What is the SBS in One Piece volumes?

SBS stands for Shitsumon o Boshuu Suru, roughly "I am taking questions," a name the column itself spells out for readers. It appears in the collected volumes, in short installments set between chapters, formatted as a straight exchange: D for Dokusha, the reader, and O for Oda. A volume usually carries several installments answering a handful of questions each. The very first SBS, in Volume 4, opened with the question readers sent more than any other, the crew's ages, and Oda answered it on the spot. Character birthdays, background characters hiding in crowd scenes, and small facts the chapters never state have been settled there ever since, mixed in with the jokes.

The reason is personal, and he gave it to Manga Tengoku. As a child, he loved the readers' corner in a comic he followed, and then it suddenly disappeared. "I really enjoyed it so that came as a huge disappointment... So I decided that if I ever became a manga author, I would continue the readers' corner no matter what." The work is real work: he reads the postcards a little every week, sorts the promising ones as they arrive, and spends about a day choosing when a volume is due. His verdict on the burden is the vow kept: "saying it isn't difficult would pretty much be a lie. But I already decided that this is something I have to do so even if I don't like it, it's something I won't give up." And the questions are genuinely the readers': "SBS is 100% from the postcards. I read 'em, I chose 'em, I write an answer."

That is why this Library treats the SBS as a primary source with a sense of humour. When Oda used the Volume 42 SBS in 2006 to explain that the series was meant to run five years and that the climax had been in his head from the start, he was not giving an interview. He was answering a reader's postcard, in the corner he swore never to close.