Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba · Water Hashira of the Demon Slayer Corps
Giyu Tomioka
冨岡義勇
The quietest voice in the Corps, and its hardest sentence.
Giyu Tomioka is the Water Hashira — the Demon Slayer Corps' highest-ranked swordsman of the Water Breathing style — and the first slayer Tanjiro Kamado ever meets, on the snowbound morning after his family's massacre. It is Giyu who spares the demon-turned Nezuko when duty says to kill her, and Giyu whose shouted rebuke — "Never leave yourself so defenseless!" — becomes the series' founding sentence. Taciturn to the point of social malfunction (he is genuinely unaware that the other Hashira dislike him), he invented the Water Breathing's Eleventh Form, Dead Calm, and carries survivor's guilt from the friend who died in his place.
The name「冨岡義勇」
義勇 reads as one word, giyū — "righteous courage," the compound used in 義勇兵 (volunteer soldier) — so his given name is literally a virtue: courage on behalf of others. 冨岡 is an ordinary surname whose 冨 is a variant of 富 (wealth); the manga itself alternates between 冨岡 and 富岡 in print. English readers meet "Giyu" as an opaque two-syllable name; Japanese readers meet a man named Righteous-Courage who believes he deserves neither half.