Who were Tatsuki Fujimoto's assistants?

Tatsuya Endo assisted on the first few chapters of Fire Punch in 2016, and arrived with series of his own already behind him, including TISTA and Blade of the Moon Princess. He later created Spy x Family on Shonen Jump+ in 2019. Yuji Kaku and Yukinobu Tatsu assisted across Fire Punch and early Chainsaw Man. Kaku serialized Hell's Paradise from 2018 to 2021, and has said in a 2019 Shonen Jump+ interview that he worked out much of that series in conversation with Fujimoto while assisting. Tatsu, after assisting on both of Fujimoto's serials, launched Dandadan in 2021.

Oto Toda assisted Fujimoto and later drew the 2022 one-shot Just Listen to the Song from his story, as well as the collection To Strip the Flesh. Tohru Kuramori assisted on the one-shot Goodbye, Eri and later created the dark fantasy series Centuria. Fujimoto himself noted, when hiring assistants again for Look Back in 2021, that it had been a while: his earlier assistants had all moved on to series of their own, and he could afford a bench again because Chainsaw Man had succeeded.

Editor Shihei Lin, who has worked with Fujimoto across his career, described the Fire Punch bench in a joint interview: 'Fire Punch was Tatsuki Fujimoto's first series, so Tatsu and Kaku, who had more experience, taught him many things.' Lin called it a peer relationship in which the artists became friends, and credited that exchange with letting each of them draw out what the others lacked.

That framing matters for how the work reads. The famous version of this story is a master training three future stars. The documented version is better: a first time serial artist, a veteran assistant in Endo, and two experienced hands in Kaku and Tatsu, all sharpening each other on the same pages, then going off to define the next decade of the magazine they shared.