Joseph Joestar
Also known as: JoJo, Joseph
Joseph Joestar is the second JoJo, the trickster grandson of Jonathan Joestar, and the only Joestar to lead one Part of the saga and recur as a major supporting character across two more. He defeats the Pillar Men in Battle Tendency at age nineteen, returns in Stardust Crusaders at sixty-nine to mentor Jotaro against DIO, and reappears in Diamond Is Unbreakable at seventy-nine to discover the illegitimate son he fathered during a brief 1983 visit to Japan.
Story
Battle Tendency
Part 2 · 1938–1939Raised by his Hamon-master mother Lisa Lisa and his grandmother Erina Joestar in New York, Joseph develops a manipulative streak that the manga frames as the deliberate inverse of Jonathan's earnest nobility. He spends his teens picking fights and pulling con games on the streets of 1930s Manhattan, until a Speedwagon Foundation researcher carrying a Stone Mask fragment surfaces a vampire from the Mexican deserts: the Pillar Man Santana.
Joseph's confrontation with Santana introduces the device that will become his recurring character beat — "Your next line will be…", the predictive insult he uses to throw enemies off-rhythm. The Pillar Men's awakening sends him to Italy, where he meets the second-generation Ripple master Caesar Zeppeli (grandson of Jonathan's mentor Will Anthonio) and the surviving Hamon master Lisa Lisa, who is also revealed to be his mother.
The Battle Tendency arc resolves with the deaths of two Pillar Men — ACDC (Esidisi) and the honourable warrior Wamuu, whom Joseph kills in single combat after losing his left arm to Wamuu's wind-pressure attack. The final confrontation with Kars ends in vacuum: Joseph and the Red Stone of Aja trick Kars into firing the Ultimate Lifeform transformation while suspended in the upper atmosphere, sending Kars into permanent orbit. Joseph is nineteen years old when he saves the world.
Stardust Crusaders
Part 3 · 1988–1989Joseph reappears in 1988 as a sixty-nine-year-old real-estate magnate with a robotic prosthetic where his left arm used to be. His Stand Hermit Purple has just manifested, awakened by the same century-late curse from Dio's recovery that turned Jotaro into a Stand user. Joseph uses Hermit Purple's photographic divination to locate Dio's hidden Cairo mansion and rallies the team — Jotaro, Avdol, Kakyoin, Polnareff, Iggy — across the fifty-day overland route from Tokyo to Cairo.
His role across Stardust Crusaders is mentor and tactical brain. Hermit Purple is too weak for direct combat, so Joseph fights with strategy, Ripple, and the prosthetic arm — a combination that beats more powerful Stand users at almost every leg of the journey. In Cairo he is killed by Dio drinking his blood, then revived when Jotaro forces Dio's own blood back into Joseph's body, completing the Stardust Crusaders arc's circular logic about whose blood belongs to whom.
Diamond Is Unbreakable
Part 4 · 1999Joseph returns to Japan in 1999, ostensibly to visit Jotaro but actually to confess that during a 1983 medical pilgrimage to Sendai he fathered an illegitimate son with a Japanese woman. That son is Josuke Higashikata, the protagonist of Diamond Is Unbreakable, who has now grown into a teenage Stand user with a Stand that perfectly inverts Joseph's vine-based divination: a humanoid healer named Crazy Diamond.
Joseph spends most of the arc visiting Morioh and being affectionately scolded by Josuke for his absence. The two reconcile by the end of Part 4, and the adopted infant Shizuka Joestar — another Morioh resident whose Stand turns her invisible — closes Joseph's late life as the patriarch of a Joestar family larger and stranger than Jonathan ever imagined.
Powers & Abilities
Sendō Ripple
HamonJoseph trains in Sendō Ripple in Italy under his mother Lisa Lisa for fifty days during Battle Tendency, the same compressed timeline Jonathan was given by Zeppeli in Phantom Blood. He inherits the family's exceptional Ripple aptitude but applies it laterally rather than directly — most of his combat output in Part 2 comes from Hamon-charged improvised objects (a coke bottle, a curtain rod, his clackers) rather than raw fist barrages.
