Tenjoh

TenJoh is the slash ship between Dr. Kenzo Tenma and Johan Liebert from the Monster fandom.

Canon
Kenzo Tenma and Johan Liebert are characters from Naoki Urasawa's manga Monster  published by  Shogakukan between December 1994 and December 2001, which follows Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon from Japan residing in Düsseldorf, Germany, through a series of events after his life becomes intertwined with Johan Liebert, his former patient.

Following Another Monster, a follow-up light novel released on 21 June, 2002 after the main series' end, Monster was adapted into a seventy-four episode anime airing from 7 April, 2004 and 28 September, 2005 on Nippon TV.

The storyline follows genius neurosurgeon Doctor Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese immigrant working in Düsseldorf, Germany, whose exceptional skill and arranged marriage with the hospital director's daughter makes him quickly rise the ranks and sets him comfortably to be next-in-line to take the director's chair. However, this comfort and stability does not last long as Tenma begins to pluck the threads and unravel the hypocrisy and unfair treatment of the hospital's staff and realizes he's being used by Udo Heinemann, the hospital's head.

After being lambasted by a Turkish woman in the hospital lobby, who criticizes Doctor Tenma and demands that he bring her husband back to her after he prioritized an famous opera singer over he husband (who was a laborer). Kenzo, at the time, had no knowledge of who the Turkish man was, and after looking further into the matter he discovers that he was indeed brought in before the opera singer and died due to being operated on by a far less-skilled, notably lazy doctor, Dr. Becker.

He confides in his at the time fiancée, Eva Heinemann, who responds to his concerns coldly, brushing him off and telling him she believes not all lives are created equally. This interaction sets forth the first of many cracks in his trust for the system, and he begins to doubt the director and his decisions.

A few days after this incident in April 1986, he receives a phone call in the middle of the night from Eisler's emergency room department, informing him that a young Johan Liebert and Anna Liebert (both age eleven) have just arrived and that Johan is in critical condition from a gunshot wound and would need emergency surgery. However, just before Dr. Tenma and his team are about to operate, he receives another call from Udo Heinemann instructing him to leave the surgery to Dr. Becker and focus his attention on Mayor Roedecker who had just arrived suffering with cerebral thrombosis. When he tries to argue that Johan had arrived first, and his efforts should be focused on the operation at hand, Director Heinemann is dismissive and tells him to leave it to Dr. Becker. Remembering the anguished cries of the Turkish woman and her son and holding Dr. Becker's nonchalant incompetence at fault, he decides to ignore the director's orders and operate on Johan instead.

Mayor Roedecker passes away without having received proper care, and as punishment for allowing this to occur, Tenma is stripped of his title as the Head of Neurosurgery, moved back to emergency care, and Eva breaks off their engagement.

However, despite all that's against him, he finds comfort in the one-on-one interaction he had often missed while not providing emergency care, which mostly comprised of lower-needs surgeries that could be performed by any number of the neurosurgeons at Eisler and did not require an entire team. Though the heavier workload of excising small tumors, draining blood clots, and providing aftercare drained him, he found a great comfort in visiting Johan and speaking with him.

Though Johan was comatose, Tenma would spend much of his time talking to his patient and venting his frustrations. He projected his own image onto Johan, placing him highly in his mind and telling him to get better, because he sacrificed his career and his life to ensure that Johan could continue living, and is at the same time grateful to Johan for giving him the courage to defy orders. One day when Tenma is venting about the workload he has and how the staff now mistreats him, saying that the director would be better off dead, Johan is actually awake, and when Tenma leaves the room the viewer is met wit a haunting close-up scene of Johan's eyes opening. It is unclear how long he had been awake, and possible he had been awake each time Tenma spoke to him, but upon hearing about the unfair treatment the man who saved his life was receiving, he decides to act.

Grateful that the Doctor chose to save his life over the Mayor's, Johan poisons and murders Udo Heinemann, Dr. Boyer, and Dr. Oppenheim to advance Tenma's career and grant his wish of Udo's death, paying his debts to the Doctor in the process before fleeing the hospital with his twin sister.

Investigators initially suspect that Tenma is behind these murders as he has the biggest motive, but with a lack of evidence, the case goes cold.

