*slaps table* hi. This is the post where I talk about, yet again, why Kishi is an idiot when it comes to the implications of his own worldbuilding. Point 1. being that Kishi’s insistence that peacetime is bad for shinobi business is hot garbage and point 2. being the implications of ANBU being Scary even to other shinobi. Because the show makes it clear that ANBU are supposed to be the Scary Ones, the Dark Ones who do messed up stuff. Many fics have already talked about this, but not *too* many I've seen actually explore the implications of what that actually MEANS when put in the context of a society who thinks it's A-okay to give a knives and bombs to literal kids and shoo them off to fight things. Buckle up I’m going to flex my logic center and start talking economics even tho I never studied economics outside casual worldbuilding interest.
Okay to start off with, I’m need to talk about Not Anbu for a hot minute and describe some of the few things we *do* know about Kishi’s “worldbuilding” of the shinobi villages and their history.
1. Literally everyone but Madara the Madman agrees that the villages are a Good Thing that happened, even the missing ninja never breathe a word about wanting to go back to the Warring States Era where everyone was in clans. The implications of this could honestly be it’s own entire rant but I will restrain myself and focus on the topic at hand for now.
2. Konoha and every village barring the trash fire that is pre-Boruto Kiri have a thriving enough economy to be literal *cities* of very decent size and decent quality of life, which the civilians have a major hand in I’m sure, but tellingly the shinobi *make enough income to get by* and seem to do so very easily. I will probably come back to this as I go on.
3. Ninja villages not only have a wide array of mission ranks (which I will also come back to) but they are the ones who set the prices for individual missions, not the employers. This is seen in the infamous Wave mission when the bridge builder fellow lied about the danger of the mission because he *could not afford to pay for a mission above a C-rank*, which I remind you is the second lowest mission ranking in the system.
Alright with those in mind I’m gonna talk about the “peacetime is bad for shinobi” garbage because that does actually relate directly to the worldbuilding implications of ANBU. Just. Just bear with me here and forgive me if this kinda rambles in multiple directions, talking about anything with Kishi makes my braincells run for the hills on a good day.
JUMPING IN WITH THE PEACETIME THING. This is stupid. This is one of the stupidest things to come out of Kishi’s mouth in my opinion barring the existence of the cannibal space aliens. Why? Because despite Kishi’s love of explosions and giant flashy fights shinobi are supposed. To be. STEALTHY. And the vast majority of them now live in villages, which means they need steady income.
Post the unification of the clans into villages, wars actually became too big and messy to be profitable because it’s during peacetime that people have money to spend on hiring ninja. And we see them spend it on incredibly frivolous things when it comes to shinobi. Just look at all the D-ranks we see or are referenced in the shows. Babysitting, pet retrieval, fence painting, carrying shopping bags for civilian ladies, house cleaning, the list goes on. And these pay well enough, are priced high enough by the village, that Might Dai, a single parent, was able to feed, shelter, and clothe both himself and an extremely energetic child while also having time to train himself and his son and walk Gai to and from school. And the price tag for missions only goes up from there. Higher ranked missions pay more according to risk, but peacetime is when people will be able to afford those kinds of missions. *Wartime*, as war is defined in the show post-village creation, are giant, messy affairs where a lot of manpower goes to maintaining front lines and countering enemy action, leaving far *less* manpower and time to take on these kinds of missions, and with the mass destruction of land and resources that these wars cause, people will have less money to throw at having the magic ninja men do things like escort caravans, deal with petty crime, retrieve stolen items, etc. And those examples are just C-rank/B-rank examples. Most wartime missions that we see in the show are actually missions assigned by the village itself, not from an outside client, which means the pay is coming from the Village coffers and not an external source, which can get messy very quickly if they do not have the manpower to take enough missions from outside clients to refill those coffers. Remember that I’m coming back to it later.
Wartime, for village ninja, is loud and messy and ugly. *Peacetime* on the other hand, is the playground of the rich, the powerful, and the *subtle*. Peacetime is when nobles pay top dollar to *flaunt* that they can afford to hire a ninja or three to escort them around in broad daylight regardless of any enemies they’ve made. Peacetime is when nobles have the money to pay for ninja to go in and spy on rivals or steal secrets. Peacetime is when the Daimyo and other elites hire shinobi to escort luxury goods at high risk of theft, to deal with underground human or drug trafficking that is inconveniencing them, or to spy on their neighboring lands for information that will become useful next time they meet up to flex on each other in a “you don’t want to make trouble with me I have and know X”.
