Bookchats: Into the world of One Piece, Japan's sprawling Pirate Epic

Welcome to bookchat! Where you can talk about anything; books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us. Despite being a lurker within the Book Lovers group (the kind who reads most posts long after they are dropped and there is no longer any active discussion to join), I always enjoy contributing pieces to Bookchats. Brecht and other core users put in considerable work organizing the series and ensuring consistent content, so I highly recommend following it if you are coming across the group and series for the first time (even if my piece wasn’t your cup of tea). For this installment, I agreed to jump in to fill a June spot if I could write about something very different this time. For this series, I have written about Jared Diamond, Fritz Fanon, Bertrand Russell, holocaust fiction, and Japanese esoteric poetry among other topics. I did take a moment to write about Garth Nix’s Abhorsen fantasy series last year, but I wanted to go really outside the box with something very different stylistically and tonally from what I usually take time to write about.

Many years back I briefly spearheaded a subcommunity on DailyKos (which sadly, is increasingly oriented around just the front page and not the larger community) dedicated to Japanese manga and pop culture, and have never lost my love of manga, a Japanese form of comics and visual media. These days, a lot of what I read consistently is manga (or news), and so I asked if I could talk about one particular manga for my Bookchat this week. If I am going to write about manga, I thought why not write about the most popular manga of all time (by sales), and one of the longest running series in history. No comic in America touches this series in terms of length or complexity–25 years of weekly serialization, no reboots, no alternate realities, no new storylines or new protagonists; 25 years of the same lead character on the same overarching plot, with the arcs of the final saga likely to take another six to seven years. A series that manages to go on so long, and develop so much without getting stale or devolving to the ridiculously over-scaled powers and fights of say late-stage Dragon Ball Z or Marvel’s esoteric extremes of meta-dimensional infinite warfare.

I am talking, of course, about One Piece by Eichiro Oda, a series wildly popular in Japan for decades and not so popular with Western audiences. One Piece has a modest fan base in Europe, but is largely a popular target of derision in the U.S. That’s one interesting thing about it as a subject; it is such an outlier, as most other popular action-fantasy oriented series in Japan also became very popular with American manga/anime fanbases. Naruto, Bleach, Fairy Tail,  Attack on Titan, and of late, Demon Slayer; all were big hits in Japan (though it should be noted the only one that ever outsold One Piece was Demon Slayer) and then became very popular in the U.S. with the fan base: but One Piece did not! I would like to approach the unwieldy and hard to define series through the lens of why it failed to become popular in the U.S. and then from there explain why I feel it is one of the definitive and best constructed franchises in Japanese manga and visual media period.

Why do American anime/manga fans mostly hate One Piece

There are people who like One Piece in America; I have a friend who does a reaction podcast to the series and indeed, I started reading it in the summer of 2010 on the recommendation of a different friend. But the fan base is a small, tight-knit one, and a person wouldn’t find many One Piece cosplayers at major conventions or nearly as much familiarity with the series among manga/anime fans more generally, even as a lot of obscure and second rate manga series in Japan generate rabid, large, and very active fanbases. So why do even series like Bleach, which had a horrific, half-assed ending and whose final 3~4 years of serialization were all one big, unnecessary and prolonged downward spiral, still manage to be held in less contempt than an ongoing ultra-popular-in-Japan series like One Piece, which has sold half a billion copies, and, to put it lightly, is an epoch-forming work of pop culture and a source of inspiration and reference to entire generations of manga creators in Japan now.

