How tall is Nobara Kugisaki?

Nobara Kugisaki's official height: 160 cm (5′3″)

Nobara Kugisaki's height comes from her Volume 1 character profile, the bonus page in the first collected volume of Jujutsu Kaisen where Gege Akutami introduced the original first-year trio. The Jujutsu Kaisen Wiki lists her at 160 cm (5′3″) on the strength of that profile, and this site uses the same figure.

There's a small wrinkle. The wiki's trivia section, citing the same Volume 1 profile, describes Nobara as just short of 160 cm. In other words, the profile places her right at the 160 line and possibly a hair under it. That's typical of Akutami's profiles, which often describe heights loosely ("over 190", "almost 180") rather than as exact measurements. For comparisons, 160 cm is the right number to use; just keep in mind that if she's a centimeter off, it's in the downward direction.

The first-year trio: Nobara, Yuji and Megumi

Nobara joins Tokyo Jujutsu High in chapter 3 alongside Yuji Itadori and Megumi Fushiguro, and the three of them form the series' central trio for most of the first half. Their heights make a neat staircase:

So Nobara is roughly 13 to 15 cm shorter than both boys, about the height difference between an average Japanese man and woman. In panels where the three walk side by side, her head comes up to about their chins.

The weights tell their own story. Yuji, at 80 kg, is heavily built for 173 cm, a sign of his superhuman physique, while Megumi is lean at 60 kg. Nobara has no published weight, but the art gives her a slim build.

What's notable is how little Akutami plays the height difference for comedy. Nobara isn't written as the "small one" in the trio. She's the loudest, the most confident and often the one dragging the boys into her plans, from shopping trips in Tokyo to fights with Kyoto students. Her personality takes up more space than her 160 cm frame, and the series lets it.

Nobara versus the women of Jujutsu Kaisen

Among the women with published heights, Nobara sits in the middle:

The Maki comparison matters most, because the two are close. Maki is a second-year mentor figure and Nobara's frequent partner, and their friendship during the Goodwill Event arc is one of the series' high points. Maki stands 10 cm taller. Mai Zenin, one of the Kyoto students Nobara clashes with, is also 170 cm, so in any confrontation with the Zenin twins Nobara gives away 10 cm. Her cursed technique, as the next section explains, does a lot to make up for it.

Momo Nishimiya of Kyoto, at 150 cm, is the only woman in the main cast listed as shorter. The two fight during the Goodwill Event, one of the few times Nobara faces an opponent smaller than herself.

Size, range and the Straw Doll Technique

Nobara's fighting style is built around Straw Doll Technique: she channels cursed energy through nails driven by a hammer and through a straw doll. Her signature moves let her strike targets at a distance and damage an enemy through a remnant of their body, a resonance attack that ignores physical distance altogether.

That has a direct bearing on height. In a close-range brawl, a 160 cm fighter facing a 175 or 190 cm opponent is at a disadvantage in reach and leverage. Nobara avoids that problem. Her nails fly, her hammer extends her reach, and her resonance attack can hurt an enemy who isn't even nearby. Akutami gave the shortest member of the trio a technique that makes size nearly irrelevant, which is a smart design choice.

The wiki notes that Akutami has acknowledged her hammer changes shape from drawing to drawing, without any meaning behind it. That's another reminder that manga art isn't drawn to a strict scale; if you try to estimate Nobara's height from her hammer in a given panel, you'll get different answers.

Nobara's look: the countryside girl in Tokyo

Nobara's backstory is that she came to Tokyo from a small rural village, enrolled on her grandmother's recommendation (after an argument, the Official Fanbook adds), and loves city life. Her Volume 1 profile and the fanbook fill in the details: she spends her free time shopping, her favorite brands are Balenciaga and Onitsuka Tiger, and her hair is dyed, naturally dark brown. Her ideal man, per the fanbook, is the warlord Oda Nobunaga.

The fashion detail ties into height in a small way. Nobara is shown with distinctive shoes and outfits, and footwear changes how tall someone looks in everyday life. Her school uniform pairs the gakuran-style jacket with a knee-length skirt, black pantyhose and brown shoes, flat everyday footwear that adds little to her listed 160 cm.