More importantly, peacetime is when the *lower* classes can afford to pay for the magic ninja as well. If D-ranks are enough to support a single parent and his child, then C and B ranks are actually going to be the *backbone* of a ninja village’s economy, not the A or S ranks. C and B ranks are going to be the highest pay for the lowest risk, and those will predominantly come from the merchant and working class who have enough spare cash to have someone deal with the wild animals harming their livestock, take out budding trafficking rings and bandit gangs or escort people and goods.
I don’t think I’m emphasizing this one enough. Look at a map of the Elemental Nations, look at the size of those countries. Now we don’t get a lot of info on cities in those countries (because KISHI) but there are bound to be plenty of villages, towns, and cities dotting those countries, and all of them are going to be connected in some way to each other via trade routes and highways. You’re going to have Konoha’s own supply lines and the trade deals they have with their own merchant families bargaining for preferential treatment in exchange for setting up shop in a ninja village on top of all the other merchants from all over the Land of Fire who, during peacetime, have both money and incentive to hire the fire-chucking magic people to ensure *all* of their goods arrive *on time, every time*.
You’re going to have merchants who have supply lines through multiple countries. Glass products from the Land of Wind. Inks, fine paper, and flavored teas from Land of Fire. Fish, oyster, and pearl products from the coast (which is especially high risk in areas near the disaster fire that is Kiri). Each and every country is going to have luxury products or famous higher-quality raw materials (*points at Iwa and their rock obsession, points at every product made out of high quality stone, silver, gold, or iron ore*) that the other countries are all going to want, and consequently you will have merchants that are going to be willing to pay top dollar to ensure those products get where they are meant to go and do so undamaged and in a timely fashion despite bad roads/bad weather/bandits/rogue shinobi hired by a competitor/wild animals/freak acts of the local kami because you forgot to pay tribute to their shrine last week.
The technology of pre-Boruto era is also still stuck in the *horse and wagon* stage, meaning you have caravans of this stuff moving on very strict, long term schedules, which means these are jobs that the village can charge per day or week on the road on top of the base price estimated from the level of risk to the shinobi. You have merchants who are going to give preferential treatment to the village of their home nation if they can, both because you Don’t Insult The Local Fire Breathers/Rock Gougers/Storm Summoners/Etc but also because the villages themselves likely offer discounts for natives of their country, or even contracts that are essentially subscription deals for those who have multiple caravans going out at the same time, multiple times in a year. A “pay this much up front and we will ensure that several shinobi are always on standby to guard one of your caravans” kinda deal. It’s been implied multiple times in the shows that the majority of any shinobi village’s workforce are chuunin and that jounin’s are elite, and C/B-ranks are literally stated in the wiki to be usually given to teams of Chuunin or sometimes two genin teams and their jounin pairing up for a joint operation. Chuunin are going to make their careers on guarding caravans, dealing with bandits, clearing road hazards, etc. If Chuunin are the majority of your workforce, then missions that chuunin can take are going to be, by necessity, the largest cashflow coming into your village.
If a war between two or more countries is happening, all of that gets heavily restricted because of the risk of infiltration, heavily impeded from road destruction and wartime front lines, or straight up *shut down* from lack of money and manpower to take those missions.
Can you see what I’m getting at now when I say Kishi’s peacetime line is stupid.
And here comes another fun aspect of this. Because where the money flows, so does the cultural norms. Now a lot of fics I’ve seen emphasize the child soldier thing and also how D-ranks are very likely a way to acclimate the genin to mission work while also training civilians to see ninja as Friendly Safe Workers who happen to have magic powers and knives. But the thing is, all of that work on acclimating the civilians to view their local shinobi as Safe To Hire is going to go out the window if you remind them too often that these people are literal killers for hire. Merchants are not going to want to hire Infamous Killers because that says to their customers and their potential business partners that they themselves are shady and possibly approve of murder to get their way. Poking at D-ranks briefly, farmers aren’t going to want to hire potentially unhinged murderers to till their fields, and nobody is going to want to hire even the genin to *babysit their kids*.
