Kabuto Yakushi was found on a battlefield, with no memory of who he was, no name, and no face to recognize in the mirror. Everything he later became —the medic, the triple agent, the necromancer who resurrects armies of the dead in Naruto— was given to him by others. His name came from the woman who took him in; so did the glasses; the trade of lying was taught to him by an organization that raised him to infiltrate. Kabuto is not the villain who chooses evil out of a perverse self: he is the child who never had a self of his own and spends his life collecting other people's. That is why labeling theory reads him better than any other: here, literally, the label precedes the person. Before he knew who he was, Kabuto was already what others had written about him.
// The theoryDeviance lies not in the act, but in the one who names it
Labeling turns the classic criminological question on its head. It does not ask "why does someone offend," but who has the power to decide what counts as crime and who gets pursued. Howard Becker, in Outsiders (1963), gave the canonical formulation: deviance is not a quality of the act, but of the social reaction to it —the deviant is one who has been successfully labeled as such—. Earlier, Frank Tannenbaum (1938) had spoken of the dramatization of evil: publicly marking and punishing someone ends up fixing in him the very identity it meant to correct. And Edwin Lemert distinguished between primary deviance —the isolated act the subject has not yet integrated into his identity— and secondary deviance —when, after being treated as deviant, he reorganizes his life and self-image around the label—. Becker added the master status: once someone "is" the label, that label swallows all his other identities. In Kabuto the mechanism works in reverse of the usual, and that is what makes it so revealing: there is no prior self onto which the label is imposed. There are only labels, layered one over another, and beneath them a void he spends his life trying to fill with the masks he is assigned.
The borrowed self: when the mask replaces the face
Lemert said secondary deviance appears when a person reorganizes their identity around the label hung on them. Kabuto takes that idea to its limit because, with no face of his own beneath the masks, each borrowed identity does not cover a true self: it replaces it. Raised as a spy, he learns to be anyone —an agent of one village, a subordinate of another, an adopted son, a traitor— until the layers blur and even he can no longer tell which was the original. The master status that in others is a label crushing the rest is, in Kabuto, the only material he is made of: he is the spy because there is nothing else. When he finally finds in Orochimaru someone to admire, the solution he chooses is literal and chilling: absorbing the other's traits —down to the snake skin— to borrow a complete identity. Collecting other people is his way of answering the question no one answered for him: who he is. The stigma, here, does not describe a subject: it fabricates one out of nothing.
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// The subjectThe nameless child that adults turned into a tool
What makes Kabuto a textbook case is not his cruelty but his obedience to the labels assigned to him by adults with power. Becker spoke of moral entrepreneurs: those with the authority to create and apply labels. In Kabuto's life that role is always filled by others —the woman who names him, the organization that trains him, the master who molds him—; he never defines himself, he only fulfills the role placed on top of him. The social reaction that the theory describes as a stigmatizing force appears here as a force that builds from scratch: with no community to recognize him as anyone, Kabuto only exists when someone uses him. Hence his tragedy: he collects skills, bodies, memories and masks because each is a fragment of the identity he never had. His necromancy —raising the dead and sending them to fight— is the perfect metaphor for a man made of pieces of others. Kabuto is responsible for every one of his crimes; he chose them, executed them, enjoyed the power they gave him. But his figure shows something uncomfortable: that a child can be labeled so early and so deeply that the label arrives before the person, and takes its place forever.
Kabuto Yakushi
// The crackExplaining the label is not exonerating the man
The crack with Kabuto is the temptation to turn labeling into an alibi. It is easy to slide from "no one let him have an identity of his own" to "then he is not responsible for what he did with the one he fabricated." The theory does not license that leap. Labeling explains the amplification of deviance —how a label pushes someone to reorganize their life around it— but it does not erase agency: Kabuto chose to experiment on human beings, chose to serve and betray, chose the power to resurrect the dead for a war. That the void of identity explains his search does not mean it exonerates his means. Explaining is not exonerating. The second crack is the opposite one, and it lurks too: reducing Kabuto to a poor orphan-victim blinds us to the concrete decisions with which he caused real harm to concrete people. The honest reading holds both at once.
There is even a limit of the theory itself that this case lays bare. Labeling explains very well why Kabuto needs an identity and why he seeks it in others, but not why he chooses to fill that void with cruelty rather than with something else. For that, other keys are needed —learning, strain, the bonds he never had—. The label says where the hole comes from; it does not dictate what fills it. And in that margin, however narrow, responsibility lives. The memory that matters here is not that of the spy searching for himself, but that of those he used as material to find himself: the experimented bodies, the dead torn from their rest, all those a faceless man treated as pieces of his own puzzle.
Label the act, never the child
Kabuto matters because he shows how far the power of a label reaches when it falls on someone who has not yet finished becoming. Developmental criminology confirms it outside fiction: officially labeling a minor —marking him as "the troublemaker," "the delinquent," "the lost cause"— rarely corrects him; it frequently fixes him in the role attributed to him, because it closes doors and organizes his self-image around the stigma. That is why the most effective responses are those that separate the act from the person: diversion programs that pull the minor out of the penal circuit before sealing him in, restorative justice, Braithwaite's reintegrative shaming —shaming the conduct without condemning for life the one who committed it, always leaving him a way back—. Kabuto is the tragic reverse of that idea: a child no one offered an identity of his own, and onto whom, instead, labels kept sticking until nothing was left underneath. The lesson is not to wait for the necromancer who resurrects armies, but to recognize the nameless child before the labels take his place.
Three key takeaways
- Kabuto Yakushi embodies labeling theory (Becker, Lemert): an orphan with no identity of his own onto whom others —with the power to name and use him— place the name, the glasses and the trade of the spy. The label arrives before the person and takes its place.
- The borrowed self: with no face beneath the masks, each borrowed identity does not cover a true self, it replaces it. Kabuto collects others' traits —even absorbing Orochimaru's— as a way to answer the question no one answered for him: who he is.
- Explaining is not exonerating. That the void of identity explains his search does not erase that he chose cruelty as the means. The label says where the hole comes from; it does not dictate what fills it. The memory is for those he used, not for the spy.
Sources · further reading
- Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. Free Press.
- Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social Pathology. McGraw-Hill.
- Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the Community. Ginn and Company.
- Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Kabuto Yakushi?
Kabuto Yakushi es un villano de Naruto, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He couldn't remember his face, his name, or where he came from.
¿Por qué Kabuto Yakushi se convierte en villano?
Kabuto Yakushi and labeling theory: how a nameless child builds a deviant identity out of the labels others hang on him. The borrowed self of the spy who doesn't know who he is.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Kabuto Yakushi?
El caso de Kabuto Yakushi se analiza desde la Etiquetamiento. Labeling theory (Becker, Lemert, Tannenbaum) holds that deviance lies not in the act but in the social reaction that names it: the label others attach ends up writing the identity of the one who wears it. Kabuto Yakushi, from Naruto, is its most extreme illustration. A war orphan with no memory of his origin, he is handed even his name by others; raised as a spy, he becomes a professional of borrowed identities until he loses sight of which one is his. His career of betrayal, necromancy and experimentation is not born of an evil self, but of the void left by a self no one allowed him to build.
