Itachi Uchiha: The brother who killed his clan out of loyalty to the village and kept the guilt for himself

Sasuke Uchiha comes home from the Academy and finds his clan’s district strewn with corpses. He runs to the house. On the floor lie his father, Fugaku, and his mother, Mikoto, and standing over them is his older brother, Itachi Uchiha. Itachi activates his Mangekyō Sharingan and forces him to watch how they died. Sasuke flees in terror; Itachi catches up with him and tells him he is not even worth killing. If he wants revenge, he should hate him, curse him, survive however he can and come back one day with the same eyes. It is the memory Sasuke relives in Masashi Kishimoto’s manga Naruto (chapters 224 and 225; episodes 84 and 131 of the anime), and the scene that defines Itachi for half the series: the prodigy of the Uchiha clan, who rose to ANBU captain while barely a teenager and who in a single night murders his entire family and deserts to join Akatsuki, the criminal organization that hunts the jinchūriki.

// The theoryThe loyalty that outweighs blood

(Spoiler warning: this case file reveals the truth about the massacre, which the series keeps back until Naruto Shippuden.) Itachi did not kill for power. He was a double agent: his father had placed him in the ANBU to spy on the village, because the Uchiha clan, sidelined and watched ever since the Nine-Tailed Fox’s attack, was preparing a coup, and Itachi was reporting those plans to the Leaf’s leadership. When negotiation failed, Danzō put two options in front of him: let the coup break out and watch the whole clan, Sasuke included, die in the civil war, or wipe out the Uchiha himself beforehand and save his brother. Itachi chose (ch. 590). In 1957, Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued in Techniques of Neutralization that most people who break the law do not reject conventional morality: they share it, and that is why they need to switch it off before acting. They described five formulas for doing so: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and the appeal to higher loyalties. This last one does not deny that the rule is good; it says that another obligation, more urgent or higher, comes first.

// The subjectThe executioner who found himself a judge

Three moments show that Itachi neutralizes just enough to act and no more. The first comes before the massacre: after the death of his friend Shisui, some members of the clan accuse him of killing him, and Itachi loses his temper, knocks them down and reproaches them for living tied to the organization and the family name (chs. 222 and 223). He has already picked a side. The second is his death. Years later, in his final battle with Sasuke (ch. 393; episode 138 of Shippuden), Itachi, who is ill, staggers forward as if to tear out his brother’s eyes, and instead taps him on the forehead, the same gesture with which he used to promise, when they were children, to train with him some other time. He apologizes and falls dead. He has achieved what he had been seeking since that night: to fall in a fight against the one person who, in his eyes, had the right to punish him, and to let him believe his revenge was complete.

The third comes when Kabuto brings him back with the Impure World Reincarnation during the Fourth Shinobi World War. Itachi breaks free of his control, takes on Kabuto alongside Sasuke and, before he vanishes, tells him the truth himself. He does not present himself as Danzō’s victim or as a hero. Along the way he admits he was wrong to manipulate his brother onto the path he had chosen for him, and in his farewell he confesses that he should have told him the truth from the start and that Sasuke never has to forgive him (ch. 590; episode 339).

// The crackThe excuse is supplied by the village

Itachi fits the theory with one important caveat. Sykes and Matza described excuses that are learned and that leave the offender with a clear conscience: their delinquent can drift between the norm and the offense because he has absolved himself in advance. Itachi does not absolve himself. He uses the higher loyalty to act, but not to forgive himself, and that is why he arranges his own punishment. This confirms the theory’s central insight, that whoever neutralizes still believes in the rule he breaks, and at the same time marks its limit: neutralization explains how the line is crossed, not that the guilt goes away afterward. Maruna and Copes (2005) noted that the theory works better at explaining how a behavior is sustained than how it begins.

The most complete excuse, moreover, is not made by Itachi but by the village. According to what Tobi tells Sasuke, the Third Hokage accepts an official version in which a killer acted alone, so that no one learns what the clan was planning or what the Leaf ordered (ch. 400). The institution keeps the peace and leaves a teenager with all the guilt. Explaining Itachi is not excusing him. Being driven by loyalty to peace does not bring a single Uchiha back to life, and the series, which ends up turning him into a tragic hero, risks doing what the village did: accepting the bill he agreed to pay.