Hiromi Higuruma: Spotlight

Higuruma and the Story of Going Numb

Spoilers: Jujustu Kaisen: Season 3 Culling Game Arc Part 1

I didn’t expect to care about Higuruma the way I did. He shows up in the Culling Game and within, I don’t know, fifteen minutes of air time, I understood exactly who this person was. And honestly, I don’t blame him.

The exhaustion of watching a system you believe in, maybe even dedicate your life to, fail over and over again until you slowly run out of reasons to think it’ll get better. That feeling when you stop being angry about it and just… go numb. I’ve never worked in law, but I know that feeling. When you stop expecting things to be fair and stop being surprised when they aren’t. Higuruma is what happens when that has nowhere to go. 

Before any of the supernatural stuff, Higuruma is just a defense attorney. Not the genius maverick type. He’s the guy who shows up for clients who don’t have a shot and argues cases he knows are probably going to fail, because some part of him still believes justice means something. That doing the right thing can come through in the end.

The system doesn’t break him in one clean moment. There is a final verdict, yeah, a last straw, but it only hits the way it does because the damage has been building for a while.

It’s like water erosion. The same slow drip wearing down the same stone until one day you look and the shape of the thing has completely changed.

Verdicts that technically follow the rules but clearly miss the point, clients pushed toward false confessions. Outcomes that feel decided before anyone even sits down. At some point, it doesn’t even feel like anger anymore. It’s closer to something like clarity.

Here’s the thing about Deadly Sentencing that keeps bothering me: even when Higuruma breaks, the structure is still there.

His Domain is a courtroom, but Higuruma isn’t sitting above everyone as the judge. He’s the prosecution. Judgeman floats behind him with those stitched-shut eyes, this warped little version of blind justice watching everything from the back of the room.

Violence gets shut down immediately. Everyone is forced back to their place. The defendant gets one chance to answer: stay silent, confess, or deny it. Higuruma gets one chance to argue back with whatever evidence Judgeman gives him.

And the evidence isn’t even complete.

That’s what stuck out to me. Even after everything, his power doesn’t skip straight to punishment. It still makes everyone stand in the room and go through the shape of a trial first.

There’s something sad in that. Higuruma breaks, but the lawyer is still there. Twisted up, colder, running on whatever is left, but still there.

From the outside, Deadly Sentencing can look like Higuruma finally snapping. But the weird part is how controlled it feels. The man breaks, and his power still turns into a courtroom. Same shape as before, just with all the warmth scraped out of it.

Higuruma goes into the fight with Yuji expecting the usual. People lie, or deflect, or try to shrink what they did into something easier to carry. The system he came from was built around dragging truth out of people who wouldn’t give it willingly.

Yuji just… doesn’t do that.

He doesn’t defend himself…at all. He took full blame, there’s no careful line between what he chose and what Sukuna did through him. He just…

“Yeah, I did it.”

“I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to deny it”

And it lands in the room wrong.

“Guilty!”

“Confiscation!”

“Death penalty!”

Yuji doesn’t argue. Hell, he doesn’t even flinch, because he believes the guilt belongs to him, no matter how many times people tell him otherwise.

Maybe the system didn’t just fail at finding the truth. Maybe it made the truth harder to say in the first place.

That’s what makes Higuruma feel so pointed. He comes from a world where confessions matter too much, where the system seems better at producing guilt than sitting with doubt.

That’s why this scene gets under my skin. Higuruma knows what a confession can do. It can make everyone in the room relax, like the hard part is over, even when nothing has actually been understood. Yuji gives him the simplest answer possible, and it makes everything feel worse.

Because by the time Yuji meets him, Higuruma has already been trying to live like someone who stopped caring.

Not every breakdown is loud. Sometimes it’s a man lying fully clothed in a bathtub, joking about a midlife crisis, tossing out the idea of becoming the kind of lawyer who only cares about money, because apparently there was still one more version of himself to try on.

Like he’s poking at himself to see if there’s any fight left in him.

He’s already talking like someone who’s tired of expecting anything good from people. Weak, ugly, selfish, whatever word makes it easier to stop hoping.

The Culling Game gives him something the legal system didn’t. Clear rules. Immediate consequences. No waiting around for a broken process to pretend it cares.

But Yuji gets to something in him anyway.

Buried under the numbness, the disgust, the jokes, all of it, there’s still the part of Higuruma that knows when something is wrong.

He doesn’t come out of this clean. He still killed people. He knows that.

So he helps.

And then he leaves, because standing next to Yuji would mean pretending he’s already dealt with the blood on his own hands.

And he hasn’t.

For a character I didn’t expect to care about, Higuruma might be the one I understood the quickest. He goes numb because caring kept taking pieces out of him, and eventually he didn’t know what else to do with what was left.

If the Culling Game rules still feel like a headache, I also broke down how they work without turning it into a textbook.

If you’re catching up on the anime side, Jujutsu Kaisen is streaming on Crunchyroll.

I’m curious how other people read Higuruma. What made him resonate with you?