Eiichiro Oda

Eiichirō Oda (尾田 栄一郎, Oda Eiichirō^?, Kumamoto, January 1, 1975) is a Japanese manga artist known for his manga series One Piece (1997-present), which earned him a Guinness World Record. Being the manga with the largest number of published copies of the same comic work made by a single author (416,566,000 copies at that time), currently selling more than 516 million copies worldwide.

Career

At the age of 17, he submitted his work Wanted, a cowboy manga, for which he won a host of awards, including second prize at the 44th Tezuka Awards. Awards.

Following the accolades, this earned him the achievement of working at Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, where he initially worked as an assistant to Shinobu Kaitani in the series Suis Police Gang, and then passing into the hands of Masaya Tokuhiro with Jungle King Tar-chan and Mizu no Tomodachi Kappaman, which gave him an unexpected influence on his artistic style.

At 18 he achieved great success with his first professional work Kami kara mirai no Present, published in 1993. The same year, he won the monthly talent contest organized by the Weekly Shonen Jump, featuring The Lonely Demon.

At the age of 19, after dropping out of university, he moved to Tokyo in 1994, he began working as an assistant to Nobuhiro Watsuki at Rurouni Kenshin. Watsuki credits Oda for helping to create the character Honjō Kamatari that appears in Rurouni Kenshin.

During that time, he drew Monsters in 1994 in the Autumn special (a seasonal Weekly Jump magazine). Also Oda drew two pirate-themed one-shot stories, called "Romance Dawn", which were published in Akamaru Jump and the Weekly Shonen Jump, respectively, in late 1996. The shot featured Monkey D. Luffy as the lead, who later became the lead of One Piece.

In 1997, One Piece first appeared in the anthology magazine Shōnen Jump. The series received the "Hot Step Award", an award given by Shūeisha each year for the best work published in the magazine.

The manga managed to gross over 100 million volumes in February 2005, over 200 million in February 2011, and had over 345 million volumes in circulation worldwide as of 2013.

In 2007, Oda in collaboration with Akira Toriyama and Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro, created a one-shot story crossover called Cross Epoch, which contains characters from Toriyama with Dragon Ball and Oda with One Piece to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the manga.

In 2009, a woman was arrested for sending approximately one hundred threatening emails to Oda between September and December 2007. That woman's husband was an assistant in Oda's office who had been laid off.

In 2011, Oda was found on the Shitsumon o Boshuu Suru list of mangakas reported after the earthquake that occurred on March 11, although nothing happened to him.

In 2013, the series won the 41st Japan Cartoonists Association Award. Toriyama has another work with Toriyama, where they each design a Gaist character for the video game Gaist Crusher.

In June 2015, his work One Piece after a large total number of sales, obtained the recognition of "Most number of edited copies of the same comic book made by a single author" by the Guinness Record.

Popularity

In a 2008 poll conducted by marketing research firm Oricon, Eiichiro Oda was voted Japan's fifth favorite mangaka. He sharing the place with Yoshihiro Togashi, creator of the famous series Hunter x Hunter and Yu Yu Hakusho .

Manga

• One Piece (1997-present)
• Wanted! (1998), Collection of the following stories one-shot:
  • Wanted! (1991)
  • God's Gift for the Future (1993)
  • Itsuki yakou (1993)
  • Monsters (1994)
  • Romance Dawn (Version 2, 1996)
• Dragon Ball x One Piece: Cross Epoch (2007)
• One Piece x Toriko x Dragon Ball Z: Cross Epoch (2013)

Personal life

On November 7, 2004, Eiichiro Oda, 29, married former model and actress Chiaki Inaba (稲葉ちあき, Inaba Chiaki) (Kanagawa Prefecture, Kantō, Japan; January 4, 1979) through a private wedding. Inaba is a former model, actress, "Campaign Girl", "Race Queen" and "Gravure Idol"; that she was active in various entertainment activities from the mid-1990's to the early 2000's. Chiaki retired from modeling and acting in October 2004, at the age of 25, one month before getting married.

In December 2001, the annual Shonen Jump Festa 2002 held a music show called One Piece Spectacles Stage (ワンピーススペクタクルステージ, Wanpīsu supekutakuru sutēji), in which Chiaki Inaba dressed in she played the character of Nami through a costume. It was at that event that the young couple met, with her 22 and he 26 years old. They began a relationship and got married two years later. Between the years 2001 and 2003, Inaba was an actress for the action musicals made by the Jump Festa festival.

In 2006, 27-year-old Chiaki Inaba gave birth to a girl, Oda's first daughter. Oda and Inaba become parents again, welcoming a second daughter who was born in 2009.

Due to his intense routine work, Oda sleeps only three hours a night, according to his own account. In addition, he lives apart from his wife and daughters, who visit him once a week at his workplace. Oda visits the family home on vacation; a luxurious mansion located in Nerima (練馬区, Nerima-ku), an upper-class neighborhood belonging to the Tokyo metropolitan area. Oda bought this house in 2006, after the birth of his first daughter.

In an interview with Oda in 2019, it was learned that after getting married in 2004, he promised his wife that when the One Piece manga ended, they would go on a world trip. Since he, according to him, he had said that he would finish it in ten years.

Oda, Inaba, and their two daughters take vacations abroad about once a year.

Influence

As a child, he aspired to be a manga artist at the age of 4, in order to avoid having to get and work in an "adult company". Ode from childhood was inspired by pirates. He recalls that his interest in pirates was probably sparked by the popular animated TV series Vickie the Viking. His artistic style managed to develop in his early years as an assistant.

His greatest influence is in the works Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump by Akira Toriyama.

After working as Watsuki's assistants, Hiroyuki Takei and Mikio Itō remain good friends. He also stated several times that he is a friend of Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro, the author of Toriko with whom they crossovered with their respective animes and another crossover with Akira Toriyama and Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro.

He is also a friend of Masashi Kishimoto, creator of the Naruto manga, whom he has said is a rival for whom he has great admiration. For the cover illustration of One Piece in chapter 766, which ran in the 2014 50th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump, along with the last two chapters of Kishimoto's Naruto, Oda it included a hidden message and other tributes in technique.