Character · Lupin III
Fujiko Mine
She has robbed the same three men more times than anyone has counted, and they keep letting her back in the car.
In Otakana the clue reads: Thief who betrays the gang roughly every episode
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Lupin III
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Fujiko is a thief who works alongside Lupin III when their targets align and against him whenever the split looks better. She uses disguise, seduction, a Browning and a genuine talent for planning, and she almost always leaves with the prize. Then she loses it, or Lupin has swapped it, or Zenigata arrives, and the arrangement resets for the next episode.
The gang's tolerance for this is the running joke of the franchise. Jigen distrusts her openly and says so in nearly every appearance. Goemon largely ignores her. Lupin knows exactly what she is going to do, does it anyway, and treats the betrayal as the price of her company. Monkey Punch drew her as an equal operator rather than a prize, which in a 1967 manga was not the default.
The 2012 series The Woman Called Fujiko Mine handed her the lead, a harsher art style and a story about who she is when nobody needs rescuing. Her name is a joke about a mountain: Mine means peak, and Fuji is written with characters meaning without equal.
Spelling FUJIKO
FUJIKO is six letters in three beats, fu-ji-ko, and the FU is the interesting one. Japanese ふ sits between an F and an H, so older romanisation systems write it HU, and the J is a hard soft-G sound rather than a Y. Two vowels do the work in positions two and four. The game wants the given name; Mine is the family name.