Name: Shibata Hakone
Age: 19 at ANBU Trials
Birthday: February 4, Sandaime Year 15
Rank: Jounin
Service: ANBU Field Ops, ANBU Team 19
Ninja ID: 010871
Physical Appearance
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 155 lbs
Blood Type: AB
Hair: Black, straight, and slightly shaggy, coming to just past his ears. It’s often in his face. He has a strong widow’s peak but it’s usually hidden by his bangs.
Eyes: Large, nearly-black eyes with long lashes under thin, straight brows.
Skin: Warm light almond
Facial Features: Long, lean and moody, with a narrow nose and chin and sharp, watchful eyes. Mouth corners tilt unevenly up when he’s at rest, giving him a hint of a permanent smirk.
Other Physical Traits: Slim and compactly built, with narrow hips and not particularly broad shoulders.
Handedness: Left
Voice: Slightly nasal, rich tenor
Identifying Marks: ANBU tattoo on left upper arm.
Usual Clothing: Dark, often long-sleeved, and slim fitting. He favors black, charcoal grey, navy blue, forest green, dark brown and occasionally, if he’s feeling very outgoing, maroon. If you ever see Hakone in a pastel, it’s a sure bet it’s a hospital gown, and it’s not of his choosing. He has a dark blue traditional fan-patterned yukata he’s fond of wearing around home.
ANBU Mask: A beaked crow with black accents. Codename “Crow” when being addressed by his mask name.
Living Situation: Lives in the ANBU rookie barracks. His room is fairly spartan, decorated with a single framed photograph of cherry blossoms and lanterns at night, but his bookshelf is full.
Skills
Fighting Style: A good all-arounder with equal skills in ninjutsu and taijutsu, and a talent for genjutsu. He enjoys making traps that employ an element of ninjutsu when triggered. Chakra natures: Wind and Water. Sensory range: 5 km.
Preferred Weapons: Jutsu for preference, not as skilled with a blade, though he certainly passes requirements.
Chakra Class and Special Jutsu: Wind and Water affinities. There’s a family legend that the Shibata are descended from tengu, and in generations past could transform into demon-crows.
Weaknesses: Faster than he is strong, his stamina could use some work. Not as accurate with thrown weapons as he would like when using chakra. He blames his wind affinity.
Service Record: Entered Academy at 5, graduated at 10. Served his Genin years under jounin-sensei Inuzuka Shippo. Promoted to Chuunin at 13, and Jounin at 17. Spent the war years working supply lines, sweeping for traps and mines and keeping Konoha and the front lines connected.
Personality
General Personality Traits: Serious but with a wry bent. Very dry sense of humor. Stays out of the fray of most social situations, preferring to make snarky observations from the sidelines. Well educated, blazingly smart, has sophisticated tastes in some areas, but is happy slumming in a dive bar with his friends. Sorts everyone he knows into three rough categories: Like You, Don’t Care About You, Dislike You.
Quirks: Trusts his intuition about whether a hookup is advisable when he’s sober, but if he’s been drinking, has a hard and fast rule: only go home with someone you know already. Almost never brings anyone to his place.
Sexual Orientation: Straight, doesn’t mind if other people aren’t.
Gifts/Talents: Sharp as a laser. Understands human psychology eerily well and is a good judge of character (learned it from his dad). Patient teacher, if he deigns to teach you something. Knows a really good hangover cure. Despite being judgmental, tries to keep it to himself when it comes to his friends. Most of the time. Shows up to provide support for friends who made bad choices without too many I-told-you-sos.
Flaws: Judgmental and superior, especially of people in authority who are not as bright as he is. Doesn’t call idiots out to their face, but makes wicked mockery of them to his friends later. Intensely private, to the point of being reclusive. Keeps his relationships superficial. When he’s in a bad mood, he withdraws from all human contact and tends to worry his friends.
Religion and Philosophy: Raised with a decent intellectual grounding in the dominant Shinto/Buddhist blend in Fire Country, but not a believer. Deeply skeptical. Distrusts religious people. His own personal philosophy is to be very, very careful about whom he trusts.
Likes and Loves: A fun night out. Being taken at face value. Friends who don’t ask too many personal questions. Friends who keep his secrets. Gangster and crime novels and movies. Oden and other salty food. Traditional music with a twist: biwa that turns to metal; shamisen with amps and a driving bass. Gods of Shamisen is one of his favorite bands.
