“Buying ‘Pretty Cure’ goods for her makes me feel defeated.If I were to tell you that the ending of the One Piece manga is on the not-so-distant horizon, would you actually believe me? Series creator Eiichiro Oda has mentioned progress many times in the past, and he did so again in a recent appearance on Fuji TV’s Honma dekka!? TV show. “My daughter is into more girly stuff,” he said in a 2009 conversation with a musician published by Switch magazine, jokingly lamenting the popularity of “Pretty Cure”, an anime franchise featuring evil-fighting schoolgirls. ![]() ![]() I never get stressed about it, so I’m confident I will never suffer karoshi ,” he told the 2017 anniversary magazine.īut for all his popularity around the world, Oda has yet to win over some of his own family. Over time, he relaxed into his role but his passion never faded and he relies only minimally on assistants, drawing almost every character and object himself. I was even ready to skip my parents’ funeral if they died while I was on the deadline,” he recalled in an interview five years ago. “I think I was too passionate about manga in my 20s. The work, partly inspired by his childhood fascination with pirate anime “Vicky the Viking”, was all-consuming for Oda. It was not quite smooth sailing from there though, and it took several flops before “One Piece” was serialised, when Oda was 22. “You could say he is Luffy himself”, one of Oda’s closest editors once told a Japanese TV programme.Ī native of southern Japan’s Kumamoto region, Oda entered Japan’s competitive manga world at 17, when his action-packed maiden work “Wanted!” won a Shonen Jump award. He has turned his house into something of an amusement park, with features like projection mapping, miniature trains and a claw crane. “I know there are many adult readers nowadays, but if I align myself with their taste too much, I feel ‘One Piece’ would lose its value,” he said.Īnd Oda’s childlike impishness makes him well-suited to keeping his younger readership in mind. There are few swoon-worthy romances in the series, as Oda believes his core fan base would not be interested. “Every week I ask myself to assess what I’ve drawn: ‘Would I have enjoyed reading this when I was 15?’” Oda said in 2009. Loud, gluttonous and lovably simple-minded, Luffy is meant to be an embodiment of how Oda sees his stated target audience: teenage boys. “One Piece” follows straw hat-wearing Luffy and his team as they hunt for the titular treasure coveted by all pirates. It is now on the cusp of its final arc, set to begin in next week’s edition of Japan’s weekly Shonen Jump magazine. The cultural phenomenon that has sold about 500 million copies worldwide will mark the 25th anniversary of its serialisation. It is a modest aspiration for a man whose tale about aspiring “pirate king” Luffy and a motley crew of fellow adventurers earned him a Guinness World Record for “most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author”. “I know I’m now old enough to be more like their uncle. “I want kids who read ‘One Piece’ to think of me as their neighbourhood brother,” media-shy Oda said in a rare 2017 interview, published in a special magazine to mark the 20th anniversary of the franchise. ![]() Luffy, in a pair of short trousers and sandals. He is even reputed to show up at fancy restaurants and hotels dressed exactly like “One Piece” protagonist and pirate Monkey D. ![]() The 47-year-old famously refuses to be referred to as “sensei”, an honorific typically used to address seasoned manga creators of his status. TOKYO - He is the creator of one of the world’s best-known manga, but “One Piece” author Eiichiro Oda shuns stardom with a carefree attitude that evokes the beloved hero of his work.
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