This is our jigokuraku strongest characters ranked 10-1 breakdown, closing out the countdown with the ten fighters who can take a battlefield on their own terms — including the one most readers would rank first, and the one the story actually does.
Light spoilers ahead. I have kept plot details to what actually explains a character’s placement.
Part 1 covered #20 through #11, and it was mostly about people who were dangerous in one direction. A title without the record to back it, a monster with no idea what he was doing, a Tensen who would rather talk than fight.
The top ten is different. This is where Jigokuraku stops handing out partial answers and starts putting genuinely complete fighters on the board. Every character from here up can take a battlefield on their own terms, and most of them require a group effort to stop.
It is also where the series makes its strangest argument. The character almost every reader thinks of as the strongest in Jigokuraku and the character the story actually treats as the strongest are not the same person, and the gap between those two answers is the reason I love this manga. I will get to that at the top of the list.
Counting down from #10.
#10. Tamiya Gantetsusai
The last swordsman of a dying lineage, and the only person on this island who arrived hoping to lose.
Gantetsusai’s Fire Tao and raw physical output are enormous, and his sword work comes from decades of chasing opponents big enough to justify his existence. On a list full of shinobi tricks and analytical genius, he is refreshingly direct. He walks at the thing and cuts it.
What makes him genuinely effective rather than just loud is his willingness to absorb damage. Against opponents who regenerate, the fight is a war of attrition, and Gantetsusai is built to win attrition wars in a way the more technical fighters are not. He takes punishment that would end anyone else in his group and keeps swinging.
The ceiling is his own philosophy. A man looking for a worthy death makes some extraordinary plays and some appalling decisions, often in the same fight. Tenth, and the most purely enjoyable fighter in the cast.
#9. Ju Fa (Ashuku Daitei)
Being Tensen sets a floor, and Ju Fa sits comfortably on it.
The Fire Tao output is beyond anything a human on this list can generate unassisted. The regeneration means damage is a temporary inconvenience rather than a problem. The physical scale, once Ju Fa stops being careful, is enough to make an entire group of trained fighters reconsider the encounter. Any one of the top human entries on this list would lose a straight one-on-one, and the manga is honest about that.
Ju Fa is ninth rather than higher because the eventual answer to that fight is coordination. Four capable humans, working as a unit and accepting real losses, is a solution that exists. For the Tensen above this spot, that same approach is not enough on its own.
#8. Yamada Asaemon Shion
Blind, fourth in the Tameshi Itto-ryu, and the calmest person in every room he is in.
Shion’s Wood Tao and his reading of an opponent’s movement are refined to the point where the loss of sight is close to irrelevant. He deflects rather than blocks, intercepts rather than dodges, and he does it without ever appearing rushed. In a series where most fights are won by whoever panics last, that composure is a weapon.
What pushes him to eighth for me is not just his own record. It is Nurugai. Shion takes someone with no training whatsoever and gets enough Tao into her to survive an environment that should have killed her in the first week. In a story where every significant victory is a group effort, the man who makes the group better is doing something the raw power rankings do not capture.
#7. Aza Chobei
The best pure fighter among the death row convicts, and the only human besides Gabimaru who improves visibly in the middle of a fight.
Metal Tao, a body that adapts to whatever is being done to it, and a pain tolerance that reads as a character flaw until you see what it buys him. Chobei starts the island arc already dangerous and finishes it having taught himself to handle opponents that should be categorically out of reach.
The thing that separates him from the rest of the convicts is his head. He identifies what the enemy is actually doing while the exchange is happening, reorganizes his approach around it, and communicates the new plan to the people beside him. Against the Tensen pairing that dominates the middle of the story, he is the reason the fight is winnable at all.
Everything he does runs on his brother. It is the least complicated motivation in Jigokuraku and one of the most effective.
#6. Ran (Juntei Teikun)
The Tensen who broke Gabimaru’s win condition before the fight started.
Ran’s Water Tao means the protagonist’s entire offensive toolkit does nothing. Not reduced, not resisted, nothing. That matchup alone would have been enough to earn this ranking, and then Ran escalates into a transformed state that outclasses two trained shinobi simultaneously and turns the surrounding area into a hazard.
Sixth is right because the eventual answer is not power. It is time. The transformed state burns Tao at a rate that cannot be sustained, and the humans in that fight survive by making it expensive rather than by overcoming it. Ran is never out-fought. Ran is out-waited, which tells you exactly how large the gap was.
#5. Shija
The scariest character in Jigokuraku, and the one Gabimaru openly admits he is not confident about.
Shija is the Village of Iwagakure’s chosen successor to the Gabimaru name. That designation comes with a condition: to take the name, you kill the person currently holding it. The village looked at Shija and considered this a realistic expectation. Before Shija does anything on the page, the setting has already told you what this character is.
