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ONE PIECE 1192: What Imu's "Tohu" and "Bohu" Swords Really Mean

Imu's two blades in chapter 1192 are read Tōfū and Bōfū, and the shield they form is read Tōfū-wa-Bōfū — the exact order of the Hebrew phrase in Genesis 1:2. The kanji point the same way. Here is what matches, what that supports, and what it does not.

By ABYSS CURRENT Editorial8 min readShare on X
Gear 5 Luffy driving a punch into Imu's shattered Shield of Emptiness, with the two named blades labelled 混沌剣 Tofu and 虚無剣 Bofu raised on either side, a void of galaxies and an eclipsed sun behind Imu, and a lit dawn horizon at the far left.
Artwork: ABYSS CURRENT
In this article

This page covers what the names mean. For what the shield is and how Luffy and Loki broke it in chapter 1192, see our chapter 1192 report.

Quick answer

Imu's weapon names in ONE PIECE chapter 1192 line up with the Hebrew phrase tohu wa-bohu from Genesis 1:2 — in sound, in order, and in meaning.

The two blades are written 混沌剣 and 虚無剣 and given the readings Tōfū and Bōfū. The shield they combine into is written 空虚の盾 and given the reading Tōfū-wa-Bōfū. In Genesis 1:2 the earth is tohu wa-bohu, rendered in English as "without form, and void."

The kanji are the reason this is worth writing about rather than filing under coincidence. 混沌 is chaos. 虚無 is void or nihility. 空虚 is emptiness. Those are the same semantic field the Hebrew phrase occupies — so the match is not only phonetic.

That makes a Genesis reference highly plausible. It does not tell us what Imu is. The larger idea — that Imu stands for the formless dark before creation and Nika for the light that follows — is a reading of the imagery, and we have labelled it as one.

Read directly from the official Japanese release — Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 issue 41, ONE PIECE chapter 1192「おれ達が許さねェ!!!」. Evidence label: PRIMARY — MANGA VERIFIED. No leaks, no raw scans, no scanlations.

What are Imu's new weapons called in chapter 1192?

We went back to the printed page and read the furigana at full resolution rather than trusting a first pass, because the order turned out to matter more than anything else here.

On the page Kanji meaning Ruby (reading) Romanised
混沌剣 "chaos" + sword トーフー Tōfū
虚無剣 "void, nihility" + sword ボーフー Bōfū
空虚の盾 "emptiness" + of + shield トーフー・ワー・ボーフー Tōfū-wa-Bōfū

The shield's name is the detail that carries the argument. In vertical Japanese the ruby sits beside the characters it annotates, and here it is distributed across the whole phrase:

  • 空虚 takes トーフー
  • の takes ワー
  • 盾 takes ボーフー

So the name is not "chaos sword plus void sword" stuck together. The Japanese possessive particle の is being used to carry the sound of the Hebrew conjunction. Read straight down the column, the shield is Tōfū · wa · Bōfū.

The reading order, exactly as printed

TŌFŪ-WA-BŌFŪ

  • 空虚 carries the ruby トーフー
  • の carries the ruby ワー
  • 盾 carries the ruby ボーフー
  • Read down the column: Tōfū · wa · Bōfū

Why the order is the whole argument

MATCHES

  • Hebrew: tohu wa-bohu — same three parts, same order
  • The Japanese possessive の is doing the work of the Hebrew conjunction
  • A coincidence would not need the middle particle to line up
  • Two sounds could be chance. Three in sequence is a different claim

For what the weapons actually did in the fight — Luffy's fists failing against the guard, and Loki launching him through it — we covered the mechanics separately in Luffy and Loki Break Imu's New Shield in ONE PIECE 1192.

What does "tohu wa-bohu" mean?

Genesis 1:2, in the Hebrew:

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם

The JPS Tanakh renders the verse "the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep." The King James renders the same phrase "without form, and void."

Taking the three parts separately, because the popular one-word gloss flattens them:

tohu (תֹּהוּ, Strong's H8414) — formlessness, confusion, unreality, emptiness, from a root meaning to lie waste. Its range across the Hebrew Bible includes waste, wilderness, vanity and empty place. It appears 20 times.

bohu (בֹּהוּ, Strong's H922) — emptiness, void; glossed as a vacuity or an undistinguishable ruin. It appears only three times in the entire Hebrew Bible: here, Isaiah 34:11, and Jeremiah 4:23. It is a rare word, and some scholars argue it exists chiefly to rhyme with and reinforce tohu.

wa (וָ) — the conjunction, "and."

Transliteration of the phrase varies between sources — tohu wa-bohu, tohu va-vohu, tōhū wāḇōhū. We use wa-bohu throughout this article because that is the form that lines up with the manga's own reading, Tōfū-wa-Bōfū; nothing turns on the choice beyond legibility.

Together they form a tightly paired expression, with bohu reinforcing the image carried by tohu. Which is why "chaos" is a serviceable gloss for the phrase but not a literal translation of tohu. Most careful English translations reach for "without form and void" or "unformed and void" rather than "chaos", and we are going to keep that distinction because the manga does something interesting with it.

Why the match is hard to ignore

Sound alone would be weak. Two invented weapon names happening to sound like two Hebrew words is the kind of thing that turns up constantly if you look for it.

What raises this above that is the kanji.