His signature combat trick is the "Your next line will be…" rhetorical ambush — a predictive Hamon technique that doesn't itself produce damage but disrupts an opponent's concentration enough for the actual Ripple strike to land. The technique is closer to a stage-magic gag than a martial-arts move, and it survives into Stardust Crusaders as the running joke that defines Joseph's voice.
- Clacker Volley
- Hamon-charged clacker toys (Newton's cradle-style spheres on strings), launched at vampire targets. Joseph weaponises an entire toy aisle of 1930s Americana across his Pillar Men battles.
- Hamon Overdrive variations
- Standard Joestar Sunlight Yellow Overdrive Ripple-punch barrage, applied less than Jonathan and Lisa Lisa apply it — Joseph prefers trickery to direct strikes.
Hermit Purple
StandHermit Purple awakens during the same metaphysical wave that turns every Joestar descendant into a Stand user when Dio's body resurfaces. It is a vine-like Bound Stand — essentially several metres of thorned tendril extruded from Joseph's wrists and palms — with negligible direct-combat output but exceptional divination utility.
Joseph uses Hermit Purple to "spirit-photograph" distant locations: by smashing the vines into a Polaroid or a television screen, he projects a low-resolution image of a target's current position or near future. This is how Hermit Purple locates Dio's Cairo mansion, identifies which Stand user is attacking the team each leg of the journey, and (in Diamond Is Unbreakable) determines the face of Yoshikage Kira from a fragment of fingernail.
- Spirit Photography
- Smash Hermit Purple's vines into a camera, photograph, or television and force the medium to print or display a divined image. Most often used to locate enemies.
- Vine Restraint
- Wrap Hermit Purple's thorned tendrils around an opponent for hold or strangulation. Combat use only — Joseph rarely defeats opponents this way.
- Hamon Conduit
- Channel Sendō Ripple along Hermit Purple's vines, turning the Stand into a long-reach Hamon weapon. The combination of Hamon and Stand is unique to Joseph — no other Stand User in the saga is also a trained Ripple master.
Relationships
Family
Allies
Cultural Impact
"Your Next Line Will Be…"
Joseph's running predictive-insult gag has become a structural template borrowed by virtually every shōnen anime since 1987. The setup — Joseph announces what his opponent is about to say, the opponent says it, the opponent realises it has been said — is mechanically identical to a stage-magic mind-reading routine but applied to combat dialogue. The line "NANI?!" ("WHAT?!") that follows has become its own meme cluster.
The gag is also the cleanest articulation of the JoJo voice. Jonathan would never use trickery this way; every JoJo after Joseph has. The character is the moment the series learned that its protagonists could be jerks and still be heroes — a tonal pivot that runs through Jotaro's deadpan, Josuke's hair-trigger, Giorno's smug serenity, and Jolyne's prison-yard pragmatism.
OH! MY! GOD!
Joseph's exclamatory tic — a three-beat "Oh! My! God!" delivered in English even in the original Japanese script — punctuates almost every dramatic reveal he encounters across three Parts. It is the canonical Joestar reaction line and the franchise's most-quoted English-language interjection. Araki has confirmed the cadence is borrowed directly from American films he watched as a teenager.
By Stardust Crusaders the line has been deployed often enough that Joseph occasionally subverts it — switching to "Oh no!" or other variants depending on the level of crisis, all delivered in the same English-loanword cadence. The pattern stuck: every dub since 1993 has preserved the English delivery instead of localising the exclamation.
The Robot Arm
Joseph loses his left arm to Wamuu's wind-pressure attack during the Roman colosseum chariot race in Battle Tendency. The mechanical prosthetic he gains afterward becomes his visual signature for the rest of the franchise — the older-Joseph silhouette is recognisable by the robotic arm before any other feature.
The arm also closes a quiet thematic loop with Jonathan's death: Jonathan died with his body intact and his cause incomplete; Joseph survived to old age with a literally incomplete body and finished what Jonathan started. The series rarely makes this comparison explicit, but the older Joseph silhouette — robot arm, trader's overcoat, walking stick — is in conversation with the Jonathan portraits hanging in Joestar Mansion.