I believe there are a number of factors at play. The very first is probably that the One Piece anime was licensed very early in America, and by 4Kids, which is notorious for its shoddy “localizations” of anime and cheesy voice acting. 4Kids itself simply bought the rights to the series without, erm, actually watching it, because it was a massive hit in Japan, and then when they watched what they bought, they were “shocked” at how “unsuitable” it was for audiences. One Piece has a major character who is smoking almost constantly, other characters who drink alcohol, and even early on, several deaths are very important to the story or certain characters’ backgrounds. Japan is nowhere near as prude as America, nor is there a culture here of obsessively sheltering and parsing content in kids media (which is now something that isn’t only the foray of right-wing Evangelicals). The result however, is that for a generation of anime and manga fans, their first exposure to the series was through a heavily edited English dub, which used cheap visual editing: the many guns in the series were made less realistic, or the Marine’s guns were made into water guns for instance. 4Kids digitally removed all blood (oh no) and uses of Cross-imagery in the series, and, in line with the studio’s bizarre obsession with hiding any trace of Japanese origin in their franchises (they did this with Pokémon and digitally removing Japanese food like onigiri, or simply having characters call onigiri donuts), all kanji were digitally removed from shots. 4Kids was also too cheap to buy rights to the soundtrack, which meant that instead of the original and now-iconic symphonic soundtrack of the Japanese series, the American release got a cheap, generic-sounding synth soundtrack. The studio also used jarring cuts of scenes, slashed dozens of episodes (including some that had crucial plot information to the series’ later developments for which they had to shoehorn explanations into later episodes) and terrible translations plus awful voice acting–basically the 4Kids adaptation is legendarily bad, but also par the course for how a lot of Japanese media was adopted in the U.S. back in the 1990s and early 2000s. One Piece, despite its cosmopolitan fantasy world of oceans and pirates, is an extremely Japanese series, with extremely Japanese-style humor that Americans in particularly find corny, dumb, and grating, all the more so when the translation into English isn’t artfully done; in the case of 4Kids, they turned even serious scenes into jokey ones and the company is infamous for its love of using shitty puns in place of Japanese humor (sometimes dirty) and word play. A lot of people who hate the series mainly judge it from 4Kids dub and have never even read the source manga.

However, the colossal failure of the first syndicated localization of the series is not the only reason. As I mentioned above, One Piece is very Japanese. I think that neither looking at a few panels of the manga, or book covers, featuring almost no characters who look ethnically Japanese and plenty of bizarre designs, nor reading a synopsis about the protagonist seeking the One Piece, which is the “treasure” of the Pirate King Gold Roger, left behind on the inaccessible and semi-mythical island of “Raftel”, in a fantasy sea world of pirates and an oppressive global government, meld with just how stylistically Japanese the series is. In that vein, the author and artist, known in Japanese as mangaka, Eichiro Oda, really pushes the boundaries of age-genre in the work, seamlessly and boldly slapping together childish daydreams, slapstick humor, downright silliness, cartoonish characters (Oda is heavily influenced by both cartoons and pop art, references to which abound in the artwork of the series), literally right beside genocide, slavery, murder, war, abandonment, starvation, racial discrimination and, of course, tobacco and booze galore.

I suspect the particularly cool reaction to the series in America has to do with the typical cultural attitudes (at least of the millennial generation of manga/anime fans), who tend to view things as either serious or funny, and not both, either “adult” or “kiddy”, not both, and are antipathetic to cartoonish aesthetics as well as particularly sensitive to their hobbies being labeled “cartoons” because of the connotation of that word as limited to unserious, childish hobbies. The style of One Piece is very much conscientious; both deeply original and intentionally anachronistic. Oda, for instance, rejected the big anime-style eye-drawing that was the most popular style of art by the mid 1990s when the series began, and intentionally emphasizes “ugly” character traits and other unusual, even inhuman-seeming designs in rejecting a trend in 1990s towards more standardized and realistic depictions in manga, strongly oriented towards beauty. Beautiful girls and young men who look like BTS idols abound in manga–Oda instead draws a series almost entirely populated by weirdos or non-traditional characters, a sheer feat of originality and also experimentation (compare One Piece’s style to the typical manga style), that is surprisingly unappreciated by American manga and anime fans. And as Oda grew more secure in himself with the manga’s unassailable popularity, his drawings have become more and more organic, more kinetic and variable. One Piece is a truly unique manga in that the reader never has any clue what to expect a previously mentioned character will actually look like. They could be an ordinary looking grandma or a scarred, handsome, normally proportioned middle aged man, or they could be a 23-foot-tall oni with horns on their head. One Piece manages to feel even larger as a world, even more fantastic in the literal sense of the world, due to its creative and fun array of body types and even species.  

