What Did Danzo Young Do To Build His Konoha Influence?

When I dig into Danzo's younger days in 'Naruto', what sticks with me most is the way the wars and early Konoha politics shaped him into someone who truly believed the ends justified the means. He wasn't born a monster — the canon paints him as a product of brutal times. Danzo grew up during the chaotic period when villages and clans were fighting for survival, and that fear of loss morphed into a creed: protect the village at all costs, even if you have to do the dirty work yourself. He became a rival to Hiruzen Sarutobi early on, and that lifelong competition colors a lot of his choices. Instead of joining the more open, compassionate path Hiruzen favored, Danzo built his own secretive power base: Root, a covert branch of the ANBU that took children and trained them to obey without question. Root did operations Hiruzen didn’t approve of, and Danzo’s impatience with diplomacy led him to back preemptive and often brutal measures, including interference in Uchiha matters. From the manga we also learn how far Danzo went to secure power and control: he gathered many Sharingan eyes and had forbidden experiments done on him, even using Hashirama’s cells to augment his abilities. Those choices trace back to a young man convinced that only a hard hand could keep Konoha alive — a tragic, paranoid logic rather than simple villainy, at least to him.

I have a soft spot for these darker little details in 'Naruto', so this always stood out to me: Danzo didn’t have multiple Sharingan because he liked collecting weird trophies — he literally grafted them into himself. In the story he scavenged eyes from Uchiha who died (or were incapacitated) and had them implanted into a special, bandaged arm that contained Hashirama cells. Those cells let the transplanted eyes survive and be used as tools. The main practical reason was Izanagi: it’s an ability that lets you rewrite reality for a short moment, but the cost is the permanent blindness of the eye that uses it. If you want to survive fights while cheating fate, one eye isn’t enough. On a softer level, the flashbacks showing many Sharingan are also storytelling shorthand. They visually communicate Danzo’s paranoia and moral decay — someone who will harvest friends’ eyes to secure power is pretty far gone. Rewatching those scenes, I always feel a mix of disgust and a weird pity: he was trying to shield the village in his own twisted way, but paid for it with his humanity.

I still get a little giddy talking about these old era details, so here’s how I’d lay it out based on what we actually see in the manga and databooks. Hiruzen is explicitly shown as a prodigy and is often described as having been trained by the elders of that founding generation—most notably Tobirama Senju (the Second Hokage) is the one most associated with shaping Hiruzen’s early shinobi education. Danzo, on the other hand, is trickier. He’s definitely from the same generation as Hiruzen, a contemporary who grew up in the chaos around the village’s founding, but the series never gives a clean, on-panel teacher-student link for Danzo the way it does for Hiruzen. So, short: they’re peers and moved in the same circles, and both were influenced by the founding leaders, but the text doesn’t say Danzo trained under the same specific teacher Hiruzen had. That gap lets Danzo’s shadowy, cutthroat methods feel more personal and self-directed to me.

I still get a little excited hunting through the pages of old manga-related books, and this question about young Danzō is a classic collector’s curiosity. From what I’ve seen, official depictions of Danzō as a young man are pretty sparse but do exist in bits and pieces. The most reliable sources are Kishimoto’s own manga flashback panels—those pages count as official art, even if they’re comic panels rather than full standalone illustrations. Beyond the manga pages, a few of the 'Naruto' databooks and artbooks include profile sketches or small illustrations showing him younger, but they’re rarely full, polished portraits. The anime also produced original flashback art in a few episodes and promotional materials that depict Danzō in earlier years; those are official, too, though sometimes stylized differently. Fans tend to stitch together these sources to get a fuller picture. If you’re hunting, check databook scans, the anime flashback episodes, and official artbook collections; the images are out there, just not in one tidy place. I always enjoy the little thrill of finding a rare panel tucked away on a faded page.

