What happened to kakashis mom

Kakashi Hatake is a beloved character within the Naruto universe, he was one of Kishimoto’s favored characters as well as being a fan favorite. His character design attracted a lot of fans as well as his cool, calm and collected demeanour.

While most of Kakashi’s backstory is explained in the anime and manga respectively his family history isn’t really talked about leading many fans to wonder why these facts were left out considering that lineage and family is often an important motif in Naruto

In this guide we are going to explore the lineage of Kakashi Hatake, what happened to his parents and why they aren’t mentioned greatly in the plot.

Who Is Kakashi’s Father?

Kakashi’s father was a particularly respected and renowned shinobi of his time, just like Kashi was in his own generation of shinobi.

Kakashi’s father was called Sakumo Hatake and he was known as ‘The White Fang of The Leaf’. During his famed shinobi career many were impressed by his skills and many suggested that he was even stronger than the notorious Sannin of his day.

Sakumo was also renowned for being extremely loyal to his village and to his mission.

Sakumo watched Kakashi pass the entrance exam into the ninja Academy. Soon after both Kakashi and Sakumo met Might Guy and his son Guy. Sakumo asked Guy to be Kakashi’s friend only to realise that Guy didn’t pass the exam this time.

Kakashi and Guy remained friends and their friendship blossomed into what we see in the series, Guy constantly trying to one up Kakashi to no avail. But Sakumo warns Kakashi that Guy could eventually become stronger than him due to Guy’s dedication to training. 

Sakumo at some point killed Sasori’s parents in a mission and this made Granny Chiyo particularly dislike Kakashi due to his Father’s actions. This demonstrated to Kakashi, eventually, how dedicated his Father truly was to his missions. 

One fateful day Sakumo was entrusted with a particularly hard mission with his team. While the true details of this mission are never revealed in the anime or manga, we know that at some point Sakumo’s teammates were in a situation where their lives were put at risk.

Sakumo, placing his friends ahead of the mission’s importance, chose to abandon said mission in order to save his fellow teammates.

Again, there is little information about the why or how, but we know that Sakumo was eventually reviled by his comrades, his village, and even those whom he saved.

This led to Sakumo feeling very depressed, like he had let his village and comrades down, but confused knowing that saving his comrades felt like the right thing to do. Eventually Sakumo resorted to suicide, only for his own son to discover his dead body. 

Sakumo remained in the Limbo plain in between the afterlife for a long time until he could eventually meet his son and seek forgiveness from him. When Kakashi entered the limbo plain after being killed by Pain, before being revived, he met his father and accept his forgiveness.

Sakumo said he was proud of Kakashi. 

Sakumo’s suicide led Kakashi to have disgruntled feelings towards his father who was on the one ha the ninja that inspired Kakashi to be the ninja he became, but on the other hand his father betrayed the village and his mission.

As a result Kakashi resolved to never give up on a mission and to never fall to the fate as his father. 

This was ultimately tested when Kakashi was placed in charge of his own team during the Third Shinobi World War and his own teammates were placed under duress. Kakashi was eventually convinced by his sensei, Minato, to never abandon his teammates.

Kakashi then resolved to save Obito and Rin but failed to save either of them, perhaps due to previous choice not save them. From this point on Kakashi resolved to never put his teammates before the mission, naming friendship as the most important thing.

This experience formed much of Kakashi’s approach to his own notorious bell test. The test was put to the groups of three that Kakashi led, he told them that the student who could take the bell from Kakashi would become a genin, while the other two would be sent back to the academy.

His idea was that those who put their friends first and worked as a team to achieve the mission’s goal were the only students worthy of promotion. Those who contested with each other were sent back to the academy. It was only Kakashi’s Team of Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke that ever passed this test.

Who Was Kakashi’s Mother?

Unfortunately, if not strangely, there is basically no information about Kakashi’s mother other than that she died when Kakashi was very young. 

No one really knows how Kakashi’s mom died or if she played a large role in his life. One thing we do know is that when Kakashi forgave his father in the limbo plain, Sakumo said ‘now I can finally be with your mother.’ which remained particularly poignant.

Many fans speculate around what happened to Kakashi’s mother, suggesting that she may have died in childbirth or some other medical mishap with Kakashi’s birth.

This is pretty plausible, but there isn’t much to gain about this sort of speculation, it’s clear that Kakashi’s father played a larger role in his life and if Kishimoto didn’t write any backstory for his mother we can assume it just wasn’t that important.

Final Thoughts

There isn’t a large amount of information to draw on about Kakashi’s upbringing, only about Sakumo’s history and the effect this had on Kakashi.

Kakashi’s mother seems to have died when he was younger and isn’t mentioned much at all in the series so we can assume she didn’t have a large effect on him as a result.

In any case, understanding Sakumo’s effect on Kakashi shows how Kakashi formed his ‘ninja-way’ and also provides additional context with which to understand the events that occurred to Kakashi’s team during the Third Shinobi World War.