In order to attract reliable patronage from these low risk, well paying areas, the ninja villages had to *alter their public perception*. Assassination missions, kidnapping missions, extortion missions, all of those over time became short-term gain/long-term loss for the village. So they took them on less and less, and those kinds of missions became increasingly *socially unacceptable* even to the shinobi, because if the village doesn’t approve of it, it’s not a good thing. What assassination/sabotage missions we do see or hear referenced in canon are always, iirc, targeting someone that can the ninja can safely point at and say “this is a bad guy”. High ranking rogue shinobi from other villages or crime lords or despotic warlords being I think the majority (if not the entirety) of the few examples canon gives us. Those are people that, when civilians hear about them being assassinated, the civilians are going to say “good riddance” rather than “oh no!”. And if those missions are the only ones that the common shinobi hear about themselves or take on, then that’s what they are going to associate with those types of missions. A high risk job that is nonetheless seen as Morally Right, even if their moral compass hinges mostly on who is the friend or enemy of their home village.
I could also get into how this has really interesting implications for what the Warring State Era shinobi economics were like and how Hashirama and Madara making Konoha was basically inventing the concept of unionizing but I’m not going to side track to that because finally, FINALLY, we get to the ANBU Are Scary Thing.
Because this. This whole thing about how peacetime is actually where ninja villages make their bread and butter and how the push-pull of being Socially Acceptable for Money turning into Actual Moral Perception is where ANBU’s identity as the Scary Guys comes into play.
Now we don’t know when ANBU was actually founded in Konoha or any other village, but I’m going to ballpark and say it was *after* the First War because of a few key things we know about ANBU.
2. ANBU are known to specifically hunt other ninja (specifically Kiri has a Hunter-nin branch of ANBU but logically every village would have this).
3. ANBU work is extremely psychologically and physically grueling to their members and has a high fatality rate.
4. Whatever ANBU does is considered messed up even by ninja standards. An example that comes to mind is a filler flashback where Gai ends up running into Kakashi on an ANBU mission where Kakashi is basically putting down enemy ninja that are defeated and attempting to surrender and Gai is visibly distressed by this.
The First Shinobi World War likely rocked the Elemental Nations as badly or *worse* than WWI did for the real world, because this was the first time “war” was not defined as two or three noble lords throwing peasants with spears or the occasional ninja at each other or two or three shinobi clans having a protracted blood feud that they could only initiate when they weren’t busy trying to feed their own families. Assuming Konoha has the average number of shinobi clans that can be found in a shinobi village, that means we had somewhere upward of 55 clans from various countries throwing everything they had at each other on open battlefields, destroying large amounts of landscape, and causing shinobi and civilian casualties on a mass scale that even the most fire happy Uchiha could not have achieved on their worst day. This was also after Jinchuuriki became a thing, so this war was the first demonstration of what it’s like to essentially duct tape a nuke to an emotionally volatile child soldier and see what happens when you throw two or more of them into a battlefield.
The economy of the villages and their respective nations would have been in chaos after the war. Entire towns, roads, and bridges are straight up gone, chunks of landscape for miles around have been drastically rewritten, the death toll is high and the missing persons list is even higher and in the wake of this you’re going to have *every* would-be warlord and their grandfather getting uppity and trying to stake a claim on what they can of the wreckage. This includes Rogue Shinobi, likely the first real appearance of Rogue Shinobi in ninja history, at least on this scale. Lots of shinobi are going to be disillusioned from the war, exhausted, more than a few are mentally broken from the traumas, and all the ninja who have no moral compasses and dreams of power are looking at this and deciding “hey, now is a great time to become a warlord”. On top of all this, since most of the wartime missions were assigned by the villages themselves and not an outside client (with *very minimal* cash flow coming from the Daimyo himself since presumably the war was partially his idea, but even the royal coffers are not enough to run a military city the size of Konoha kthanks), the village coffers are likely hanging out somewhere between “Naruto’s childhood allowance” and “I can offer you lint”.
