On her first day at the West Chinjuku Police Station, Ippongi realizes she got the short end of the stick: Her new partner, Chojo, uses his psychic powers to do everything except work. But after some yakuza threaten to take over Ippongi's family's dojo, Chojo begins to take his job more seriously, and the pair embark on a comedic whirlwind solving crimes, catching bad guys, and blundering their way through life as police officers.

Super Psychic Policeman Chojo has story and art by Shun Numa. English translation is done by Dan Luffy with lettering and touch-up by Phil Christie. Published by Viz Media (January 6, 2026). Rated T.

Erica Friedman
Rating:

Chojo and Ippongi take on a variety of odd people, from a drunk salaryman who won't go home to the Yakuza. They find a missing cat, and Chojo takes on a trading card game master and finds the thief of his rare card. All of this is done with tons of facefaults and loads of comedic screaming. Of course, many one-note jokes are repeated every chapter, in case you forgot, say, Ippongi's family runs a judo dojo, or Chojo plays yoyo with the neighborhood kids… to show them up.

It is a universal truth that comedy is hard, and it is especially hard when the comedic premise of a manga is “this guy is a jerk.” Chojo is very much a sit-com level jerk who, at least outwardl,y does not care about anyone else. In fact, as the story goes on, he actually gets less mature and more disruptive. His inner warm-heartedness, which is obviously an embarrassment to him, is also not quite as cute as the story needs it to be.

Nonetheless, this manga has an old-school feel about the situations and the over-dramatic reactions to them, which is kind of comfortable and cute. I honestly thought this was an older comic that had been licensed, but no, it's quite recent. So maybe it's for an audience of folks looking for no-emotional commitment manga that adds a character, then does the same gags all over again, for a smile and maybe a “heh.”

Chojo and Ippongi adopt a cop robot when it is fired, they help out the local community, and keep the bad guys at bay. This may be a shitty exile station, but at the end of the day, Chojo and Ippongi care about the neighborhood and are the kind of cops you want at the corner station.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

I really wanted to like this one more than I did, but Super Psychic Policeman Chojo receives only a barely passable “meh” from me. It's a little like police procedural/comedy TV show Psych, but where the “psychic” character isn't a charlatan and does, in fact, have ESP. Plus, the “straight man” is a woman. Veteran policeman Chojo, with his Black Jack-esque two-tone hairstyle and obnoxious personality, is annoying at the best of times, but his newly assigned junior partner, Ippongi, is significantly more tolerable. Despite only standing at around 2/3rds Chojo's height and about half his weight, she's a terrifyingly competent Judo master capable of beating up entire Yakuza clans without breaking a sweat. I like her, she's fun.

This is a light-hearted comedy set in a police precinct where not a lot tends to happen – it's a career dead-end, but Chojo seems happy with his lot there, helping out with normal people's small-time problems. He's prone to overstepping boundaries (by reading everyone's minds), but he has a heart of gold that he tends to keep hidden away. And he enjoys making children cry, for some reason. Your enjoyment of this volume will hinge entirely on whether the humor works for you or not. An extended card-battling sequence crams in plenty of Yu-Gi-Oh! jokes for those in the know, and did manage to get me to crack a smile, but in general, I found this volume a struggle to finish. The art is decent enough, and Ippongi is cute yet capable, but I'll likely forget everything about Super Psychic Policeman Chojo as soon as this review is over.

Bolts
Rating:

Psychics are often portrayed as either fearful creatures that need to be avoided or all-powerful superheroes who can fix everybody's problems. If there's one thing I like about Policeman Shojo is that it's not afraid to portray a psychic as just some bum that everybody wanted to avoid. I guess that makes sense because who would want to be in the vicinity of someone who can constantly read your mind and mess with you? Making someone like that, a police officer that's notoriously difficult to deal with, can yield some pretty interesting comedic potential, which is what we have here. Super Psychic Policeman Chojo is a serialized gag series where every chapter focuses on a new case that Chojo and his new assistant, Nao, need to work on. The story does not take itself seriously at all, but there is some heart to this. It has heart in the same way that Gintama has heart, where there might be a nice moment at the end of each chapter, but it's all dripping with the thickest sarcasm.

I honestly like it a lot in that sense, even if I do feel the story does start running on steam by the end of this first volume. I like the dynamic between Chojo and Nao as they are a strong comedic duo. One is the slacker man-child who secretly cares, while the other is that naïve, passionate one who cares a bit too much about everything. There are a couple of running gags and recurring characters throughout the book, but I like the creativity of a lot of these cases. I was not expecting one of them to be just a straight-up Yu-Gi-Oh! parody, but I like Yu-Gi-Oh!, so who am I to say that it's bad?

I will say the style is a little bit too simplistic for my liking. It does yield to some pretty strong comedic expressions, but for a rather quippy gag series, everything feels a little boring presentation-wise. It feels like the style is going for a bit of a retro aesthetic, as the designs feel like something that was ripped right out of the eighties or early nineties. But a lot of the men do sort of look a little bit the same, and there isn't anything incredibly striking about our main character from the design perspective. Even the parodies don't come off as stylistically different from what they're parodying. I think if the series had a stronger sense of a stylistic identity, the jokes would land a lot better. At the very least, I feel like the series might need to do something soon to shake things up a bit. Otherwise, it runs the risk of getting old pretty quickly.