Appearances
- Manga debut
- Chapter 45 of Battle Tendency (1987)
- Manga final
- Chapter 425 of Diamond Is Unbreakable (1995)
- Anime debut
- Battle Tendency Episode 10 (2013)
- Anime episodes
- BT 17 eps · SC 48 eps · DiU multiple cameos
Trivia
- Joseph is the longest-lived JoJo. He is nineteen in Battle Tendency, sixty-nine in Stardust Crusaders, and seventy-nine in Diamond Is Unbreakable — a fifty-year-plus span unmatched by any other Joestar in the original saga.
- His Japanese young-Joseph VA Tomokazu Sugita is one of the most recognisable voices in anime — also known for Gintoki Sakata in Gintama and Yū Kanda in D.Gray-man — and the casting was widely considered the keystone choice that gave the 2013 anime its tonal identity.
- Hermit Purple is one of only two Stands in the saga that can be powered by Hamon (the other is Caesar's Bubble Launcher in a non-canon Eyes of Heaven scenario). The combination is unique to Joseph because no other Stand User in the manga is also a trained Ripple master.
- Joseph's clacker toys in Battle Tendency are a deliberate period reference — clackers were a 1930s American children's toy, briefly fashionable around the time the arc is set. Araki has confirmed in interviews that the choice was researched specifically to ground Joseph's improvisational fighting style in the right decade.
- Joseph survives into the canonical timeline beyond Part 4 — he is still alive in 1999, and the manga has never confirmed his death. The 2003 Stone Ocean arc references him obliquely without a death scene, making him the only JoJo of the original eight Parts to outlive the saga's main villain twice (Kars in 1939, DIO in 1989) and remain alive at the time of Made in Heaven's universe-reset.
- The character was originally drawn taller than Jonathan in the early Battle Tendency chapters, but Araki shortened him by a few centimetres after Part 2 to preserve Jonathan's role as the franchise's largest Joestar — the height of 195 cm appears in promotional materials but Joseph is canonically slightly smaller from Part 3 onward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Joseph Joestar?
Joseph Joestar is the second JoJo and the protagonist of Battle Tendency, the second Part of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The grandson of Jonathan Joestar and the son of Hamon master Lisa Lisa, he is the franchise's trickster JoJo — a manipulative, jovial brawler who defeats the Pillar Men at nineteen and recurs as a mentor across the next two Parts.
What is Joseph Joestar's Stand?
Joseph's Stand is Hermit Purple, a vine-like Bound Stand that awakens in his sixties at the same time as Jotaro's Star Platinum. It has negligible direct combat power but exceptional divination utility — Joseph uses Hermit Purple to spirit-photograph distant locations and identify enemies via television sets, cameras, and photographs.
Does Joseph Joestar use Hamon?
Yes. Joseph is a trained Sendō Ripple master, taught by his mother Lisa Lisa during a compressed fifty-day training arc in Battle Tendency. He retains his Hamon ability into Stardust Crusaders, where he uniquely channels it through Hermit Purple's vines — making him the only Stand User in the saga who is also a Hamon practitioner.
How does Joseph Joestar die?
Joseph does not have a canon death in the original eight-Part saga. He is killed by DIO in Cairo at the climax of Stardust Crusaders but is revived when Jotaro forces DIO's own blood back into him. He appears alive and well in Diamond Is Unbreakable (1999) and is referenced as living in Stone Ocean (2011).
What does "Your next line will be" mean?
It is Joseph's signature combat-dialogue gag, used across all three of his Parts. Joseph announces what his opponent is about to say, then the opponent unwittingly says it. The trick disrupts the enemy's rhythm enough for a Ripple or Stand strike to land. The motif is one of the most-imitated bits of shōnen-character voice in anime.
Why does Joseph Joestar have a robot arm?
Joseph loses his left arm to Wamuu's wind-pressure attack during the Roman colosseum chariot race in Battle Tendency. He survives the rest of the arc with the wound and acquires a mechanical prosthetic shortly afterward; the robot arm becomes his visual signature for the rest of the franchise's appearances of older Joseph.