Masamichi Yaga

Yaga cut an imposing figure, tall and heavily muscled with tanned skin, his scalp shaved apart from a spiky, dark brown crop left up top. Thick eyebrows sat above his face, and he kept his beard as a paired mustache and goatee.

Sunglasses were practically fixed to him, as with so many sorcerers. His 2017 look set a white dress shirt beneath a black jacket matched by black pants and shoes; by 2018 he had switched to a black long-sleeved jacket zipped all the way up over comparable pants and shoes. Back in 2006, before he took the principal's office, his hair lay flat in two straight parts circling his head and he reached for the sunglasses far less often.

Serious, considerate, and sincere, Yaga set a steadying example for the faculty and students of Jujutsu High alike. A firm moral compass and deep reserves of patience set him apart from the higher-ups, and he served as the chief mentor to Gojo and Geto, a famously troublesome pair during their school days. When Gojo once abandoned a manager and skipped raising a curtain on assignment, Yaga questioned every student to give the culprit a chance to confess, and disciplined Gojo physically when no honest answer came.

His commanding presence alone could halt the constant arguments between Gojo and Geto over their clashing ideas about sorcery, even as the two never tired of needling him. The pair joked that being named the next principal had gone to his head when he handed them the Star Plasma Vessel escort, which irritated him in his usual way though he let it slide. Years on, a grown Gojo still tested his nerves with chronic lateness and public stunts, and reining him in fell to Yaga. Yet the two shared a progressive streak toward the students, and when the higher-ups condemned promising young sorcerers, Yaga and Gojo chose to enroll Yuta and Yuji instead of bowing to tradition. Geto's defection wounded Yaga as deeply as it did Gojo; unable to grasp why their comrade had turned, he never blamed Gojo for sparing him.

With Yuji he refused enrollment at first, since the boy's drive came from a grandfather's dying wish, a motive Yaga deemed unacceptable for a sorcerer. He pressed Yuji with the harsh suggestion that a curse-spirit death would somehow be the grandfather's fault, then clarified that prompting such realizations is a teacher's duty, even siccing a cursed corpse on him to force a stronger reply. Beneath the sternness lay quirks: an English catchphrase of Goddamn! whenever startled, and a fondness for cute things that made his doll-like corpses all the more incongruous. As Panda's father he raised the corpse from infancy and into Jujutsu High, and he later bent his own secrecy to craft a corpse from Takeru's soul data to comfort a grieving mother. Facing execution after Shibuya, he chose a fatal wound from Gakuganji over surrendering his method for sentient corpses, handing over the formula only in his final moments and framing it as a curse he was passing to his killer

Yaga already ranked as a seasoned grade 1 sorcerer back when Shoko, Geto, and Gojo were still in their second year. When it came to puppet sorcery he had no equal, which made him the leading authority on wielding cursed corpses, the lone craftsman able to build fully autonomous ones that hold their own cursed energy. His masterwork is Panda, a freak mutated corpse running on three independent cores complete with feeling. The prospect of someone manufacturing thinking corpses nearly pushed the higher-ups to bump him to special grade and lock him down indefinitely, fearing he could raise a self-sufficient army.

His catalog of corpses spanned many roles, some built for combat and others meant to support or drill fellow sorcerers. Puppetry was his core gift, but he could exorcise curses unaided as well, and since he trained Panda in combat himself and would readily brawl a colleague without any dolls, his close-range skill was clearly real. Even in defeat against Gakuganji he managed to injure his executioner and smash the man's guitar before his wounds claimed him.