Who wrote "We Are!", the first One Piece opening?

Kitadani told the story to Billboard Japan. A director he had worked with under an earlier stage name had joined Imagine, Tanaka's agency, and one day the call came: the most popular manga in Weekly Shonen Jump was becoming an anime, Tanaka was entering a song in the competition for its opening, and would Kitadani record the temporary vocal track? The song won. The singer had not been chosen. "Due in part to Kohei's prompting, the staff began saying 'Why not just have it sung by the singer who did the temporary vocal track?' My record company had just told me that they didn't really see a future for me with them, so I was wondering what to do, career wise. So this 'We Are!' offer came out of the blue. That was the start of my rags to riches story."

It was his debut under the name Hiroshi Kitadani. In the studio, tense in front of a room of executives, he got the advice he still repeats: Tanaka told him the song had to give hope to people around the country, so he should smile while he sang, because a smile comes out in the voice. He sang smiling. They kept the take.

The trio, with Negishi arranging, became known among the staff as the "We Are!" gang, and the series kept calling them back. In 2011 Kitadani returned with "We Go!", which Tanaka wrote as a response song to "We Are!" for the crew's arrival in the New World. In 2019, for the Wano arc, they reunited for "OVER THE TOP", the first of the songs Tanaka wrote to order for Kitadani's voice rather than the other way round. And for the Egghead arc the same three made "UUUUUS!", a song dense enough that Kitadani's first honest reaction, by his own account, was "Huh?" before it grew on him the way Tanaka promised it would. One interruption proves the rule: the 2016 opening "We Can!" was written by Kishidan instead, the only one of Kitadani's five One Piece themes the gang did not build.

Underneath the openings sits the score itself: the television anime's music is credited to Kohei Tanaka and Shiro Hamaguchi, which is why the sound of the series, brass, strings, and sea shanty lift, has stayed recognisably itself from 1999 into the final saga. The first thing a generation of viewers ever heard from One Piece was a demo singer smiling into a microphone. They have been hearing him ever since.