Eiichiro Oda

Eiichiro Oda was born on January 1, 1975, in Kumamoto, in southern Japan. He says he decided to become a manga artist at age four. His biggest influence was Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball. His love of pirates likely came from the cartoon Vicky the Viking, which he watched as a kid.

At 17, Oda took second place in the Tezuka Award with Wanted!, a Western story. That result opened Shueisha's doors. He worked as an assistant to Shinobu Kaitani and Masaya Tokuhiro, and at 19 he joined Nobuhiro Watsuki's team on Rurouni Kenshin. Behind the scenes on Kenshin he learned the grind of a weekly magazine.

In 1996 he published two one-shots called Romance Dawn. Both featured Monkey D. Luffy, a rubbery kid hungry for adventure at sea. They were the seed of One Piece, which premiered in Weekly Shōnen Jump in July 1997. Luffy ate a Devil Fruit, lost the ability to swim and gained a rubber body. He sets sail after the treasure left by the legendary Gol D. Roger to become King of the Pirates, picking up a crew along the way. Early on he recruits the swordsman Zoro, the navigator Nami, the sharpshooter Usopp and the cook Sanji, each with a dream of their own. Their goal is to cross the Grand Line, the most dangerous route in the world.

Oda writes on a huge canvas. Each island has its own culture, politics and look, and characters who seem minor return hundreds of chapters later. He mixes slapstick with themes like freedom, slavery and abuse of power. Readers also know him from the SBS corner, where he answers fan questions in the collected volumes. In 2022 the manga entered the final stretch of the story.

The numbers are off the charts. One Piece passed 100 million volumes in 2005 and 200 million in 2011, and reached 600 million copies in print in 2026. It set Guinness World Records in 2015 and 2022 for the most copies published of a comic series by a single author. In 2012 it won the Japan Cartoonists Association Award grand prize. Toei's anime has been on the air since 1999. Oda wrote the story for One Piece Film: Strong World (2009) and had producer or design roles on Z, Gold, Stampede and Red. In 2023 he was one of the executive producers of Netflix's live-action series.

Away from the page, Oda keeps a low profile. He has been married since 2004 to Chiaki Inaba and they have two daughters. After the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake he donated 800 million yen to rebuild his home prefecture, which gave him an honorary award in 2018. He still writes One Piece every week, and the story keeps sailing toward its end.