The series does not do itself any favors starting out. In contrast to many of the hit series I have mentioned before, One Piece doesn’t start off particularly strong, whereas the initial arcs of Attack on Titan and Bleach, for example, are the best and most gripping of those series. One Piece, on the other hand, takes a l-o-n-g time to find its voice and develop its footing. The first one hundred chapters of the manga (about 1600 pages of graphic novel), are almost formulaic at times, and part of this can’t be helped because of the sheer, almost indescribable scope of Oda’s project, even early on before many of the finer details were decided. The protagonist, Monkey D. Luffy (his family name is, in Japanese fashion, Monkey, and he goes by Luffy), literally starts the series off floating in the ocean in a glorified wooden barrel by himself–this is the character whose ambition is to beat all the other pirates in the world, become Pirate King, and reach the island “Raftel” in that order. Why? Because he wants to live as he pleases, eating and drinking as much as he wants without having to worry about money or being under other people’s command. A lot of Western fans in general are stumped by a protagonist whose motivations are neither intellectual nor altruistic, but who is rather, a childish and egotistical character whose sole motivations are mostly pretty far down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and who does things because “they seem interesting.” However, in the super high pressure, ultra-practical, and conformist society Japanese youth face, this is very refreshing and endearing.

In any case, because the series starts the reader off with Luffy when he has absolutely nothing and is a nobody (he’s not really a nobody, but the reader doesn’t discover that for a long time), it has to build him up pretty quickly so that meaningful conflicts and big developments can start happening. Thus, the early stages of the manga, which many people fail to get past, can be pretty formulaic, as every arc was basically self-contained and revolved around him searching for new crewmates (the Pirate King needs a great, powerful crew), getting a real ship, and fighting what can feel like the random baddy of the month types. It is at exactly chapter 101, that the Arabasta saga, a series of 5 interconnected arcs, begins, which lasts for 117 chapters and during which all of the major pieces, the thematic elements and the story structure of One Piece are largely developed. Most fans of the manga series, and I do as well, urge anyone reading the series to try and finish the Arabasta saga, before deciding whether or not to quit the series. A lot of people find a new appreciation for what Oda is doing and a deeper interest in the series by the end of this saga and then keep reading

How to even explain One Piece?

So the series’ lack of popularity outside of Japan (relatively speaking), is a combination of a bad window piece (localization of the anime), an anachronistic style that rejected a lot of the very aesthetic elements that attracted millennials to manga and anime, and a slow, at times formulaic opening sequences of arcs, in combination with the problem that, at a certain point, One Piece just got too big. A lot of people I introduce it to are daunted by the sheer size of the series, with over 1000 chapters and 100 volumes, One Piece alone can fill an entire wall to ceiling bookcase of manga. I began reading it in summer of 2010, right around this time, so I have now been reading it for 12! years and I haven’t even read the series for a majority of its 25 years in serialization. Around the time I started reading the manga, Oda made a big declaration that the story was halfway over, which would put the ending of One Piece at later this year or next year. In truth, the second half of the story, which mirrors, thematically and developmentally, the first half, has only, just now, finished the 3rd saga, The Four Emperors Saga, which, for reference he started around the time I first moved to Japan on the JET program, way back in 2015. The current saga has been going on since Obama was in the White House, and the final saga is going to be even more complex and has more material to finish!

The TV episode plot primer, which I have already broached, is simple enough: nearly twenty years prior to the series start, Gold Roger, the Pirate King, was executed by the World Government (what the series terms its antagonistic global government), and right before his execution, in front of the crowds and snail cameras (explaining this pun is more trouble than it's worth), declares that he left all his treasure and riches on the last island of the Grand Line, Laughtale (an aside here, but for decades this was romanized as Raftel, until Oda revealed in the current arc that Roger named the island after his amazing journey and the name is literally a reference to some of the Japanese language lyrics of the pirate song Bink’s Sake that Oda introduced in the series decades ago; the ambiguous katakana used for the island’s name was actually an English reference hidden in the Japanese that pretty much no one picked up on). This sparks what is termed “the great pirate era” as a rush of people flood out into the seas seeking out Roger’s legacy. This is the manga and anime opening. More difficult to explain, is the puzzling and enormous geography of One Piece. The Grand Line is the key site of all the action, and refers to a navigation belt that runs around the equator of the world of One Piece and which is the only real way to circumnavigate the globe. Likewise, the only “continent” of the world is a long strip of land, more a steep mountain range, that circles the globe on the prime meridian, known as the Red Line. The combination of the two splits the world into four oceans, East and North Blue, and South and West Blue. The story starts with Luffy in East Blue, renown as the weakest and most peaceful of the four oceans. On either side of the Grand Line are “calm belts” with no wind or currents and more critically, massive sea monsters, all of which make them generally impassible. The world of One Piece is simply physically enormous and the story takes place on the numerous islands that make up the majority of the world’s human settlements.

