Sakura Haruno

Sarada Uchiha (Daughter)

Sasuke Uchiha (Husband)

**Sakura Uchiha** (うちはサクラ, *Uchiha Sakura*, née **Haruno** (春野)) is a kunoichi of Konohagakure. When assigned to Team 7, Sakura quickly finds herself ill-prepared for the duties of a shinobi. However, after training under the Sannin Tsunade, she overcomes this, and becomes recognised as one of the greatest medical-nin in the world.

## Background

Sakura is the only child of Mebuki and Kizashi Haruno. She had an ordinary childhood, raised by her parents without any serious tragedy or complications, unlike her team members. When she entered Konoha's Academy, a few of the girls in her class started picking on her because of her broad forehead. Sakura tried to combat their teasing by hiding her forehead with her bangs, but this proved to the other girls that it bothered her and caused them to tease her even more. Ino Yamanaka, one of her classmates, saw this, and defended Sakura from her bullies and encouraged her to embrace her forehead rather than hide it.

## Personality

As a child, Sakura was insecure and highly self-conscious about her large forehead, covering it with her bangs. It was not until she met Ino, who defended her from bullies and became her friend, that she become more self-confident. At the start of Part I, Sakura typically gives the outward impression of being polite to her superiors, considerate of her peers, and confident in herself. She has occasional moments of bashfulness around Sasuke and competitiveness around Ino, but otherwise appears quite collected. This reservation, though never disingenuous, frequently masks how Sakura feels: in certain situations, she has pronounced feelings of delinquency, jealousy, and anger. Rather than display these emotions to others, she projects them inward, allowing a manifestation of who she truly is — what is labelled "Inner Sakura" (内なるサクラ, *Uchi Naru Sakura*) — to have the opinions Sakura wants to keep to herself. Inner Sakura, whose appearances are marked by an exclamation of "*Shannarō!*", is in a sense a personality separate from Sakura herself, a fact that allows her to overcome the Mind Body Switch Technique. At other times, Sakura and Inner Sakura are indistinguishable from each other, usually with regards to Naruto. If Naruto says or does something that annoys or upsets her, Sakura responds with violence, a reaction that under other circumstances would be delegated to Inner Sakura.

Sakura doesn't get along well with Mighty Ray since when they first meant, Mighty Ray rudely comments that she wasn't much of a warrior which earned him a painful beating from her. Despite her short temper, Sakura has a very soft spot for Kirby due to his cute appearance and bravely.

## Appearance

Sakura has fair skin, green eyes, and pink hair. In her youth, she wore her hair as bangs in order to cover her large forehead and fend off her classmates' calling her "Forehead Girl" (デコリーン, *Dekorīn*, *English TV:* Billboard Brow). Ino encouraged her not to do this and wear her hair back instead, so that others could see her face. Later in her Academy career she let her hair get longer because of rumours that Sasuke was attracted to girls with long hair. During Part I, when she realises that long hair is a vulnerability in combat situations, she cuts her hair and keeps it under shoulder-length from that point onward, which she sometimes pins up in a ponytail while working. As Sakura gets older, she is noted to become quite attractive, with Jiraiya likening her looks to Tsunade's own.

## Powers and Abilities

As a genin, due to her focus on her studies, Sakura lacked any particular combat skill, other than the basic skills she learned in the Academy. This greatly limited her role in missions, to the point where she frequently noted how much she relied on her teammates, Sasuke and Naruto. On one occasion, she is even stated by Shikamaru to be: "A kunoichi with no particular talent". Determined to change herself, she undergoes intense training with Tsunade for two-and-a-half years. From her display of skill in the earlier portions of Part II, others have remarked that Sakura would likely surpass Tsunade. Upon completing the Strength of a Hundred Seal during the Fourth Shinobi World War, she's finally caught up to her team-mates at the time. Two years later, she rises to the rank of jōnin, and was capable of single-handily defeating Kido Tsumiki despite the Anbu being empowered by a Tailed Beast Drug. As an adult, Boruto remarked that she was a suitable replacement for Naruto as Hokage.

### Chakra Control and Physical Prowess

While Sakura has rarely been seen using taijutsu in Part I, she was able to hold her own against Ino, one of the top students in her class. After Tsunade's training, Sakura's taijutsu improved to the point that she could easily destroy a number of Sasori's puppets. As an adult, she could go toe to toe with a Mangekyō Sharingan wielding opponent like Shin Uchiha.

As seen in Part I, Sakura's most defining skill was her proficiency in chakra control. Even as a genin, Sakura could greatly augment her speed by sending chakra to her feet, impressing both Naruto and Rock Lee. Such exact use of her chakra allows her to perform a jutsu with maximum efficiency without wasting much chakra. Kakashi Hatake once noted that her aptitude is well-suited for genjutsu. While never actually seen using genjutsu, due to her affinity for it and her proficiency in chakra control, Kakashi taught her a method to deal with being caught in genjutsu that involves abruptly stopping the flow of chakra. She's frequently been shown to quickly identify when genjutsu is being used, and release herself or others from it. By adulthood, genjutsu had little to no effect on her and she is able to break out of even some of the strongest ones with ease.