Obviously, these things need to be taken care of pronto, and with the villages scrambling to have the money to rebuild, the Kage in charge are going to be much more willing to take on dirty missions like assassinations, extortion, blackmail, *whatever* just to refill the village coffers. But. The ninja villages still need to keep their social acceptability in order to start getting their C and B ranks back, especially after the war opened everyone’s eyes to how destructive shinobi can really be in large numbers. They cannot afford to be seen killing left and right and the Rogue ninja are a huge stain on their village’s reputation, but openly advertising that “hey, if anyone leaves the village we’ll behead them” really isn’t going to do any favors for keeping the shinobi who are in the same mental space Tsunade was when she got fed up and left Konoha altogether.
And this, I think, is what gave rise to the existence of ANBU. The Kages picking their remaining highly skilled and most loyal followers, putting them in masks so that they cannot be easily identified by civilians, and sent out to quietly complete these high level, socially unacceptable missions. They were sent out to deal with Rogue shinobi and make them disappear without advertising to all the other traumatized village shinobi that their village is “serve or die” rather than the more patriotic “we fight for our home” that they were raised with. They were sent out to perform civilian assassinations, extortion, whatever they were offered in order to shore up the village’s shaky economy of the time and enable the Kage to pay their soldiers.
Then, after the economy stabilized, the ANBU just kinda … never left. Because by then the respective Kage had realized that being able to take on these kinds of missions with high pay and no loss of social acceptability was useful, and in the wake of the First War with everyone being simultaneously paranoid of their neighboring country but also on eggshells to not start another war, the anonymity of ANBU became a convenient way to keep an eye on each other and subtly attempt to sabotage the other when it looked like they were getting too powerful. The next two Great Shinobi Wars only solidified ANBU’s role in the hidden villages for those very same reasons, even though I would argue that they were ultimately a Bad Idea because they put too much power in the hands of the Kage without their village clans being able to hold them responsible, and that’s how we get stuff like Danzo™ and the crimes committed by Danzo™ and the Sandaime against the Uchiha. The existence of ANBU and the ability to “anonymously” jab at each other also just encouraged the animosity between the Great Shinobi Villages, and allowed warmongers (Danzo™) to ensure that an actual peace never fully settled in until the 4th Shinobi War happened.
And the peace post the 4th war, by the way, SHOULD have been a huge boom in the popularity and use of shinobi rather than the detriment that the Boruto manga/anime insists on for like- all the reasons stated in the economics part of this rant as well as the rise of CORPORATIONS that would happily pay a lot for shinobi in a host of different capacities and also people paying for shinobi to pretty please come help rebuild our destroyed homes and farmland with your fancy ninja powers.
It’s also canon that several shinobi retired and went into other professions in the wake of this peace and alliance, such as *acting*, which opens up an entire potential slew of missions geared specifically toward movie producers using their new technologies and their bigger budgets to hire shinobi as stuff like stunt doubles, live special effects artists (need to rehearse but the set isn’t done yet? No problem!! Just hire someone with *genjutsu* to make your actors the ultimate set/stage), *makeup artists* (hey those infiltration skills come in handy in a lot of ways), and more. And that’s just one “modern” profession off the top of my head that would adore having Magic Ninja People available for hire.
I’m sure I’m missing a ton of potential peace time jobs and economic implications because again, I only research this stuff in relation to worldbuilding fictional places. But there we go, I have just gone a 3k rant about ninja economics in order to explain why ANBU are Scary. I hope ya’ll enjoyed.
A side note I couldn’t find a good spot for in the actual rant but another factor in the shinobi villages having to change their behavior and seem Socially Acceptable is because of the rise of civilian-born shinobi in their genin/chuunin ranks. Because there’s no way a civilian family is going to *want* their child to become a murderous psychopath. A competent, magic wielding defender of your merchant uncle’s caravans on the other hand…
Other rants I need to do at some point when my braincells aren’t mush are:
1. My personal HCs on Konoha’s orphanage/foster system (aka Hi, Let Me Give You More Reasons To Hate Sarutobi Hiruzen)
2. Ninja Economics Two: Warring States Boogaloo (Edit: now available here!)
3. Why Cannibal Space Ninjas Are The Stupidest Idea of Multiple Stupid Options
4. Boruto Ninja Cults: What Kishi Could’ve Done Instead of the Garbage We Got
5. Genin Corps (Aka Reasons Kishi Could’ve Given for Why No One Thought Kabuto Was Suspicious But Didn’t. Aka Ninja Economics 3 Babyyyyyy)