One Piece is a fantasy story, but like many Japanese fantasy stories it doesn’t engage with magic or use Western fantasy tropes. In the series, rather than magic, there is “haki” and “devil fruits” (and Oda’s human’s themselves possess the physical strength to smash warships and slash mountains in half). Devil Fruits are a major keystone of the series: there is a legend that the devil himself once split up his powers and divided them up into the world of men, where they are obtained by eating special fruits, called devil fruits, which, as a rule, a single human can only possess one. Luffy, the protagonist, possesses the gum gum fruit, or literally, the rubber fruit, whose one effect through most of the series is to make him a rubber human. In practice this means stretching and contorting or inflating his body, which Oda uses to great and often cartoonish effects. The other mystical force is “haki” which translates from Japanese as “will” and there are three branches of haki as well, but rather than spending pages going into the vagaries of the fantasy powers of One Piece, I think the fantasy world itself is a lot more interesting. There are rivers that flow up mountains, waterspouts that deliver people to floating islands, waterfalls that flow upwards, chaotic and dangerous weather, including storms worthy of a fantasy world, bizarre islands that half on fire and half frozen, all of which makes the Grand Line different from the rest of the world. The Grand Line itself has two halves, the second half, referred to as the New World, starts on the other side of where the Red Line intersects the Grand Line. The capital of the World Government and residences of the World Nobles (also termed the Celestial Dragons), Mariejois is located at this intersection.

What is really interesting about One Piece, I think, is just how subversive it is, especially compared to its popular shounen (boys) manga peers. Look at how pro-authority other popular shounen manga are, and One Piece’s decades-long use of the World Government as the titular antagonistic force looming in the background becomes even more daring. The series manages this without libertarian edgelord aesthetics as well; the concept of a World Government isn’t the problem, and neither, in One Piece’s world, are pirates (psychopaths and self-serving narcissists) the answer either. Oda manages to show the reader that many of the people working for the World Government are good people, many doing good rather than harm or at least trying to mitigate the harm caused by an institution too large and too powerful for them to stand against. And while Luffy is more of a selfish, lazy, Robin Hood type character who never plunders or extorts, and rarely steals anything more than a meal–a goofier, dumber, more laid-back Han Solo–the series doesn’t shy away from showing most pirates as murderers and thieves. In other words the series makes us root for Luffy, against the World Government, while not, especially initially, showing the World Government as unfounded in its stringent anti-piracy measures and militarism.

As time goes on however, the series really shows that the controlling government of the world is rotten, and any attempt to serve it as ultimately misguided, because the very core of the government is deeply immoral and unjust and the government itself is inherently authoritarian and anti-democracy, predicated on the rule of the many by the few. The World Government in One Piece, and the many countries who are members of it, is inherently based on aristocracy, specifically the rule of kings and nobles, who can brutalize the people under them as they so please without repercussions, if they wish. The Celestial Dragons are even worse, and here Oda really pulls no punches with his representations of elites and inherited wealth. The Celestial Dragons are the descendants of 19 of the 20 monarchs that formed a confederation to create the World Government (and conquered the rest of the world) and relocated to Mariejois, the capital city atop the steep, vast mountain range that makes up the Red Line continent circling the globe. They literally view themselves as deities; on the rare occasions they descend from Mariejois, they wear bubble helmets to avoid breathing the same air as lower beings and wear full body hazmat suits to avoid touching anything. They move via slave-powered conveyer belts, and shoot and maim slaves for sport. What is interesting about Oda’s portrayal is that all the greatest class of nobles seem to, in his world, be simply cashing in on the genetic lottery but they don’t actually seem to have authority to do anything. Oh, they can demand personal protection from one of the three Marine Admirals (the highest ranked and most powerful regular soldiers of the World Government), and have ungodly wealth and luxury, but so far the story doesn’t present them as having any sort of major role in the World Government itself. Instead, Oda mostly portrays them as sniveling whiny brats with a bizarre (think out of touch Parisian high fashion) aesthetic and who are physically weak (in a world he consistently portrays physical power as correlated to authority). The highest elites, the greatest nobles, are something seemingly tolerated by a larger system they created and benefit from, rather than of any importance or central authority to that system.