After her severe injury in the Shibuya Incident, she wears an eyepatch over her left eye, according to the wiki. It changes her look, but not her height.

Nobara next to the adults: Gojo, Nanami and Todo

The height gaps get much bigger once the teachers and the tallest students enter the frame. Satoru Gojo, the first-years' homeroom teacher, is officially over 190 cm, so he stands at least 30 cm taller than Nobara. In scenes where Gojo leans down to talk to his students, Nobara's head reaches roughly to his chest.

Other adults and senior students show the same pattern:

Akutami uses these gaps for character moments more than for jokes. When Todo looms over the first-years before the Goodwill Event, the difference in scale makes him look like a force of nature, and when Nobara squares up to someone a head and a half taller, her confidence reads as fearless rather than foolish. Jujutsu Kaisen consistently treats height as a fact of life rather than a measure of strength: the 160 cm Nobara and the 190-plus Todo are both dangerous sorcerers in their own way.

Manga, anime and the color of Nobara's hair

MAPPA's anime adaptation keeps Nobara's proportions and her place in the trio's height order. The most noticeable change between versions is color: the Jujutsu Kaisen Wiki notes that her hair is drawn more orange in manga color illustrations and closer to a ginger brown in the anime. She is voiced by Asami Seto in Japanese and Anne Yatco in English.

The character has been one of the series' breakout favorites. The wiki records that she won Best Girl at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards 2022, and she placed sixth in the series' first popularity poll. Her popularity is a good example of a heroine whose appeal has nothing to do with being tall or petite. At an average height for a Japanese woman, she stands out through attitude, not stature.

Why Jujutsu Kaisen heights use "almost" and "over"

Nobara's "just short of 160" belongs to a wider pattern in how Akutami presents the cast. The Volume 1 and Volume 5 profiles and the 2021 Official Fanbook describe several characters with qualifiers rather than precise figures: Gojo, Todo and Panda are "over 190", Geto is "over 180", Yuta is "almost 180" and Toge Inumaki is "almost 170". Characters such as Yuji (173) and Maki (170) get exact numbers.

The effect is that some comparisons are fuzzier than they look on a chart. Nobara versus Yuji (13 cm) or Maki (10 cm) is solid, because the gaps are large. Nobara versus another 160 cm character from a different series is close enough that the "just short" phrasing could decide it. This site shows the rounded figure with a note where the profile uses a qualifier, so you can judge how much weight to put on a one-centimeter result.

Spoiler note: Shibuya and beyond

Spoiler warning for the Shibuya Incident and the end of the manga.

Nobara's fate after Mahito's attack in Shibuya left readers uncertain for a long time. She returns late in the story, during the final battle against Sukuna, and the spin-off Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo lists her at age 84 decades later. None of this affects her published height, and no official source gives a figure for her older self.

What 160 cm means for a Japanese woman

Nobara was born in 2002 in rural Japan. The NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates, shown on this site's Japan average height page, give Japanese women born in 1996 an average adult height of about 158.3 cm (5′2½″). Nobara's 160 cm is about 1.7 cm above that average, which makes her essentially typical, and if the "just short of 160" phrasing is taken literally, she's within a centimeter of exactly average.

That's an unusual thing to be able to say about an anime heroine. Manga and anime casts tend to skew tall, and many leading women in the site's data are listed well above their country's average. Nobara is one of the few who stand at a genuinely ordinary height for her country and generation.

The trend data adds context. The same NCD-RisC series shows Japanese women's average height rising from about 142.3 cm for those born in 1896 to about 158 cm by the 1970s and 1990s. A 160 cm woman in Meiji-era Japan would have been exceptionally tall; today she's in the middle of the distribution.

To see how common 160 cm is, the 160 cm page compares it with U.S. and worldwide percentiles, and the height comparison tool can put Nobara next to any other character or real person.

Nobara Kugisaki's height at a glance

• Official height: 160 cm (5′3″), from the Volume 1 profile, described there as just short of 160
• Versus Yuji: about 13 cm shorter
• Versus Megumi: about 15 cm shorter
• Versus Maki and Mai: about 10 cm shorter
• Versus Momo Nishimiya: about 10 cm taller
• Versus Japanese women born in 1996: about average, roughly 1.7 cm above