The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results‘Luffy himself’: ‘One Piece’ author remains child at heart
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Meet Luffy: A statue of the character Monkey D. Luffy, also known as Straw Hat, is displayed at the One Piece anime souvenir shop in Tokyo on Nov. 19, 2021. (AFP/Philip Fong)
H
e is the creator of one of the world's best-known manga, but One Piece author Eiichiro Oda shuns stardom with a carefree attitude that evokes the beloved hero of his work.
The 47-year-old famously refuses to be referred to as sensei, an honorific typically used to address seasoned manga creators of his status.
He is even reputed to show up at fancy restaurants and hotels dressed exactly like One Piece protagonist and pirate Monkey D. Luffy, in a pair of short trousers and sandals.
"I want kids who read One Piece to think of me as their neighborhood brother," media-shy Oda said in a rare 2017 interview, published in a special magazine to mark the 20th anniversary of the franchise.
"I know I'm now old enough to be more like their uncle, [...] so maybe a funny, easy-going uncle."
It is a modest aspiration for a man whose tale about aspiring "pirate king" Luffy and a motley crew of fellow adventurers earned him a Guinness World Record for "most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author".
On Friday, the cultural phenomenon that has sold about 500 million copies worldwide will mark the 25th anniversary of its serialization.
More from The Weekender
Siapa Anda? Mengapa Anda?
What begins as a small grammatical curiosity becomes a larger question about language, culture and the way we understand ourselves in relation to others - and, ultimately, about what we risk losing in a world increasingly impatient with reflection, ambiguity and the humanities.
A passport to the kingdom of the sick
A breast cancer diagnosis, a journey to the kingdom of the sick and a determination to describe what lies there without metaphor, euphemism or the word “fight.”
The weight of time
Richard Mille’s newest ultralight timepiece pares down haute horlogerie to its mechanical necessities, proving that sophistication often comes from knowing what to leave out.