There's a lot of gritty mystery around Danzo's body if you dig into 'Naruto', and honestly I love how vague some of it is — it leaves room for headcanon. Canonically, we never see a clear flashback of the exact moment he lost the arm or got each scar. What we do know is that by the time he's an older shinobi he has a heavily modified right arm grafted with Hashirama cells and studded with multiple transplanted Sharingan, plus facial scars and a missing left arm hidden under his cloak. From piecing together scenes in 'Naruto' and 'Naruto Shippuden', the simplest, safest takeaway is this: his scars mostly come from decades of black-ops missions, surgeries, and the brutal procedures needed to implant eyes and Hashirama tissue. The arm itself is the product of surgical grafting — someone removed the original limb (or it was destroyed) and later replaced or augmented it with Hashirama cells to support the stolen Sharingan. The specifics of when and exactly how — battlefield loss, surgical amputation, or long-term medical modifications after injuries — are never spelled out by Kishimoto. So I tend to picture a younger, ruthless Danzo accepting severe surgeries and dangerous experiments to build power behind the scenes, and the scars are the visible proof: a life of secrecy and compromise rather than one single pivotal moment. It’s dark, but it fits his whole vibe.

I still get chills when those Danzo flashbacks pop up — they show a much younger, scrappier version of him and really reframe a lot of his decisions. If you want the most concentrated set of youth-flashbacks, go through the Five Kage Summit / Sasuke-attack stretch in 'Naruto Shippuden' (roughly the episodes covering the Summit up through Sasuke’s confrontation with Danzo). The exact numbers in the anime can blur because there are fillers and little scene cuts, but you’ll see the clearest young-Danzo moments during the Summit arc and the episodes where his past and ROOT are discussed during the Sasuke vs. Danzo conflict. I like to watch that arc back-to-back because the present-day fight scenes intercut with Danzo’s past — showing his rivalry with the Hokage, his feelings about villagers vs. ideals, and how ROOT shaped his worldview. If you’re hunting a particular scene (Danzo meeting Hiruzen-era leaders, or his ROOT manipulations), skip to the episodes in that Summit-to-post-Summit window and you’ll spot them. It’s one of those rare stretches where the anime really leans on flashback to explain a morally gray character, and it made me rewatch a few episodes just to catch small details I missed the first time.

Man, I’ve hunted down Danzo’s younger flashback panels more times than I can count — they’re scattered but findable if you know where to look. First stop for me is always the official releases: grab the digital or physical volumes of 'Naruto' from Viz Media or the Shueisha releases if you can. The flashbacks tied to Danzo show up in the arcs around the Five Kage Summit and the reveal scenes, and official tankobon scans are the cleanest, highest-resolution source for panels. If you prefer streaming, some of those moments are also in the anime cuts of 'Naruto Shippuden' — screenshotting a crisp 1080p episode gives surprisingly good panels. When I want quick screens, I’ll use image search with tight keywords (try Japanese too: ダンゾウ 幼少 回想 漫画) and then verify on fandom pages like the 'Naruto' wiki or Reddit threads. Fan edits live all over Pixiv, Tumblr, and Danbooru — great for comparison, though be mindful of copyright and credit. Oh, and if you’re collecting, consider buying the volumes or digital chapters; it supports the creators and gives you legally perfect scans.

When I flip through my sketchbook or scroll my feed late at night, young Danzo shows up in a dozen different uniforms and moods. Some artists paint him as a gaunt, idealistic academy cadet—clean face, determined eyes, maybe one early scar hinting at the future—while writers place him in origin stories where his convictions slowly calcify into paranoia. Those versions appeal to me because they let you pity and blame him at the same time. Other times I find softer takes: young Danzo as the quiet older-brother figure patched up in bandages, secretly kind with a wry smile, or as an androgynous, bookish loner in a high-school AU where he’s awkward with friendships and fiercely protective. There are also darker riffs where his arm is already a nightmarish patchwork of eyes and stitches—a visual shorthand for the moral compromise fans love to explore. What really hooks me is how flexible he is. Pairings range from gentle friendships with Shisui to fraught rivalries with Hiruzen or romantic tension with Itachi, all reshaping his motives. I often sketch him half-shadowed, because that contrast captures the whole fan impulse: wanting to understand what made him cross the line, and imagining a version that maybe never did.