If he creates a water whip from the lake and has it touch the lake, can he drain creatures in the lake?
Yes, because if he creates a WW from real water (e.g. the lake) then he can drain through it.
Jiraiya did nothing and he was an Essie for decades and the Hokage for some time. That's the thing. I mean, sure, we convinced him to begin tills & fills. He seemed an okay person overall. But he didn't have the traits a ruler should. He did not care one bit about the civilians of Fire, the vast majority of the population he was de facto ruling over - and he did nothing revolutionary once he seized power - which he easily could have. It was simply not on his agenda to do so, or if it was it was not a priority. Of course his reign was cut short because of Nagi Island but he was on track to being just another Hokage, if one receptive towards our ideas and one that we would steer towards idealistic reforms. On his own, he stood for tiny, gradual changes in a world that demands more.
Looking at the
graphical timeline, Jiraiya was Hokage from chapter 124 to chapter 260, roughly August to December of 1068. His top priority during that time was to recover Naruto, who is both his godson and one of Leaf's strongest military assets. Most of his reign was spent at the Chūnin Exams, where he devoted a lot of effort to working on trade deals with the other Kage.
He created till'n'fills in
chapter 218; it was his own idea, not something that Hazō suggested, although you're right in that Hazō's philosophy was important in promoting the idea to his awareness.
Hiashi's policies if the Collapse didn't happen and he'd ruled longer would have been a disaster for systemic progress on the international stage because he was a fundamentalist that actively pushed for maintaining the status quo and quashing social progress, as well as an arrogant, prideful prick besides.
I agree with you on this one. I suppose things
might have improved somewhat because he would have been working on building up international trade as a way to fold other nations into Leaf, de facto if not de jure. Political consolidation might reduce the frequency of war, but that's very much a hypothetical. Overall, yeah. He was an ass.
Asuma was full of resentment towards other villages (like how he wanted to eradicate Rock for the Collapse) instead of seeing the wider picture where it isn't them that are the problem but the whole dynamic and the village system. He ordered genocides and stood by while Oro commited atrocities, hiding his head in the sand because he was too weak to enact real change and he refused to push civic reforms that would change that state of affairs, such as if he delegated more power to the Clan Council.
I think Asuma is a much more complicated character than you are giving him credit for. He had a problem with Rock after they murdered a lot of his friends and people he was responsible for, stole a bunch of Fire's land, and genocided a dozen Fire villages. He got along fine with the other Hidden Villages. He was his father's son, meaning he would have been pro-diplomacy and pro-peace. In my opinion, very much not WOG and not having discussed it with the other QMs, Fire and perhaps the EN as a whole would have benefited tremendously from his rule.
He also came up with the idea of the "everyone put something in the pot so we all get stronger" contest and he carried through on it.
He built up the power of the KEI tremendously when he gave them the right to control adoption tickets. This helped hundreds of civilian-born ninja, and thereby their families, and thereby their communities.
He immediately jumped on Mari's idea of "let's invest in civilians and also lower their taxes."
He immediately jumped on Hazō's idea of "let's improve the educational system."
(The obvious rejoinder to the prior two points is "yeah, but he didn't think of it", but that's the long-running discussion about whether it's the idea that matters or the execution of the idea. I would assert that a ruler doesn't have to think of all the good ideas, they have to be open to them and execute on them. Aside from that, it's highly unlikely that someone from his culture and time period would ever have thought of such things; the fact that he was willing to get right on those ideas makes him an incredible progressive for his time.)
On the other hand...
He ordered a war crime during WWIV when he told Ino and Akane to burn down that city in Earth. HDK whether there were valid strategic reasons for that but certainly no such reason is obvious.
During WWIV, specifically in
chapter 457, he ordered the destruction of civilian settlements along the Earth/Fire border in order to force Rock to pull their troops back from Fire so that they would stop tearing up the landscape and killing Fire's civilians and ninja. Note that he mentioned this plan in the paragraph *after* Hazō proposed how to divert rivers in Earth as a way of causing drought that would kill tens of thousands of Earth Country's civilians while having very little immediate impact on Rock's ninja.
He wiped out Isan, an ally of Leaf's. On the one hand, holy crap doubleplus bad. On the other hand, doing so literally saved civilization, because otherwise their Elemental Mastery jutsu would have spread out and eventually the EM nuke would have become widely known. EM nuke is far worse than real-world nukes, since it's something that any Fire-aspected chūnin can do, not something that requires a rare resource that can be controlled, or a team of experts, or a device that is hard to transport. (Note that it helps if the chūnin in question has both Earth and Fire aspect. If you want to be able to repeat the nuke you start it running, then quickly tunnel underground before the storm starts. Staying underground long enough for the terrain to become safe again is left as an exercise for the reader, although more than sufficient resources have been shown to make it feasible.)
Of course no Kage will do any reforms of that scope or think long-term, because they don't care about civilians or anything beyond their tiny little village of superhumans that use their powers for killing and killing only. To have absolute power and not use it to the betterment of society is evil.
This seems oversimplified. Hashirama started the Hidden Villages specifically in order to reduce war and to protect people, including civilians. He created and enforced the "no hurting civilians" rule with an iron hand when he was in charge. Under Hiruzen's tenure, trade flourished and things were kept relatively peaceful most of the time. HDK about Tobirama or Minato.
And yes, keeping people alive is more important than said people's agency. That is like human rights 101 and why you cannot [...] consent to someone killing you
Oregon
Washington
Montana
Vermont
California
Colorado
Washington D.C.
Hawai'i
New Jersey
Maine
New Mexico
...would like a word.
Do you think firemen ask people for consent to save them from a burning building? How about when an ambulance is called in to save a would-be suicide victim from bleeding out, do they ask for permission because maybe they wanted to die?
Actually, EMTs are not allowed to transport you against your will. That's the fundament of it, anyway; the actual details are a lot more complicated and vary from place to place.
Flippancy aside, I get where you're coming from on this but I agree with
@Twinnstars that it's not as cut and dried as you might think. There's a host of other issues that need to be addressed before you could relocate an entire country's population, such as:
* Is it practical to grow enough food in the area you are moving them to? (This is not a trick question, I honestly don't know the answer.)
* How will sanitation be managed once you get them there? It's one thing to manage the human waste from small villages spread out over tens of thousands of square miles, but it's entirely different under the circumstances you're describing.
* Is it practical to supply water to all those people? (Again, I honestly have no idea.)
* How exactly do the logistics of getting them there work? Remember, there aren't many good roads and this is a giant forest, so carts are going to be of limited use. IRL, an average fit person is going to be hiking 1-2 mph through the typical terrain of Fire, and that's without monsters jumping out at you. Transporting villages means moving infants, pregnant women, and elderly people, plus all their belongings. How are you feeding them? Are the ninja traveling with them at the pace of a walking civilian? Who is covering those ninjas' normal jobs while they are spending weeks or months on escort quests?
* The QMs originally said that Fire was about 300,000 people, but the players later convinced us that it should be >1 million, so we soft-retconned it by saying "oh, uh...yeah, it's more like 1 to 1.2 million, but a lot of them have managed to hide out and Leaf mostly isn't aware of them." (That's my understanding, anyway;
@Velorien or
@Paperclipped can correct me if I am misremembering where we left it.)