ONE PIECE 1192 Kanji sense Hebrew parallel Standard gloss
混沌剣 (Tōfū) chaos, primordial disorder tohu formlessness, waste, confusion
虚無剣 (Bōfū) void, nihility, nothingness bohu emptiness, void
空虚の盾 (Tōfū-wa-Bōfū) shield of emptiness tohu wa-bohu "without form, and void"

Three things are lining up at once: the sounds, the kanji meanings, and the word order including the connective. Any one of them alone would be arguable. The third is the one that is hard to produce by accident — a coincidence does not usually need a middle particle.

One honest wrinkle, and we would rather raise it than let a reader find it: the pairing is not a tidy one-to-one. 混沌 ("chaos") sits on tohu, where the more literal sense of tohu is formlessness rather than chaos; 虚無 ("void") sits on bohu, which is the closer fit. So the manga is mapping onto the phrase's popular sense as much as its lexical one. That is what a reference usually looks like. It is not what a translation looks like, and we are not calling it one.

Read on the page in chapter 1192

  • 混沌剣 is given the reading Tōfū
  • 虚無剣 is given the reading Bōfū
  • 空虚の盾 is given the reading Tōfū-wa-Bōfū
  • The shield is formed from the two blades together
  • Luffy's Gear 5 fists fail against it before it finally breaks

Not established by chapter 1192

  • That Oda has confirmed any Genesis reference
  • What Imu is, or what race, fruit or origin Imu has
  • That the blades are made of Haki
  • That Imu 'is' darkness, Satan, or a biblical figure
  • That Luffy is standing in for a creator god

The most important detail: light comes next

Genesis 1:2 is not a standalone image. It is the last beat before the first act of creation.

  1. The earth is tohu wa-bohu — unformed and void.
  2. Darkness is over the face of the deep.
  3. Genesis 1:3 — "God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

In the narrative sequence, the description of the earth as tohu wa-bohu and covered in darkness is immediately followed by the creation of light in Genesis 1:3.

Which is where this stops being a naming curiosity and starts being interesting, because of who is standing opposite those weapons.

Imu against the sun

Here the layers have to be kept apart, so we are marking them explicitly.

FACT. Nika is established in the manga as a legendary warrior revered as the Sun God by slaves — and in the same chapter Luffy shouts down the entire legend attached to him, which we covered in Luffy Rejects the "Nika" and "Joy Boy" Labels. Luffy fights the entire chapter in Gear 5. Chapter 1192 also gives Luffy an attack whose name is written 白い — "white" — but printed with the ruby ドーン, Dawn; the same Dawn returns in the finishing blow with Loki. Imu's weapons in the same chapter are named for formlessness and void.

INFERENCE. Setting a void-named arsenal against a sun-named opponent, in a chapter that also foregrounds the word Dawn, looks deliberate rather than accidental. ONE PIECE has used dawn imagery for a very long time — the series' first volume is titled Romance Dawn — and the Elbaf fight puts that vocabulary directly against Imu's.

THEORY. That Imu is meant to represent the primordial void before creation, and Nika the light that ends it, making the Elbaf confrontation a staging of Genesis 1:2 giving way to Genesis 1:3. It is a satisfying reading and it fits a lot of the imagery. It is still a reading.

What we are not saying, at any layer: that Imu is Satan, that Imu is "the biblical darkness", or that Luffy stands in for God. Those are category errors — the manga is borrowing names and imagery, which is a very different thing from mapping characters onto theology. Oda has drawn on this well before without any of it being doctrinal: Fish-Man Island's ancient ship is called Noah, and the rare wood used for the Thousand Sunny comes from the Treasure Tree Adam. Names, not doctrine.

Does this tell us what Imu really is?

No. This is worth stating plainly, because naming analysis has a way of drifting into identity claims.

A weapon name tells you what the weapon is called. It does not establish Imu's race, age, Devil Fruit, immortality, motive, or origin. The blades themselves are not even newly created objects — they belong to the arsenal associated with the founders of the World Government, the weapons standing before the Empty Throne, which is background from earlier chapters rather than something 1192 explains.

So the correct size of this finding is: the names of two ancient weapons and their combined form strongly echo the Hebrew phrase for the formless void before creation, in the hands of the World Government's hidden ruler. That is a strong thematic signal. It is not a reveal.

What chapter 1192 actually changed

Briefly, because the fight belongs to the other article.

Imu's blackened arms — introduced in 1191 with no explanation and immediately read by much of the fandom as Armament Haki — are still not named as Haki anywhere. 1192 shows those arms wielding named relic blades wreathed in black, which supplies a competing explanation for the blackness without confirming either. Our position is unchanged and now better supported: observed, not identified.

What is still unknown

  • Whether the other Empty Throne weapons are also biblically named. Two of them now have names in this register. (The One Piece Wiki puts the total at nineteen; we have not verified that count against a chapter, so treat the number as secondary.) If more follow, the reference stops being a one-off flourish.
  • Whether the shield can be reformed after breaking.
  • Whether any of this is ever acknowledged in-story. It may simply stay as naming.
  • What Imu is. Unchanged by this chapter.

Change log

  • 7 September 2026 — Published. Weapon kanji and furigana re-read at full resolution from the official Japanese release before writing; the shield's reading is Tōfū-wa-Bōfū, with の carrying ワー. Genesis wording taken from Sefaria and the lexical entries from Blue Letter Bible rather than from summary sources. Genesis reference rated INFERENCE — HIGH CONFIDENCE; the Imu-as-void / Nika-as-light framing rated THEORY.

Sources

Tags#ONE PIECE#Chapter 1192#Imu#Nika#Theory

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