In 1995, Doctor Tenma is still working at Eisler Memorial Hospital when a wanted man by the name of Adolf Junkers is brought in after being obtaining a head injury after being hit by a car. After Kenzo operates on him, the same investigator who still holds the same suspicions about the murders committed in 1986 arrives to interrogate Junkers in relation to a different case, a string of murders involving middle-aged couples. Later recalling a conversation he and Junkers had about a clock he always dreamed of, he sees it in a shop window that night and buys it, returning to the hospital intending to gift it to the recovering patient when he sees the policeman tasked with guarding Junkers' door collapsed and unresponsive.

He runs out of the exit at the end of the hall, assuming that Junkers is the one responsible and this is an escape attempt, and chases him into a building in the midst of construction across from the hospital. There, Junkers warns Doctor Tenma not to come any closer or the "Monster" might kill him, and from the shadows the true mastermind behind the killings is revealed as Johan Liebert, now age nineteen, executes Adolf Junkers, but not before revealing his identity to the Doctor as well as revealed that he was responsible for avenging Tenma by killing the other two doctors as well as the director. Too shocked to speak, Johan and Tenma part ways without another word.

The subsequent story that follows this reveal revolves around Tenma as he investigates Johan's past, becomes a wanted fugitive, goes off-the-grid, and dedicates himself fully to hunting Johan down and putting an end to his killings. Now a man on the run, stripped from his title as a Doctor, he embarks on a mission full of close-calls and missed connections with Johan. He initially believes the only means to an end are by killing Johan and trains with an ex-soldier to learn to shoot a gun, but quickly he realizes he is not truly capable of taking another human's life.

Nevertheless, he pursues, still dedicated to stopping Johan, and with each step he takes closer to reaching that goal, he learns more about Johan's past and, more specifically, the horrific traumas he endured that have resulted in his behavior. Initially viewing Johan as an irredeemable Monster who can only be stopped by being killed, Tenma learns about the eugenics project Johan and his twin sister Anna went through from birth, the abuse from their mother and the organization that wished to shape them into the leaders of a new world (or more specifically, Anna into the sole leader), the horrifying tragedy of the 511 Kinderheim orphanage, and more atrocities Johan has experienced. With each piece of information, he is able to put the puzzle of Johan's origins together and, when meeting him at the end of the series at Ruhenheim, he is unable to shoot him despite Johan's pitiful pleas. Johan's idea of the perfect suicide must be at the hands of the man who gave him his life, and he wishes for Tenma to act as Life and Death for him. However, Kenzo sees his pain, and reaches the same conclusion that Anna reaches in this arc, and that is that they both wanted to forgive Johan and that he deserved a chance to start over away from a life of pain, misery, and control by the true titular Monster, Franz Bonaparta, a leader in the eugenics project.

Fanon
TenJoh is the most popular pairing in the Monster fanbase, with the most fanfictions and fanart of any other pairing, and as a ship has existed essentially since the dawn of Monster, with fanworks dating back to the early 2000s. However, Monster is considered rather niche, if not a cult classic to older anime fans, thus the scale of which the ship can be judged on is not nearly as vast as much more popular anime.

Monster suffers the same fate as many works of its time have, it was coming out at a time well before shipping, or even fan creations, were the norm. Most fanworks for the series are new compared to the series itself, having mostly appeared on the internet in the early 2010s, a near two decades after the manga's release. The fanbase as a whole consists primarily of an audience that is over the age of twenty-five, and this also comes from the series' mature content that often goes over the heads of younger viewers with themes involving government, politics, and history, and these fans are often inactive in creating content or do so for nostalgic purposes, so fanworks are few and far between compared to anime released today.

Since the anime's release on Netflix in 2023, the fanbase has seen quite a lot more attention, and the amount of content created centering Tenma and Johan's relationship has increased significantly.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

TUMBLR

Trivia

 * The ship name "TenJoh" was not popularized until the fandom's resurgence on Twitter in early 2022, and the pairing was previously only referred to as Tenma x Johan. Twitter user ExpressityArt coined the term in March 2022.
 * Tumblr user tenjoh coined the name DoktorDoll in early 2023 in a joking statement, likening Johan to Tenma's "little dress up doll that he projects all his fears and fantasies onto", and the term gained a bit of traction within the user's friend group and has since spread to other sites like AO3 to reference the pair.