Do we like Eiichiro Oda?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Huge, sustained generosity and no harmful words of his own turned up, held back by his silence on two friends' child-protection convictions and a clumsy joke or two.
Oda was born in Kumamoto in 1975 and turned pro at 17 with a serial called Wanted, which won the Tezuka Award. He later worked as an assistant to Rurouni Kenshin's creator, and One Piece grew out of two one-shots before launching in Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since become the best-selling manga in history.
His scandals are small and mostly foot-in-mouth. In 2018 he joked on a volume flap about a leftover piece of fried chicken being named after a Japanese soldier who hid in the Guam jungle until 1972. Plenty found it disrespectful, and Shueisha's Jump editors apologised for a 'lack of consideration', saying both they and Oda were reflecting on it.
The harder question is his friends. Popverse reports Oda interviewed Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki, who was arrested in 2017 over child sexual imagery, and praised him for the series' 30th anniversary. He also wrote a 2011 crossover with Toriko's Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro, who was convicted in 2002 of soliciting a 16-year-old and given a two-year sentence without serving prison time. Oda has not publicly defended or condemned either man's crimes, per the same piece, and Popverse says it can't understand why.
On the harm test, that is the whole file. Nothing in the coverage we read shows Oda campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in his own words. Critics of the series argue some female and queer characters are played for gags, but that's fan commentary on the work, not a statement from him. A 2024 aside joking about wanting an app to turn 'erotic' photos into his art style drew some eye-rolls, though Anime News Network read it as tongue-in-cheek.
The recent thing is Kumamoto. After a magnitude 7.1 quake struck his home region at the end of July, the One Piece account put Luffy in a Kumamoto T-shirt to rally support. No fresh donation from Oda was reported, but the coverage recalls the roughly 800 million yen he has given since the 2016 quake.
That earlier giving is the real stuff. In 2018 he gave 800 million yen (about US$8 million) to Kumamoto's recovery, in two gifts, and the governor announced bronze statues of the Straw Hat Pirates across the quake zone to honour him. Giving that much to your home town, over years, is not a publicity stunt.