If your feed is suddenly full of a soft spoken sorcerer with a katana and a very complicated relationship with his dead childhood friend, that’s because Jujutsu Kaisen just handed Yuta Okkotsu the spotlight again.
Yuta headlined his own prequel film back in 2022, then all but vanished from the main anime timeline. Fans who only knew him from Jujutsu Kaisen 0 have spent two full seasons waiting for the show to catch up to him, and now it finally has.
Yuta Okkotsu‘s Journey From Cursed Child to Special Grade Sorcerer
Yuta’s story starts with tragedy. As a kid, he watched his childhood friend Rika Orimoto die in a traffic accident, and her spirit came back wrong, twisted into a monstrous curse that latched onto him and refused to let go.
That made Yuta a special grade cursed human before he ever set foot in a classroom. Satoru Gojo saw the potential buried under the horror and enrolled him at Tokyo Jujutsu High, where he trained alongside Maki Zenin, Toge Inumaki, and Panda.
By the end of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, Yuta had defeated Suguru Geto and finally set Rika’s soul free, closing out one of the franchise’s most emotional arcs.
His power set is what makes him terrifying on paper. Yuta can copy the innate techniques, but his shikigami rika must consume a physical part of that target, which is part of why the fandom has debated for years whether he might eventually outpace Gojo himself.
Why Yuta Is Now Hunting Yuji Itadori
After the events of Jujutsu Kaisen 0, Yuta left Japan to train overseas with a sorcerer named Miguel, which conveniently explained his absence for all of Season 1 and most of Season 2. That absence is over.
With Gojo sealed away in the Prison Realm and the jujutsu world’s higher ups back in control, Yuji Itadori’s execution order has been reinstated. Yuta returns to Japan under direct orders to be the one who carries it out, putting him on a collision course with the very people he once trained beside.
It’s a gut punch of a setup. Yuta isn’t a villain here, he’s a soldier following the chain of command in an organization that has never cared much about mercy. Watching him wrestle with that assignment, especially against a kid whose situation mirrors his own history with Rika, is shaping up to be one of the emotional cores of the Culling Game arc.
Long term, the manga eventually has Yuta grow into the head of the Gojo Clan, but the anime has plenty of ground to cover before fans get anywhere near that point. Right now, the tension is simpler and rawer: can Yuta actually go through with killing Yuji, and what does it cost him if he does.
Jujutsu Kaisen: The Culling Game Part 1 dropped globally on Netflix today, July 23, 2026, putting Yuta right back in the center of the story where he belongs.