The World Government though, the reader slowly finds out, has no problem ordering the genocide of scholars who have deciphered a code, known as the ponegylphs, which are the last written records of the “void century” (one of the big running mysteries of One Piece, but which pertains to the great wars that led to the founding of the World Government). Nor does the government care about rampant slavery, human trafficking, human rights abuses, or any number of totalitarian crimes happening across the world within its member states. Instead, Oda portrays the government as concerned only with maintaining the balance of power that allows a tentative stability over the turbulent and insane world of One Piece, where singular humans can range from an ordinary person from our world to walking catastrophes who can level cities or even topple islands at will. Needless to say, what is important is that this tedious balance has the leaders of the World Government at the top of the pecking order.

This is not to say the World Government is a continuing antagonist in One Piece; in fact the interesting thing is that they are mostly not a direct antagonist of Luffy except in the final saga of the first half of the series that culminates in the Summit War. Luffy’s enemies have generally been pirates; first the 7 Warlords of the Sea (shichibukai in Japanese), made up of 7 powerful pirates who, in exchange for agreeing to stay out of the World Government’s way and help defend the government from other pirates and threats, are given a legal pass to piracy, and then the greatest pirates, the Four Emperors of the New World. The Four Emperors are, cumulatively, a wild card force powerful enough to destroy the World Government and upend the balance of the world–if they didn’t hate each other and weren’t all jockeying for Roger’s legacy and individual hegemony. The series spends most of its time fighting pirates, and showing villains if anything more brutal, horrific, and destructive than the World Government–which is the singular power sort of keeping everything contained–is depicted, adding a complex and nuanced dimension to the libertarian ethos of the series. The last arc, for instance, has dealt with one of the 4 Emperors named Kaido, who is a pure, nihilistic survival of the fittest monster who treats the weak and civilians as stepping stones and whose dream it is to engulf the world in a brutal war because he hates society as it is.

Yet, a recurring theme is, in every antagonist, there is the hand of the World Government. Oda is bold enough to suggest that a system built on exploitation and inequality enforced by heavy-handed violence and without any real guarantees of basic freedoms, perpetuates generation after generation of violence–the backstory of every antagonist usually reveals how a callous social system itself creates these monsters. With the Fish Men species he even manages to depict the progression of revolutionary violence into nihilistic violence in a shockingly effective manner. The Fish Men are an appellation of mixed human and sea creatures (an octopus man, a shark man, and so on), not simple merpeople, and the first member of the species the reader encounters is Arlong, in the initial East Blue arc. Arlong is a pirate who murdered the mother of a character named Nami when she was a child (Nami later becomes Luffy’s navigator and resident gravure idol), and he despises humans. Arlong’s goal is to conquer and rule over humans, because his species is superior; in this he is the first real villain that Luffy encounters. Later in the series though, we learn of the Sun Pirates, whose founder climbed the steep cliffs up to the plateau atop the Red Line and freed all the Fish Men slaves of the Celestial Dragons, after which he incorporated them into an anti-government pirate crew, of which Arlong was a member.