Dislikes and Hates: Stupid people in authority. People who take forever to get to the point when he can already see where they are going. Especially if the point they are making is wrong. Overly sweet things. People who stare at his father’s disfigured face. People who assume he’s achieved his rank because of nepotism (this is one of the reasons he seldom reveals his family name.)
Fears: Being injured and disfigured as badly as his father was.
Dreams and Ambitions: Serve in ANBU with honor, make a name for himself as an excellent ninja, and long-term, rise to a position of authority in the village hierarchy. Have a family of his own, some day, but that’s also pretty far on the horizon. Eat the perfect bowl of oden.
Relationships
Family: Father is Shibata Tomohiro, the director of ANBU T&I. Mother, Shibata Koemi, is a chuunin who works in accounting and payroll. He is an only child. His dad is the more lenient parent, it’s his mom who runs the tight ship in the Shibata household.
Friends: Friends from before ANBU with recent ANBU recruits Tousaki Ryouma and Fukui Ayane. Has known Ryouma for about two years, as a drinking buddy, movie pal, and occasional mission partner. Former genin teammate with Ayane, and close with her, but in a way that allows for a lot of space between them. They have their own friends and do their own thing, but they come together once in a while and it’s like they’ve never been apart.
Lovers: No one serious. Dates infrequently, hooks up for casual encounters more often than he actually goes on a real date with anyone. People think he and Ayane have a sexual history, but they are completely wrong about that. Had a giant, hopeless crush on Uzumaki Kushina when he was an adolescent.
Hero: His father. Senju Tobirama, the second Hokage. Uzumaki Kushina, who was as badass as they come on the battlefield, and literally saved the entire village with her sacrifice.
Enemies: No personal enemies, but he has a list of people he dislikes that includes his current lieutenant, Ushiro Keiichi, whom he thinks is slow and plodding, and Sato Ken, a veteran ANBU and lieutenant of Team 16 who is arrogant and unsubtle, and misuses words.
Personal History
Hakone’s parents met when Tomohiro had to submit several complicated expense reports following an extended mission. Koemi was working in the accounting office at the time as chuunin support staff. It wasn’t love at first sight, but the spark was there, and after a few months of dating, with war on the horizon, they decided to marry. Koemi is the down-to-earth, detail-oriented type. When the war effort ramped up, she was assigned to the QM and Supply office, and spent her time making sure even in times of rationing and dwindling access to resources, the Hokage’s front line troops had everything they needed.
Tomohiro was already a rising star of an interrogator. His outgoing personality and genuine interest in people combined with a jounin’s ruthlessness made him a natural.
Tomohiro and Koemi conceived about a year into their marriage, but Koemi suffered a miscarriage three months into her pregnancy. There followed four years of failed pregnancies, until the day Hakone was conceived. The pregnancy was surprisingly easy, after so many losses, and nine months later the Shibata family added a healthy baby boy. Despite many further attempts, they were never able to conceive again: Hakone is an only child.
Here’s the thing you need to know about Hakone: His childhood was, as much as a ninja childhood could be, idyllic. His parents adore him, and just as importantly, they respect him. He grew up in a stable, happy family. Even when hard times came, and come they did, the three of them held together.
The event that changed everything came when Hakone was seven, in his second year at the Academy. Tomohiro went on a mission he almost didn’t come back from, and the man who did come back, when he emerged from weeks in a hospital bed and yards of bandages, didn’t look anything like the Daddy Hakone had said goodbye to months earlier. Half of Tomohiro’s face was replaced with a grotesque amalgam of acid scars that twisted his mouth into a permanent, tooth-exposing leer, and softened his voice into a chalky lisp.
But under the scars, in that ruined voice, he said the same things he always had. He was the same man. A loving father and husband.
And Konoha’s most fearsome interrogator.
When Hakone first heard his father called a monster, in a whispered hush in the public market, he thought it was just about Tomohiro’s face. And maybe it was. But it wasn’t the last time he heard it. And it didn’t take long for Hakone to realize that the name “Shibata” carried with it something unsavory.
By the time he graduated Academy, his father had been promoted to assistant director of T&I, and Hakone took to introducing himself by his given name only. When as a newly minted chuunin at thirteen, Hakone was given a coveted assignment working the supply lines, he heard more than a few rumors it was his father’s influence that got him there. When his father became director of T&I a few years later, Hakone stopped using the name Shibata with anyone who wasn’t a direct superior.
He’s proud of his father. Immensely so. And proud to be a Shibata. But he wants his colleagues and friends to judge him on his own merits, as Hakone, before they factor in the family connection.
In many ways, the anonymity of the ANBU mask suits him perfectly.