The History of One Piece

Oda was submitting manga at about fifteen and took home an award at seventeen; Anime News Network's record adds that he was a runner-up for the Tezuka Award in 1992, still in high school. In a long 2007 interview with Manga Tengoku, he describes dropping out of college in Kumamoto, moving to Tokyo, and learning the trade as an assistant: scenery for Masaya Tokuhiro, then a short, intense stretch at Nobuhiro Watsuki's studio, where he worked full time for about four months before cutting back to prepare his own serial work.

He had wanted to write a pirate manga since middle school. When his early submissions kept being pulled apart, he staked everything on one story. Romance Dawn, he said, was like bringing out the family's treasured heirloom sword for a last stand: he wrote it deliberately as the beginning of a grand story, to make it plain that it was meant to continue. It worked. The full account of the two drafts is on this shelf.

One Piece began in Weekly Shonen Jump 1997 No.34, on sale in July 1997, with chapter 1, "ROMANCE DAWN," as the lead colour feature; this Library's authentication page documents that issue in full. The Toei Animation television anime followed in October 1999. Oda has told the Manga Tengoku interviewer that, back when he drew Romance Dawn as an assistant, he already imagined Mayumi Tanaka's voice for Luffy, and that when she won the part without his asking, hearing her read the lines told him, in his words, "THAT'S IT, THIS IS THE VOICE!"

The middle of the run is a record of scale rather than incident: the Guinness record in 2015, the print run records gathered on this shelf's print record page, and the two round numbers Mantan Web logged on the way past: the 1,000th chapter in January 2021 and the anime's 1,000th episode that November.

In June 2022 Oda took a one month break to prepare what Shueisha calls the manga's final saga, and serialization resumed on July 25, 2022. The story is still there, in the Elbaph arc, four years on. Around it, the franchise now runs on three screens at once: the Toei anime, on air since 1999 and moving to a capped schedule of at most 26 episodes a year from 2026; the Netflix live action series, which debuted in August 2023 and returned for a second season on March 10, 2026; and a second anime adaptation, THE ONE PIECE from WIT Studio, announced in December 2023 and due in February 2027, which this shelf documents on its own page.

In March 2026, to mark 600 million copies, Oda did something no sales figure could outdo as a closing image for this history: he wrote down the secret of what the One Piece is, on paper, for the first time, and the paper was sunk to the bottom of the ocean in a treasure chest, to be made public only after the story is complete. The ending, whenever it lands, already exists. It is sitting underwater.