In Japan, there is a mountain range called the Iizuna range. There is a mountain in it also called Iizuna (or Izuna), and this mountain is also one of five mountains dubbed the “Five Mountains of Northern Shinshu”.
The other four mountains are: Mount Myoko (妙高山), Mount Kurohime (黒姫山), Mount Togakushi (戸隠山) and Mount Madarao (斑尾山).
(Madara, Madarao. Potato, potato.)
Adding to this, Mt. Izuna is famous for being the home of a daitengu (Izuna Gongen). Five mountains, five brothers, connections to tengu – it adds up.
OP I LOVE this theory and I hope this doesn’t come across as raining on your parade–I think it can definitely still be made to work, but there are some issues.
First off, strong points! 斑尾 is parsed as Madara-o, and the first kanji is actually the one used for Madara’s name in Chinese translations. It means “spotted, speckled” and the second character means “tail” (in the sense of a mountain range, the shortest one–indeed, Madarao is the shortest peak in the range, which fills me with glee).
Izuna or Iizuna 飯綱 in the mountain name is also the Japanese word for the common weasel, mustela nivalis. Since we already know that the Uchiha like naming people after weasels (Itachi = Japanese weasel, mustela itatsi), I think this is an exceptionally strong candidate to be what Kishimoto truly intended to reference in his name. VERY GOOD WORK HERE!!!!! I’m only mad that I didn’t work this out myself.
Togakushi (戸隠) is also a FANTASTIC name for a ninja because it’s related to a historical school of ninjutsu from the 11th century, 戸隠流, “the flow of the concealed door”.
Okay now time for the drawbacks regarding the other two mountains.
Kurohime means “black princess”. So… not an ideal name for a boy. But you could do the Madarao approach, lop off the last character, and then it’s Kuro, which would mean only “black”.
Myoko is even trickier because not only does the name sound feminine as a whole, but lopping off the last character doesn’t work, because 妙 is still a feminine character and name (it has the “woman” radical). Since we’re dealing with a boy, I’d go for the second character 高 instead, which could be pronounced a number of ways, but I’d go for Kou so it would sound the most like the mountain’s name. (It means “tall”.)
If you’re curious about birth order, here’s what I would do, based on the mountain’s order from north to south:
Uchiha Kou
Uchiha Madara
Uchiha Kuro
Uchiha Togakushi
Uchiha Izuna
Bonus bonus: this is a volcanic range, as one would expect in Japan but still. Mount Myoko is actually still an active volcano!
It’s finally figured out (fanfic writers rejoice, we finally have sorta-ish canon names for the three other brothers!). I stumbled on this during a wikipedia trawl and lemme tell ya – I was really surprised by how it all worked out. I like your meta on the other three names, because I was scratching my head on what to do with them once I realized some of them weren’t quite right for boys.
(Which honestly could’ve been avoided if Kishi simply let Madara have sisters tbh)
Anyway, high five y’all. Madara’s three brothers have names now.
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