Kakashi Hatake

Kakashi Hatake leads Team Seven, the squad that trains series stars Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha, and Sakura Haruno. He later becomes his village's Sixth Hokage, its top leader, before handing that title to Naruto many years afterward.

Kakashi shows up late almost everywhere and acts like he barely cares about anything, but this lazy act hides one of the sharpest minds in the story. People call him the "Copy Ninja" because he has picked up more than a thousand secret combat skills, called jutsu, simply by watching other fighters closely. Younger teachers and students trust him for advice even though he claims to dislike responsibility. What he teaches his students most is that protecting each other matters more than following a mission's rules to the letter.

His past explains why he thinks this way. His father, a once-celebrated warrior, was shamed by the village for breaking a mission's rules to save his own team, and later took his own life. As a boy, Kakashi lost a teammate in a cave collapse; before dying, that friend gave Kakashi one of his eyes, a gift known as the Sharingan that lets him copy and even invent powerful techniques. Kakashi was later forced to kill another close teammate to stop enemies from using her against the village, a memory that still weighs on him. His long, mostly one-sided rivalry with fellow teacher Might Guy gives the story some of its warmest, funniest moments, even though Kakashi barely seems to notice they are supposed to be rivals at all.