Then the feats arrive. Shija clears out a group of opponents with fire ninjutsu in a single motion. Shija goes up against a Tensen and, rather than trying to out-power something immortal, floods the battlefield with chaos and psychological pressure until the immortal is the one reacting. That is a level of composure the rest of the cast simply does not have.
Gabimaru’s own assessment is that Shija is a worse problem than the Tensen he has been fighting. I take him at his word, and that is why a character with relatively little screen time sits at fifth.
#4. Yamada Asaemon Jikka
Third rank, spends most of the series apparently asleep, and is arguably the most efficient combatant in the entire manga.
Jikka sees the principle behind things. Where a body comes apart. Where his own feet need to be so that nothing reaches him. Where a falling petal is going to land before it lands. It functions as something between foresight and x-ray vision, and it applies to Tao as well, which means incoming attacks are objects he can watch approach and calmly not be standing in front of.
The flex that sells it is his equipment. He carries out executions with a blade that does not have a working edge, and a bamboo practice sword in his hands will go through iron. He is not relying on sharpness. He is cutting at the exact point where the principle says the thing separates.
He also treats Shinsenkyo as an engineering problem rather than a war, which is why his solutions look lazy and work every time.
#3. Yamada Asaemon Shugen
Second rank, and the hardest placement on this list. Jikka and Shugen are two versions of the same idea, and I went back and forth several times before settling here.
Shugen’s ability sounds modest and is not. He reproduces the techniques of the other Yamada Asaemon, and the copy comes out more precise than the original. He can also change his Tao attribute to suit the situation, which in a system built entirely on elemental counters is close to holding the answer key. Put those two things together and Shugen is a one-man solution to almost any matchup on the island.
He is also genuinely unsettling. His view of criminals is absolute and he acts on it without hesitation, including against his own. A lot of readers hate him for one particular decision, and they are not wrong to.
I gave him third over Jikka because of what he does in the final act, which I am not going to spell out here. It is the single most consequential contribution any Yamada Asaemon makes to the ending, and it is not a copied technique.
#2. Gabimaru
Gabimaru the Hollow, formerly the strongest shinobi Iwagakure ever produced, and the character most readers would put at number one without thinking about it.
The series tells you what he is on page one. They try to execute him and it does not take. Blades do not work, weight does not work, the officials watching are visibly unnerved. That opening is a promise, and Jigokuraku spends thirteen volumes keeping it.
From there he only climbs. He picks up a regeneration that closes the gap with the immortals. He works out how to redirect Tao he cannot overpower and turn it back on the source. Placed against an opponent his entire fire-based arsenal is useless against, he survives long enough to create the opening anyway. At the very end, against the one character above him on this list, he is still upright when almost nobody else is.
He is second purely because the ceiling above him is higher. In terms of distance travelled, nobody in this manga is close, and his wife Yui is not the weakness the story initially frames her as. She is the reason the ceiling kept moving.
#1. Rien (Fugen Jotei)
The leader of the Tensen, and the only character in Jigokuraku who never has a fight that could be called fair.
The numbers are ridiculous. Rien takes on the strongest humans in the story simultaneously, not a few of them but effectively all of them at once, and remains in control of the exchange. Damage does not accumulate. Tao refined over an inhuman span of time makes conventional attacks close to meaningless. And when the restraint finally comes off, the story stops pretending this is a battle and starts framing it as something closer to a natural disaster with a face.
What eventually brings her down is not a stronger fighter, because there is no stronger fighter. It takes three people performing three completely different roles, built on a plan that targets something other than her body, and even then the ending is not a clean victory. It is a negotiation with a person whose enormous power came entirely from wanting one specific thing back.
That is the argument I mentioned at the top. If you rank by who the story is about, Gabimaru is first and nothing else makes sense. If you rank by demonstrated power, it is Rien, and it is not particularly close. Most readers go with their heart here, and honestly, Jigokuraku earned that response. A series that spends its entire length insisting that strength is not what decides anything, and then convinces its audience to vote against the strongest character in it, has done something genuinely rare.
I am ranking by power, so Rien takes the top spot. But if you disagree, the manga is on your side.
That is the full twenty. If you have not read Jigokuraku yet, thirteen volumes is nothing, and it is one of the few battle manga I can recommend without adding a warning about how long it takes to get good. It is good immediately, and then it ends properly, which is more than most of its competition manages.
Final Verdict: Jigokuraku Strongest Characters Ranked 10-1
That’s our jigokuraku strongest characters ranked 10-1 — Gabimaru, Rien, and the rest of the fighters who turn Jigokuraku’s back half into a different manga. Missed how we got here? Go back to Part 1: #20-11 →
Series creator Yuji Kaku spent thirteen volumes building toward this list, and it shows in how little filler sits between #10 and #1.
If you want to own the ending in one go, the complete collection covers every volume used in this list.