thoughts on Konoha as a functional town
Jul. 16th, 2005 02:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingNote to self: even if there are no roads, goods must enter and leave the village. I think there must be roads that come within one or two days' journey of Konoha, and there are guard posts of sorts on those roads. Merchants leave their wagons and load goods onto horses and donkeys, and human porters, and then ninja lead them through the forest to the village.
I suspect that most people who run those trade routes are actually citizens of Konoha, since ninja are a little paranoid about letting outsiders into their homes. Also, this would seem to lead to the growth of small trade fairs at the guard posts, to which foreign traders come once a month or so, and deal with ninja and with merchants of the Leaf.
There are probably also some industrial districts within Konoha itself, and some farmland both inside and outside the village walls. And I'm sure there's a river that runs either nearby or through the village itself -- probably it's been diverted to act as a sort of moat around some sections of the wall.
Trade and industry in Konoha are geared toward supporting the ninja, but Konoha is a thriving community in its own right. Leaf-steel is highly prized throughout Fire Country and neighboring regions. The village is also known for fancy woodwork and guard dogs, and as a training center for healers.
(Hidden Sand is known for theater, chemicals -- dyes, poisons, medicines -- and mechanical curiosities. Hidden Mist, probably for silk and lace. I dunno about other hidden villages.)
I believe Konoha is fairly young as hidden villages go. For centuries, ninja were organized into warring clans, and the villages developed slowly as various families made alliances and traded some of their secrets. This allowed them to pool contracts and standardize their training. The Fire Country clans were slow to adopt this pattern, mostly because Fire Country had an unusually high proportion of clans who depended on bloodline limits, or on family traits that weren't quite strong or clear enough to be considered true limits. They took pride in their individuality.
The Shodaime and Nidaime managed to gather the clans to a small village built around natural hot springs and an upthrust granite plateau. The indigenous villagers were slowly absorbed into the ninja culture, but generally didn't become ninja; instead, they performed support functions. Yukiko's clan, the Ayakawa, were the original guardians of the hot springs, which by that point had been made into an elaborate bathhouse with a small shrine nearby to propitiate the spirit of the springs. At some point, the Ayakawa sold the bathhouse to the town council, so it's no longer a private business.
I suspect that most people who run those trade routes are actually citizens of Konoha, since ninja are a little paranoid about letting outsiders into their homes. Also, this would seem to lead to the growth of small trade fairs at the guard posts, to which foreign traders come once a month or so, and deal with ninja and with merchants of the Leaf.
There are probably also some industrial districts within Konoha itself, and some farmland both inside and outside the village walls. And I'm sure there's a river that runs either nearby or through the village itself -- probably it's been diverted to act as a sort of moat around some sections of the wall.
Trade and industry in Konoha are geared toward supporting the ninja, but Konoha is a thriving community in its own right. Leaf-steel is highly prized throughout Fire Country and neighboring regions. The village is also known for fancy woodwork and guard dogs, and as a training center for healers.
(Hidden Sand is known for theater, chemicals -- dyes, poisons, medicines -- and mechanical curiosities. Hidden Mist, probably for silk and lace. I dunno about other hidden villages.)
I believe Konoha is fairly young as hidden villages go. For centuries, ninja were organized into warring clans, and the villages developed slowly as various families made alliances and traded some of their secrets. This allowed them to pool contracts and standardize their training. The Fire Country clans were slow to adopt this pattern, mostly because Fire Country had an unusually high proportion of clans who depended on bloodline limits, or on family traits that weren't quite strong or clear enough to be considered true limits. They took pride in their individuality.
The Shodaime and Nidaime managed to gather the clans to a small village built around natural hot springs and an upthrust granite plateau. The indigenous villagers were slowly absorbed into the ninja culture, but generally didn't become ninja; instead, they performed support functions. Yukiko's clan, the Ayakawa, were the original guardians of the hot springs, which by that point had been made into an elaborate bathhouse with a small shrine nearby to propitiate the spirit of the springs. At some point, the Ayakawa sold the bathhouse to the town council, so it's no longer a private business.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-05 01:17 am (UTC)What that crop-tech -is- is going to be entirely up to a given author, of course, since the series itself seems to bounce between '20th century' and 'Warring States' Japan with no warning or explanation whatsoever. If the tech level is low, then things like the Snow Country booster suits and headset radios can be explained as attractively-packaged examples of the same kind of elaborate seal work we saw in Konoha's hospital after the Sasuke Retrieval Mission, and if it's high, then, well, who needs guns when you've got jutsu that'll shatter mountains?
Anyway, if the tech level is high, then Konohagakure, with a population that I'd guess in the neighborhood of fifty to a hundred thousand, is nothing more than a (relatively) small town in the hinterlands, and could easily be overlooked except for its ninja population - and, therefore, truly -can- be hidden.
If, on the other hand, the primary farming 'equipment' is livestock and human hands, then that same fifty thousand people will represent a major metropolis, possibly the largest in the Fire Country and -certainly- in the top ten.
In which case, 'Hidden' is just a name, and the village may well be -the- manufacturing and cultural nexus of all of central Fire Country, with major roads running right up to its gates.
Given that the village also has a -freakin'- -huge- Mt. Rushmore type monument that'd be visible for dozens of miles, I think the latter case is more likely, with all of its attendant implications for local technology.
Ja, -n
(Nathan Baxter)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-05 08:02 pm (UTC)I have an attitude toward canon that says all character and jutsu information must be respected, but timelines and certain equipment and numerical issues can be disregarded because frankly? They make no sense. Therefore, my private estimate of Konoha's population is a fair bit lower than yours, regardless of Kishimoto's illustrations, and I also tend to assume Konoha is in a bit of a valley, where the Hokage monument and related cliff structure is a sort of upthrust geological anomaly.
(This is probably easier for me since my imagination is primarily non-visual, so I find it easy to ignore pictorial evidence that opposes my private assumptions.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-09 03:11 pm (UTC)Mmm. I can see why, but I'm a compulsive worldbuilder, so figuring out how to reconcile these aspects that Kishimoto doesn't bother to plan is at least half the fun, for me.
Anyway, my numbers above are for -civilian- population - the number of ninja is limited by other factors that we -have- seen explicitly. Specifically, the number of Genin per year.
Naruto's graduating class, expanded from the final exam's 33.3% passing rate and the nine kids (three teams) that ended up being formed, had somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty students. I haven't counted specifically, but just eyeballing it, I'd say that Konohamaru's class is about the same size.
Call it an average of twelve new ninja a year, with an active career of thirty years. Less combat losses and early retirements.
That's a -maximum- of three hundred sixty ninja, for one of the five most powerful nations in the 'world'. If some of the failed students keep trying - and are allowed to - then you might as much as double that.
I'd guess the actual numbers at being about two-fifty or so for the first assumption and five hundred for the second. Or anywhere in between.
Even if you make Konoha <10,000 people, that's still... insignificant, in terms of overall numbers. Assuming five support personel per ninja - which I'd say is -way- high - you're still looking at at least four-fifth's of the town's economy being directed at something completely unrelated to ninja.
Personally, given that Lady Shijimi (and, thus, her husband, the lord of the Fire Country), seems to live quite close at hand, I'd suspect that Konohagakure is also the Fire Country's capital.
Ja, -n
(Valles at http://pub21.ezboard.com/bdrunkardswalkforums)