keep a cool head

kagurabachi stocks have paid off main: @alonelystargazer

[entenoi]

welcome bachibros! call me Winnie (she/they)

this is my Kagurabachi side blog entenoi (mashup of Enten + tenoí), so if I follow back it will be from my main blog @alonelystargazer where I mainly post about JJK and other animanga (and other misc stuff)

Check out my fanfics on AO3 at asleeplessmalice

⚠️ I won't be sharing leaks or spoilers on this blog, and I'm also a yaoi shipper ⚠️

(meme by @/kuro-shred)

[mocchimello]

The pinnacle of sorcery

[tocc0]

[tocc0]

[faraskyee]

[i-cant-swim-actually]

freebie i had at ax this year bc we’re a real show now baybeeeeee

[eggstoastnbacon]

[tamsywindsup]

Throwback to this Kagurabachi ad that tore through the October 6, 2025 issue of The New York Times' International Edition to celebrate the series' second anniversary 🗡️ Featuring Chihiro “cutting into our world” 🔥

👆🏻 The actual article without Chihiro

[tamsywindsup]

According to event attendees, about the Kagurabachi panel! Original source of this info here 🙏🏻

The panel opened with Taihi Kimura-san saying, "Enough time has passed!" (He knows his stuff omgahhh 😩 !!!)

The panel team also referred to the audience as "bachibros"!! 😆

Many people said the anime has a really cinematic feel and looks incredibly polished.

Many also think that the anime isn't just copying the manga, it elevates the source material — there are ani-ori scenes which help flesh things out thus making the experience even better 🙂‍↕️

The sound design really adds to the atmosphere! 🎵

Incredible voice acting that capture the characters and their emotions really well.

The team mentioned that Hokazono-sensei wanted the anime to be "as cool as possible," and the team seems fully committed to making that happen! 😍

When the Kagurabachi producer was asked to describe his favorite scene in just one word, he replied: "Curtains closed." Maybe it's a hint that the anime will adapt through the end of the Rakuzaichi Arc 👀 tho it's still unclear whether the next arc will also be animated as part of this season.

Overwhelmingly positive reaction, all in all! A lot of fans left saying that if the rest of the season has this level of quality, Kagurabachi could easily be one of the biggest anime of 2027 🥰

[faraskyee]

[entenoi]

temporarily changed my pfp

[entens]

how it's going

[entenoi]

FINALLY we get to see Shiba('s ankles)

[tocc0]

[akiomitsuki]

I've been obsessed with Kagurabachi lately. I read from Vol one to six and it's so satisfying. No I want to draw all the shinuichi bearer one by one. If you interested buy this art you can find it on my Redbubble and INPRNT (later on my inprnt).

[hestzhyen]

Chapter 125 Pre-Hiatus Posting

Strong feelings about this chapter... well, more like I have strong feelings about how much I don't feel, kind void.

Editor's Notes First Page: 神秘の源... [shinbi no minamoto...] "A source of mystery..." Last Page: 伝説の始まりー [densetsu no hajimari...] "The beginning of a legend..."

Yes, the announcement is true. The editorial department at Weekly Shounen Jump has decided that Hokazono needs to take a 5-week break. It's pretty unusual for the editorial department to tell a mangaka to take this kind of hiatus so it's natural to wonder what prompted it. We don't know the exact reasoning behind the decision, but hopefully it's nothing to do with poor health.

At any rate here's hoping he can rest up and come back with more banger chapters in August.

Mikaboshi Lore

How 'bout them thoughts and prayers?

I'm glad we at least acknowledge that the historical information at hand may have been influenced by the Soga clan. History is written by the victors and all that.

It's mostly to set up a contrast of one of the important lines near the end of the chapter, but yeah. The "prayers" involved a hell of a lot of human sacrifice to harness this so-called god stone. Our "good guys" aren't going to be putting holes in people and smearing their blood around, I think.

The quotation marks do a lot of heavy lifting though. We the readers know that Kunishige, Urita, Shiba, and Masumi only have good intentions here- they just want to protect their country and their loved ones. The thing about that though is weapons kill people. And Kunishige has no idea what he's making- he barely knows how to handle the datenseki's volatility!

I'm gonna have a mega long yap out about what Kagurabachi has to say about genocide and the morality of the sides involved later. It's way too much to do in a weekly chapter post. But basically, it's not cut-and-dry on who's good or evil. The Mikaboshi definitely hover towards "evil" within the story's framing, but they're not suddenly deserving of what Akemura is going to do to the civilians and children. But more on that over the hiatus.

In this version of "man harnessing lethal materials based on intuition and desperation", no one has to die. There are no sacrifices. Therefore, it's "purer" than the Mikaboshi's methods. It gives a much more wholesome feel to the blades that are going to result from this process- until Magatsumi corrupts Akemura, at least. In time, the professor's earlier comment that man wasn't meant to touch datenseki will bear true for the blades too.