Training under Tsunade for over two years refined her already impressive chakra control, becoming a vital part to many of her abilities. By rapidly building up chakra and concentrating it into her fists or other body parts, it grants her what is commonly referred to as "monstrous strength". Her attacks are strong enough to destroy buildings or upend the earth, increasing with greater input of chakra. She was even able to damage Kaguya with a single blow, breaking off one of her horns. She can also use this increase in strength to lift great mass or free herself from formidable constraints. Her raw power has earned her praise from Hashirama.

Sakura can use the chakra built up in her hands to catch and repel incoming ninjutsu. Likewise, after anticipating an attack, she can send chakra throughout her entire body to nullify the damage of normally lethal blows.

Another goal of Tsunade's training was to increase Sakura's available chakra supply via completing the Strength of a Hundred Seal, which is something that took three years to accomplish. In the anime, Tsunade explained that building up the seal substantially drains one of their chakra, making it dangerous to perform surgery or fight, but Sakura developed a way to divert a small portion of that built-up chakra back into her normal reserves. When the seal is released, Sakura has access to all the accumulated chakra, allowing her to perform techniques of a greater scale than she is normally able to. She can also transfer this chakra to others.

Sakura's unique mastery of chakra manipulation has improved enough to roughly map out entire structures by channelling her chakra through inorganic materials. Doing so allows her to detect threats, traps, and hidden rooms.

### Ninjutsu

By the Fourth Shinobi World War, Sakura could use the Summoning Technique, and like Tsunade, summon the giant slug, Katsuyu. Noted to be incredibly impressive by Shizune, Sakura could have Katsuyu split apart and attach itself to others, Sakura could then remotely monitor many allies at once, healing and replenishing their chakra as needed. Sakura could also use Earth, Water, Yin, and Yang Release. By adulthood, she acquired Fire Release as well. Sakura has also become skilled in the use of fūinjutsu. Upon contact, she can skilfully implant a cherry blossom-shaped seal on a target. On command, these seals release red chakra threads that completely restrict body movement.

#### Medical Ninjutsu

The major purpose of Tsunade's training was to teach Sakura medical ninjutsu, which demanded Sakura's refined chakra control and intelligence. Tsunade remarks that her proficiency for healing is exceptionally rare. As such, Sakura can heal even the most fatal of injuries. Even when heavily injured, Sakura demonstrated the ability to quickly heal herself to halt further blood loss, managing to do so with the weapon still lodged within her. When dealing with an enemy with an extremely resistant body, she could combine her chakra-enhanced fists with her medical ninjutsu to heal the resulting damage from her strikes, eventually killing the affected cells from over-replication. By releasing the Strength of a Hundred Seal, Sakura can put her body in a state in which it heals itself so that she doesn't need to stop to treat herself or even be fazed by injury. In the anime, she could perform a highly difficult operation alone to regenerate a missing section of a person's body.

If healing proves ineffective, Sakura can make incisions in her patients to try and directly treat her patients' vital organs. She can also cure those who have been poisoned by extracting the poison from their bodies, while simultaneously repairing the damage — something which even poison-experts like Chiyo cannot do. To ensure a complete recovery, Sakura can create an effective antidote after analysing the poison's contents, even for poisons that Sasori did not believe anyone but himself could make antidotes for.

After Kurama was removed from Naruto, during the war, Sakura was able to prevent Naruto's death by manually making his heart pump, as well as manually carrying out respiration via mouth to mouth resuscitation until they were able to reach Minato and eventually saved him. Two years after the war, she again saved Naruto from chakra deprivation, by pouring her own chakra into him and Kurama, which took her three days.

Her medical expertise extends to more standard medicine as well, enabling her to perform autopsies and examine cells with a knowledge of genetics. She was taught by Tsunade how to blend powerful fast-acting sleeping gas, and was taught by Shizune on how to concoct poisons that, when coated on weapons, could debilitate or paralyse a person with a single scratch. In the anime, Sakura even created her own version of Military Rations Pills, intended to have more medicinal purposes and be easier to consume. By the time of *Boruto: Naruto Next Generations*, she had also learned the Healing Power Alteration Technique (癒力変生の術, *Yuryoku Hensei no Jutsu*), although it is unknown what this entails. After Naruto became Hokage, Sakura's skill with medical ninjutsu had been recognised to the point he made her the head of the medical department.

### Intelligence

While she was at the Academy, Sakura received consistently high test scores. It is because of her diligence in her studies that Sakura initially struggled in combat situations, for this reason, she was added to Team 7 so that she could benefit from the more battle-oriented Naruto and Sasuke, while in turn, they would benefit from her knowledge. She was able to answer the written portion of the Chūnin Exams all by herself without needing to cheat, something that genin were not expected to be able to do. Sakura's intelligence is nevertheless consistently useful, making her observational enough to guess an opponent's tactics from a brief scan of the battlefield and pick up on otherwise minor inconsistencies in conversation. She was able to quickly and accurately deduce Tobi's unique abilities upon their brief encounter. Sasuke deemed her analytical skills to be superior to his Sharingan, and as such, developed remarkable memory and observational skills. In her battle against Sasori, a few observations were enough to learn the latter's attack patterns.  She is also capable of immediately memorising large amounts of information, including minute details.

She has an excellent memory, able to quickly piece together multiple pieces of information she's previously come across in order to form a hypothesis. In actual combat, Sakura frequently relies on misleading her opponents, either by letting them think they've outsmarted her so that they lower their guard, or letting them think they've defeated her so that they will approach her, and she can defeat them with a single punch.