Another of the initial revolutionary members is a Fish Man named Jinbei (Japanese for blue whale), who later is part of the interspecies dialogue and peace process, and becomes a member of the 7 Warlords of the Sea, before later abandoning the World Government (he is currently a member of Luffy’s crew). Arlong was a younger, more aggressive second generation member of this revolutionary movement and opposed the efforts at peace and integration. The second half of One Piece takes this backdrop and adds another layer of intricacy to it, when Luffy and his crew go to the underwater air dome that contains Fishman Island (because it contains the only path into the New World). There they discover a coup, perpetrated by anti-human extremists who admired Arlong when they were children and have grown into young adults seething with anger, directed first and foremost at overthrowing their own “traitorous” leadership and, unlike Arlong, are fine excising brutality and violence against their own community in an attempt to gain power. Oda shows a common progression of generational violence as revolutionary violence is slowly cycled and rediverted from its original aims and finally turns inward and is co-opted into nihilistic and self-serving movements that are enthralled by the specter of violence and totalitarian authority itself, rather than any liberational or ideological aims.

The reason I was drawn to writing about One Piece is, I think, because it manages to tackle many serious concepts without taking itself too seriously. One Piece manages almost Shakespearian bouts of goofy puns and slapstick comedies of error even in the midst of very tragic and dark storylines. The series is fun to read, visually interesting and has an astoundingly complex and vast fantasy world. The story structures are very intricate and thoughtfully designed; not just the overarching series, which has two distinct halves both of which mirror each other, but the story structures of the arcs themselves. For instance, within the current saga, the last two arcs have both had very distinct narrative and aesthetic approaches, the Whole Cake Island arc using German marchen fairy tales, and the immense, magnificent Wano arc that is just now concluding, which is the only time in the series Oda has set an arc in an explicitly Japanese setting. The most interesting thing about the Wano arc is that Oda has framed it in the same manner as a traditional Japanese Kabuki play, which have extensive formal stylistic conventions that he has used to subtly reinforce the medieval Japan aesthetic of the arc. Compared to many long-running manga, One Piece is even more extraordinary because its author, Eichiro Oda, has had the story largely plotted out since at least 2000. Whereas many other long-running series clearly had no idea where they were going until half-way through or jack-knifed around to meet fan demands. One Piece, on the other hand, keeps reconnecting to earlier scenes, with plot developments that were actually presaged decades ago and not just jammed in for narrative convenience, something that is a real problem with a lot of these long-running weekly serials.

There is something fascinating about a playful, often comedic series that aims at being accessible to children as young as 9–but with a reader base ranging from 7~90–that manages to tackle so many issues in an over-exaggerated but interesting way. The current arc has dealt with environmental degradation and runaway military industrial complexes placing war production over civilian needs. The series shows propaganda and the ways in which capitalistic sensationalism passing as journalism and government censorship continually distort the truth, always to the benefit of those in positions of power and authority. A main character is graphically murdered right in front of Luffy’s eyes, while the existence of sexual violence, racism, and totalitarianism are front in center to the story, sometimes only barely softened by the cartoonish aesthetics of the author. This is a series that headlines a weekly manga magazine targeting young readers. But again, One Piece manages this without taking itself too seriously–and it manages to revel in camp and intentionally quirky, unique stylistic conventions (which include many references to pop art and fashion). I believe it is worth writing about One Piece if only because it is a major pop culture franchise that, contrary to the thinly veiled pro-USA, quasi-Randian propaganda of Marvel, actually has a fundamentally subversive message, and has a liberational and revolutionary outlook that remains grounded in humanism.

Things that are fun and easy to read, yet unpredictable, original, consistently interesting, and ideologically laudable are rare. Even though I have grown up in the past 12 years and opened my eyes to the shortcomings in things like Harry Potter and Marvel, One Piece has actually aged well during that time, as have, for that matter, other fictional projects like The Lord of the Rings, or The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper, or anything by Ursula Le Guin. I wanted to take the opportunity this time to talk about One Piece for this reason. When I was younger I trapped myself in respectability politics and the fear of the ridiculous, which is, I think, a big part of why Oda has embraced the ridiculous in his character designs and art style–the ridiculous can also be subversive, especially when respectability is largely enforced by subjective and self-perpetuating systems of power and wealth. There is something deeply joyous and even liberating in the ridiculous, but multifaceted and immense world of One Piece, that I hope my words have led a few more people to discovering.

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