It's genuinely hard not to think of the moment where nuclear fission was achieved and harnessed to make bombs capable of as-then unseen destruction. Scientists were working on logical guesswork and the lessons from the Curies- they knew radiation was extremely dangerous and accounted for that when handling the material themselves. But no one could guess the sheer devastation wrought by nuclear fallout long after the bombs obliterated cities. The Trinity test in the Jornata del Muerto desert had unexpected effects and spurred the creation of measures to deal with nuclear fallout. But no one knew just how long the after-effects would last for:

More than seventy years after the test, residual radiation at the site was about ten times higher than normal background radiation in the area. The amount of radioactive exposure received during a one-hour visit to the site is about half of the total radiation exposure which a U.S. adult receives on an average day from natural and medical sources.

Even now in peacetime, nuclear reactor meltdowns make large swaths of land uninhabitable for decades. The Chernobyl disaster is still affecting Russians and Ukranians in adjacent regions to this day with high rates of cancer and birth defects. Three Mile Island's cleanup isn't expected to be finished until 2029 at the earliest. Fukushima is slowly being re-opened, but former residents are rightly sceptical of the government's claim that it's safe to return long-term.

Every time something goes wrong, we learn something new and create better safeguards. But we will never, ever get to a state where nuclear materials -Datenseki- are completely safe for humans to use. It will always be a gamble with catastrophic results in the case of failure; if we ever think we have actually "tamed" it, we are fools. Kunishige certainly realised that after the war.

Technical Terms Ahoy

Since this is this is the last chapter we're getting for slightly over a month, I did my very best to translate it. "Bellows" and "mochi iron" and "magnetite" aren't stuff you use every day.

The EN translation didn't bring it over, so here: "mochi iron" (餅鉄, beitetsu or mochitetsu) is a whimsical name for magnetite that has been eroded into a rounded pebble shape by rivers. It's prized for use in the tatara method of sword making since it's said to not only have fewer impurities than iron sand, but is also easier to process.

Joji: "Be... bei...?" Urita: It's "mochi" and "iron"

The top left panel here is Urita explaining the word since it's pretty damn specific to the craft of tatara sword making. Kunishige pronounces it as beitetsu, so Urita tells Joji it's bei as in the alternate reading for 餅 [mochi] instead of any other number of things like 米 (rice), 皿 (dish), 塀 (fence/wall), etc. Probably still doesn't help explain what it actually is but hey. We are not here to dive into the etymology of all the techniques and materials referenced this chapter. At least I assume no one but me is.

...I don't know why they translated and rewrote that part but not noro (ノロ), honestly. Replacing that with "slag" wouldn't have made a bit of difference; it's not like noro is a specialised term without an English equivalent like 餅鉄 is. I don't understand.

Anyway, what is this "tatara" that's getting tossed in like we all kinda know what it is? It's a traditional clay furnace used for smelting iron that's operated with a foot bellows. Looks something like this:

(Read more about the history of tatara from the image's source.)

It's a very time-intensive and laborious process of iron-making that's still practised by a few forges in Japan. The Japanese version of the Wikipedia article corroborates the manga's claim that it's experiencing something of a revival (as of 2017), but the process has been demonstrated every winter since 1977 by Nittoho (Japanese Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords), the Japanese government's Agency for Cultural Affairs, and Yasugi Special Steel (a subsidiary of Hitachi Works). The resulting steel is used for reproduction of historical swords and firearms.

The resulting 玉鋼 [tamahagane, "precious steel"] is another specialised term- not just any steel can be called by that name. It has to be the result of traditional processes relying on iron sand.

Holy Yap

This chapter had me flashing back to that chapter where we spent like six pages explaining how the barrier around Kamunabi HQ worked. Cool info, but not something that needs so much page time to explain. That's the kind of trivia you relegate to a bonus page or notes for those who want to delve deeper on the subject. (Yes, I realise the irony of saying this when I blab about my own research all over these posts.)

I was willing to let the special Rokuhira eyes just be one of the many things we don't get in-depth explanations of in this series. I was also interested in the forging process. But Hokazono really went overkill here. It's a common new writer mistake where you wanna yap about the cool stuff you learned/thought up, but the details don't really add to the story that much.

It's cool to know that:

Kunishige and Urita are using a traditional method that's been around since ancient times

They went out of their way to prepare higher-quality materials for this

The method they're using relies on their skills and senses, no modern tech at all

Kunishige was "born" to do this because his eyes are special

But a part of me is wishing that the finer details were left out so we could get, I don't know... more insights into character's thoughts and feelings, a shot of what Chiaki and Akemura are doing, some flashbacks to Kunishige and Chiaki to heighten the emotional tension, anything but the special membrane that doesn't make sense at all and breaks my immersion a little.

It's not a bad chapter. I'm also not a pro so I wonder if I should be criticising at all. But it didn't really land with me and given Hokazono's comment this week, I think he knows he's kind of lost the plot a bit.

(Did you know that VIZ provides translations of the mangaka's weekly commentary? Now you do!)

My most delusional hope is that we come back with more time spent on showing us the characters interacting outside of strictly plot-necessary scenes. It's kinda sad that we don't know any of Chihiro's hobbies or what he thinks about most of the cast, y'know? And we're in an even sorrier state for less important characters than him.

At any rate, it's break time and I hope Hokazono makes the most of it. See you sporadically until serialisation resumes, dear void. Take care of yourself too.

[blinkeasy]

Happy "Chihiro... Please slay my father!" Day to all who celebrate