Naruto/Clone Technique

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NINJUTSU · ACADEMY BASIC Clone Technique 分身の術 · Bunshin no Jutsu

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Naruto's "clone", chapter 1

[ Details — full series ▾ ] English "Clone Jutsu"[1] Classification Ninjutsu — supplementary Rank E-RANK (Academy basic)[2] Debut Manga: chapter 1, "Uzumaki Naruto!!"[3] Anime: episode 1, "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!"[4] Known users Academy students and virtually every trained ninja

Clone Technique (分身の術, Bunshin no Jutsu), called the Clone Jutsu in the English-language anime,^[1] is a basic ninjutsu — a ninja technique — in Naruto. It produces intangible duplicates of the user: images that can distract and mislead, but cannot touch anything. The Ninja Academy of the Village Hidden in the Leaves treats it as graduation-level basics, which is exactly why it matters to the story. It is the one technique Naruto Uzumaki cannot perform, the reason he fails his exam in chapter 1, and the doorway to everything that follows.^[3] After that chapter he all but abandons it, fighting with the Shadow Clone Technique instead.

The technique makes one or more copies that look exactly like the user but have no substance. They cannot lift, strike or take a hit, and anything that touches them ends them. Their value is confusion: extra targets, hidden movements, covered escapes and baited traps. The Academy teaches it to beginners alongside the Transformation Technique, and the official guidebooks grade it E-rank, the bottom of the scale used to rank techniques.^[2] Because it is cheap and easy, almost every trained ninja can produce one, and for every student except Naruto it is the easy part of the exam.

The series' first crisis is built on this technique. The graduation exam requires a working clone, and what Naruto produces is a single pale, limp body with dead eyes. Iruka Umino fails him for it, over the objection of Mizuki, whose suggested mercy is the first move of a trap.^[3] The failure puts Naruto alone on the swing outside the Academy, which is where Mizuki finds him and points him at the Scroll of Sealing. By the end of that night Naruto has learned the forbidden shadow-clone version, which makes real bodies instead of empty images, and beaten his first enemy with it.^[3] The technique that failed him is never really his problem again.

Later chapters explain the joke the first one sets up, in which the boy who could not make one convincing image becomes the ninja who fills battlefields with hundreds of solid ones. Naruto's problem was never too little chakra, the energy behind every technique, but far too much of it, and a small, delicate technique rewards fine control rather than raw power. The basic clone stays in the story as everyone else's tool, a standard feint for ordinary ninja, while Naruto's failure with it becomes a diagnosis the reader can appreciate in hindsight.

The Clone Technique is the plain ancestor of a large family. Other villages field solid versions made of water, earth and other materials, which can genuinely fight at the cost of more chakra and more preparation. The most important relative is the Shadow Clone Technique, the forbidden version that creates real bodies, which enters the story only pages after Naruto's failed exam and stays to the very end of the series.

• Shadow Clone Technique
• Transformation Technique
• Naruto Uzumaki
• Iruka Umino
• Ninjutsu

1. Naruto, episode 1: "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!" English-language broadcast (VIZ Media, 2005).
2. Naruto: Hiden — Rin no Sho, Character Official Data Book (Shueisha, 2002).
3. Naruto, chapter 1: "Uzumaki Naruto!!" (Shueisha, Weekly Shōnen Jump, 1999).
4. "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki." NARUTO OFFICIAL SITE (official). naruto-official.com/en/anime/naruto1/list/01_225. Retrieved July 2026.