How tall is Denji?

Denji's official height and where it comes from

Denji, the teenage devil hunter who fuses with the chainsaw devil Pochita, is 173 cm (5′8″) tall. The figure comes from the character height chart displayed at the official Chainsaw Man anime exhibition, which the Chainsaw Man Wiki cites for Denji and the rest of Public Safety's Division 4. This site uses the same number.

Unlike Attack on Titan or Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man hasn't been accompanied by a detailed character databook that lists heights and weights. Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from December 2018 to December 2020 (Part 1) and on Shōnen Jump+ from July 2022 to March 2026 (Part 2), leaves most vital statistics unstated. The exhibition chart, produced alongside MAPPA's 2022 anime, is therefore the closest thing to an official measurement for most of the cast. It's a useful source because it puts everyone on the same scale.

A 16-year-old's height

Denji's 173 cm is the height of a 16-year-old. He is introduced as a destitute teenager working off his late father's debt to the yakuza, and the manga gives his age as 16 in chapter 20. No source gives a separate figure for Part 2, which is set after a time gap, so this site uses the exhibition figure throughout.

For a real comparison, the CDC 2000 growth charts used across US pediatrics put the median boy at 16 at about 173.4 cm and at 16½ at about 174.5 cm. Denji at 173 cm sits between the 42nd and 48th percentiles, almost exactly typical for his age. Most boys still grow a few centimeters after 16, so an adult Denji might well end up a little taller than the chart shows, but no official source says so.

The table shows how the CDC median changes over the late teens, and where an unchanged 173 cm would fall at each age. It's a statistical reference, not a prediction for a fictional character.

In other words, 173 cm is a dead-average height for a 16-year-old and a slightly below-average one for a young adult, because the typical boy adds 3 to 4 cm after 16.

The story suggests he had every reason to be smaller. In Part 1, Denji grows up in severe poverty, sells organs to pay the debt and fantasizes about eating bread with jam. The wiki's trivia section also notes he had a heart condition inherited from his mother before Pochita became his heart. In the real world, childhood undernutrition is one of the best-documented causes of shorter adult height, a link that runs through the NCD-RisC research on a century of height trends. Fujimoto doesn't comment on Denji's size, and the chart makes him average rather than small. That's worth knowing when fans describe him as "scrawny." He is slim, not short.

Denji versus Power, Aki, Makima and the rest of Division 4

The exhibition chart lets you line up the main cast of Part 1 accurately. The table uses this site's data, all from that chart.

A few pairings stand out.

• Denji and Power. The two spend much of Part 1 living together and fighting side by side, and at 173 cm and 170 cm they are practically the same height. That suits a relationship written as squabbling siblings more than as a hero and a sidekick.
• Denji and Aki. Aki is 9 cm taller, the gap you'd expect between a teenager and the older roommate who ends up looking after him.
• Denji and Makima. Denji is 5 cm taller than Makima, yet she dominates almost every scene they share. Height has nothing to do with the power balance between them. The wiki notes that her prototype design listed her at 173 cm, the same as Denji, before her final figure was set at 168 cm.
• Denji and Kishibe. Kishibe, the veteran hunter who trains Denji, is 21 cm taller, the biggest gap among the main cast and a good match for his role as the series' grizzled mentor.

To compare any two of these at true scale, use the height difference calculator or open the Chainsaw Man character hub.

Chainsaw Man form: what happens to his height?

When Denji pulls the starter cord on his chest, his head and forearms sprout chainsaw blades, and he becomes the hybrid known as Chainsaw Man. No official source gives a height for this form. The blade on his head adds visible height in the art, but because it is a weapon rather than part of his stature, there's no canonical "Chainsaw Man height" to quote. Online numbers for the transformed form are fan estimates.

The same goes for Pochita in his full devil form, which appears in Part 1's final arc. The manga draws it as huge and ominous, but no measurement has been published. The site lists only Denji's human height.

Denji among other shōnen protagonists

At 173 cm, Denji is almost exactly the typical height for a modern shōnen lead. This site's character data, from each series' official profiles, puts him in very familiar company:

Denji and Yuji Itadori are the most natural match. Both are listed at 173 cm, both are teenagers forced to host something monstrous inside their bodies, and both debuted in Shueisha's magazines within a few months of each other in 2018. Fans often pair the two with Tanjiro Kamado as the protagonists of the era's biggest dark shōnen hits. Of the three, Tanjiro is the shortest by 8 cm.

What 173 cm means in the real world

At 173 cm, Denji is a little under average for an American man and a little over average for a Japanese one. In the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for 2021–2023, the median US man aged 20 and over is 175.2 cm and the 25th percentile is 170.0 cm. That puts 173 cm at about the 37th or 38th percentile. The height percentile calculator gives the exact figure for any age group.

In Japan, where the series is set and drawn, the NCD-RisC estimates on this site put the average man born in 1996 at 170.8 cm (see average height in Japan). Denji stands about 2 cm above that. In a crowd on a Tokyo train he would look completely ordinary, and so would the Chainsaw Man under his jacket.

Several real people in the site's data share his height. Tom Holland, the actor who plays Spider-Man, is listed at 173 cm (see his height page), and so are Robert Downey Jr., Dua Lipa and Rihanna. Those comparisons help with the "Denji looks small" impression. He is average height, drawn with a lean frame and a slouch.

The chart, the anime and the film: a short timeline

Because Denji's height comes from material produced for the anime rather than from the manga itself, it helps to know when each part of the franchise appeared. All dates are from Wikipedia's summary of the series.

The exhibition chart was made for the anime, which follows Part 1. Its figures therefore describe the Public Safety era cast, the same characters as in the table above. The Reze Arc film continues that era, so Denji's 173 cm applies to it as well. Wikipedia describes the setting as an alternate late-1990s timeline in which the Soviet Union still exists. The wiki gives Denji an in-universe birth year of 1980, which fits a 16-year-old in the late 1990s.

Popularity: an average-height hero at the top of the polls

Denji's ordinary build hasn't hurt his standing with readers. According to the Chainsaw Man Wiki, he placed 5th in the series' first official popularity poll with 18,302 votes, then 4th in the second (59,130 votes) and third (66,175 votes). Fujimoto said in 2021, around the second poll's results, that Denji was his favorite character in the series. The rest of the top of those polls shows how little height matters to readers:

The third poll's winner isn't one of the characters on this page. Makima placed second in all three polls, according to the wiki, and Power and Aki have each won one. The winners include the tallest and the shortest of the main trio, so in Chainsaw Man popularity has had little to do with size.

Why fans disagree about Denji's height

Three things drive the debates you'll see in forums and comment sections. First, the chart isn't a book. Some readers expect a printed databook entry and treat an exhibition display as less official, though it was produced for the anime project and is the source the main wiki uses. Second, Fujimoto's art style is loose and cinematic. Characters' relative heights shift between panels, especially in action scenes, and Denji often hunches. Third, Part 2 introduces a time gap and new characters, and some fans assume Denji must have grown. No official update exists. Until one appears, 173 cm remains the figure to use.

Spoiler note: this page mentions events up to the end of Part 1 only in passing and doesn't discuss Part 2's plot.