‘One Piece’ creator Eiichiro Oda made a shocking reveal on Tuesday, triggering a global treasure hunt at sea – just like the pirates of his manga would have wanted.
The iconic manga has just recently hit 600 million copies in circulation worldwide, confirming its position as the best-selling manga of all time.
‘One Piece’ recounts the tale of pirate Monkey D. Luffy and his friends, the eccentric crew of the ship ‘Thousand Sunny’.
In the manga, which is currently on its 114th volume, the biggest mystery of the story still stands: the lore behind the One Piece, a mythical treasure located on Laugh Tale, the final island.
To celebrate the manga’s success, Oda disclosed that he had hidden the mystery behind the existence of the prize in a note, which was then enclosed in a chest and dropped into the sea.
Fans go into a frenzy
Shonen Jump, the magazine that has published ‘One Piece’ chapters for the last 30 years, posted a video of Oda writing the solution to the mystery on a piece of paper.
The author, who never shows his face publicly, a practice shared by many Japanese mangakas, can then be seen tearing the page and hiding one portion of it in a locked treasure chest.
The chest is then placed into a pressure-resistant glass sphere and finally dropped overboard from a small boat.
It is then shown reaching the bottom of the sea, at a whopping 651m deep.
“Until the whole story is revealed, the truth will rest far beyond anyone’s reach, at the bottom of the ocean,” a voice can be heard narrating.
Or will it?
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Fans begin search
The video, which has already surpassed three million views on YouTube, has been analysed by eager fans.
‘One Piece’’s dedicated fanbase was quick to observe every detail in the video, trying to pinpoint the exact location of the chest.
“We’ll assume [the chest is] off the coast of Japan, in Japanese territory,” a fan posted on Reddit.
“No land can be visible from the drop point when looking southwest. The sun would be setting southwest at around 4 pm, and we have a high-angle shot with no land on the horizon.”
“So if the camera/ship is looking SW into open water, the coast should be behind us/to the NE,” the user added, before offering their definitive guess: “Suruga Bay, Shizuoka.”
However, there could also be another answer to this thrilling riddle: that there is actually no revelation to the mystery in the chest, and that the whole thing is just a solid publicity stunt.
“I seriously doubt they’d pull something like this if there was any chance it’d be found,” another user commented.
It would seem that our best bet to discover the secret behind the One Piece would be to just wait for Oda to tell us.
But in the meantime, we can also try to be pirates and look for it ourselves.
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