Rock.

The payoff goes to Kushina. After Minato wakes up in the hospital, she leads him to the very spot Mito had once shown her; as they climb the steps, with Minato's face lining up with those on the Hokage Rock, she names the technique he developed for her. The name of the Rasengan is drawn from Mito's teaching about love spun in a spiral toward a target.

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Summary Table

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FAQ

• Who is Kurama's first jinchuriki: Mito or Kushina?
  It is Mito Uzumaki. Kushina is only the second host of the Nine-Tails, and Naruto the third. Mito seals the Nine-Tailed Fox inside herself after the battle at the Valley of the End, long before Kushina was born.
• How did Mito become the Nine-Tails jinchuriki?
  During the duel at the Valley of the End, Madara controls the Nine-Tails with his Sharingan to attack Konoha. Hashirama defeats him and subdues the Nine-Tailed Fox; Mito, his wife, then seals it inside herself using a fuinjutsu specific to the Uzumaki Clan.
• What is the connection between Mito and Tsunade?
  Mito is Tsunade's grandmother. Tsunade is the granddaughter of Hashirama Senju (on the Senju side) and of Mito Uzumaki (on the Uzumaki side), which gives her roots in both clans.
• Why did Kushina succeed Mito?
  As she aged, Mito could no longer contain Kurama indefinitely. Kushina, a member of the same clan and endowed with a powerful chakra suited to sealing, was chosen as the new host.
• Does Mito appear in The Last: Naruto the Movie or Boruto?
  No. She is seen only in flashbacks in the original manga (from chapter 500, in Kushina's story) and in the flashbacks of the Naruto Shippuden anime.

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In summary

Wife of the founder, grandmother of a Hokage and the first to carry the Nine-Tailed Fox: Mito Uzumaki is the quiet root of the whole saga of a chakra passed down from Uzumaki to Uzumaki.

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