Jujutsu Kaisen: Why This Manga Became a Global Phenomenon
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
In October 2023, Jujutsu Kaisen broke a record that Demon Slayer had set in 2020.
The record: the highest-grossing anime film in Japanese box office history. The film was Jujutsu Kaisen 0 — a prequel to the main series — and its record-breaking performance in Japan, combined with its international streaming success, confirmed what the manga’s sales figures and the anime’s viewership numbers had already suggested: Jujutsu Kaisen had become the dominant anime franchise of its generation.
I want to examine why. Not simply that Jujutsu Kaisen became a global phenomenon — the fact is documented and undeniable — but why this specific manga, in this specific moment, connected with audiences at the scale it did. The answer reveals something about what the contemporary anime and manga audience wants that is worth understanding.
What Jujutsu Kaisen Is
Jujutsu Kaisen — roughly translatable as “Sorcery Fight” or “Jujutsu Battles” — is a manga by Gege Akutami, serialised in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 2018 and adapted into an anime by MAPPA studio in 2020.
The premise: in a world where cursed spirits — manifestations of negative human emotion, ranging from small nuisances to catastrophically powerful beings — threaten human life, jujutsu sorcerers exist to fight and exorcise them. The protagonist, Yuji Itadori, is a high school student with extraordinary physical capabilities who accidentally swallows a finger of Ryomen Sukuna — the most powerful and most dangerous cursed spirit in history, whose dismembered body has been sealed across twenty separate fingers. Instead of dying from the experience, Itadori becomes Sukuna’s host — a dangerous, unprecedented situation that forces the jujutsu world to make a specific choice: use Itadori to find and swallow the remaining nineteen fingers (concentrating Sukuna in a single host who can then be killed), or execute him immediately.
Itadori chooses the first option. The series follows him through jujutsu high school training and increasingly dangerous missions alongside classmates and mentors while the larger conflict between the established jujutsu world and those who want to overthrow it develops in the background.
Why It Works: The Specific Ingredients
The power system. Jujutsu Kaisen’s cursed energy system — where sorcerers and cursed spirits channel negative emotional energy into specific techniques — is one of the most inventive battle power systems in contemporary shōnen manga. The specific rules of the system are precise and internally consistent, which allows the fights to be won through intelligence and preparation as much as through raw power. The specific technique of each character — their innate domain, their cursed technique — is original and visually distinctive in ways that make each fighter’s combat style specific and memorable.
The domain expansion mechanic — the ability to expand one’s innate domain into a bounded space where one’s techniques are amplified to maximum effect — is the series’ signature dramatic setpiece. When a character activates their domain expansion in the manga or anime, the visual spectacle is genuinely extraordinary, and the specific design of each character’s domain is one of the most creative elements in the series.
The supporting cast. Jujutsu Kaisen’s ensemble of characters is unusually strong — most shōnen manga struggle with supporting characters who feel like background decoration rather than fully realised people. Jujutsu Kaisen’s secondary characters — Megumi Fushiguro, Nobara Kugisaki, Satoru Gojo, Nanami Kento, and many others — are developed with sufficient depth that their fates generate genuine emotional investment.
Satoru Gojo deserves specific mention. Jujutsu Kaisen’s most popular character is not the protagonist but the mentor figure — a white-haired, blindfolded sorcerer of overwhelming power who is simultaneously the strongest character in the series, a genuinely funny personality, and a figure whose specific relationship to power and responsibility raises interesting questions. Gojo’s combination of competence and personality has made him one of the most popular anime characters internationally of the past several years.
The willingness to cause consequences. One of the most significant departures of Jujutsu Kaisen from conventional shōnen storytelling is its willingness to kill significant characters — not minor characters as dramatic punctuation, but genuinely beloved major characters at moments when their deaths are least expected and most impactful. This willingness to follow the story’s logic rather than protecting beloved characters from the consequences of the world they inhabit creates a specific reading experience: you cannot assume that survival is guaranteed, which makes every dangerous situation genuinely tense.
The animation quality. The MAPPA anime adaptation of Jujutsu Kaisen is — alongside the Ufotable adaptation of Demon Slayer — one of the two defining examples of what contemporary anime production can achieve visually. The fight sequences in the Jujutsu Kaisen anime are among the most technically accomplished animation in television history. The specific scene from Episode 19 of Season 1 — the fight between Gojo and Jogo, animated with a fluidity and a dynamism that became immediately iconic in the animation community — generated the kind of industry-wide attention that shifts expectations for what television anime can look like.
The Shibuya Incident: The Arc That Changed Everything
The most significant narrative arc in Jujutsu Kaisen — and the section of the manga that most directly accelerated its international reputation — is the Shibuya Incident arc, which appears in the manga’s later chapters and in the anime’s second season.
I am going to be deliberately non-specific about the events of the Shibuya Incident for the benefit of people who have not yet read or watched it. What I can say:
The Shibuya Incident arc does to Jujutsu Kaisen what the Red Wedding did to Game of Thrones — it fundamentally changes the reader’s understanding of what kind of story this is and what can happen in it. Characters who seemed central and safe are revealed to be neither. The scale of the conflict changes. The emotional landscape of the narrative after the arc is substantially different from what it was before.
The Shibuya Incident is also visually and narratively the most ambitious section of the manga, with a complexity of simultaneous storylines and a density of event that requires sustained attention to fully follow. It rewards that attention with some of the most impactful storytelling in contemporary shōnen manga.
The Gege Akutami Question: What the Creator Is Doing
The manga’s creator, Gege Akutami, is one of the more interesting figures in contemporary manga. Publicly private (Akutami has maintained a degree of anonymity that is unusual for a creator of this prominence), clearly technically accomplished, and apparently willing to take narrative risks that have generated significant reader reaction — both enthusiastic and frustrated.
The specific choices Akutami makes — in character fates, in power escalation, in the pacing of revelation — suggest a creator who has a specific story they want to tell rather than a story that will be optimised for sustained reader satisfaction. This orientation produces manga that is capable of genuinely surprising its audience, which is the quality that distinguishes Jujutsu Kaisen from more formulaic shōnen production.
Why It Connected Internationally
The international success of Jujutsu Kaisen — which by most measures rivals or exceeds the international reach of Demon Slayer and rivals the peak international presence of Naruto and Bleach — has several specific explanations.
Simultaneous global availability. The Jujutsu Kaisen anime debuted on Crunchyroll with simultaneous international availability, which meant that the global anime community was watching the same episode in the same week as the Japanese audience. This simultaneity created conditions for the kind of global discourse — the Twitter conversations, the YouTube reactions, the Reddit analysis — that had not been possible for previous generations of anime.
The Gojo factor. The specific international popularity of Satoru Gojo — who has consistently topped popularity polls both in Japan and internationally since the anime’s debut — created a gateway into the series for audiences who were not previously anime viewers. The specific quality of his character — the combination of overwhelming competence, genuine warmth toward his students, and specific irreverence — translated across cultural contexts in ways that some other popular characters do not.
The animation quality. The MAPPA adaptation’s visual quality generated attention from the animation community specifically — from animators and animation enthusiasts who began documenting and discussing the specific sequences and the specific animators responsible for them. This attention from the animation community amplified the series’ visibility beyond the conventional anime audience.
— Yoshi ⚡ Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Demon Slayer: Why This Manga Broke Every Record” and “The History of Anime: From Astro Boy to Global Phenomenon” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
