Jujutsu Kaisen Finally Answers a Big Shonen Fan Question

The American military invades Japan in Jujutsu Kaisen's latest arc, letting fans find out who would win in a fight of soldiers and sorcerers.

Warning! Contains spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 209!Many Shonen fans often wonder about how powerful characters like Luffy or Goku would compare to real world threats like the US military. Luckily for them, Jujutsu Kaisen is finally answering this question for its own characters by pitting its characters against a squadron of American soldiers. It is the latest example of how series author Gege Akutami makes Jujutsu Kaisen one of the most rewarding manga for Shonen fans to read.

In Chapter 209, the American Military invades Japan in order to harvest the cursed energy from the sorcerers involved in the Culling Game. With the element of surprise on their side, they are able to tactically and efficiently capture a fair amount of weaker sorcerers, but some of the stronger combatants give them some issues. One squad is forced to murder their target sorcerer as he has a helicopter-like head (which isn't even Jujutsu Kaisen's strangest power) that killed a fair amount of their soldiers before they took him down. In addition, when the soldiers attempt to take out Itadori and his allies with a stun grenade, they are easily able to deflect it. Fushiguro doesn’t even seem to think of them as threats, instead being more curious about what they’re doing in the Culling Game. The next chapter will likely reveal if his assessment is correct or if the military is a more formidable opponent than he thinks.

Related: Jujutsu Kaisen Confirms One Sorcerer is Much Weaker Than Fans Think

Jujutsu Kaisen has previously addressed how sorcerers match up against more mundane fighters, if indirectly. For instance, the grading system for how powerful sorcerers are is based largely on how they match up to non-magical threats, with Jujutsu Kaisen's Special Grade sorcerers like Gojo being able to single-handedly overthrow a country, implying that characters with this designation can take out an army with ease. And when Kenjaku visits America to convince the military to invade, he demonstrates this somewhat, easily dispatching the soldiers who oppose him. But Chapter 209 makes this question the main focus of the series.

Based on how the military is able to capture a fair amount of people, it seems that against the average sorcerer a squad of American soldiers can easily defeat them. And while some of the stronger sorcerers can give them some difficulty, the military’s superior numbers and weaponry can still overcome them. Given that these soldiers aren’t even using some of their more powerful weapons like tanks and other more lethal weapons, it’s likely that if the army was trying to kill these sorcerers instead of just harvesting their energy on Kenjaku's advice they could do so easily. All of this helps put the power level of an average character in Jujutsu Kaisen’s world into perspective.

Of course this doesn’t explicitly show how the military would fare against some of the more powerful characters in the series like Gojo, but given the definition of Special Grade, this is largely unnecessary. In future chapters the series will likely show how its main characters like Itadori and Fushiguro compare to the military, which is what many fans really want to see. But in the military’s preliminary introduction, Jujutsu Kaisen has arguably answered a more important hypothetical question for Shonen fans about how an average level of sorcery would help a character against the power and numbers of a real world army.

More: Jujutsu Kaisen Could Be Ending Sooner Than Fans Think - Theory

Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 209 is available to read from Viz Media.

Ben Sockol has been writing articles for the comics section of Screen Rant since early 2022. Growing up watching a variety of Saturday morning cartoons and then voraciously reading through the comics they were based on, Ben developed a love of the superhero genre from an early age. And upon discovering anime in high school and college he became a manga fanatic as well. After double majoring in Physics and Mathematics at MIT and doing a brief stint as an Analyst at an investment firm, he realized that writing about his nerdy interests was his true calling. When Ben isn’t writing about comic books, he is most likely reading them or engaging in one of his many other hobbies like card magic. Ben has his own YouTube channel YGOFrom0 where he does deep dives into historic formats of the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game. You can occasionally find him on Twitter @bsocks8.