1- Let’s begin with the basics, Eiichiro Oda was born on January 1, 1975 in Kumamoto City, Kumamoto Prefecture in Japan. Oda claimed that he resolved to become a manga artist at age of four in order to avoid having to get a “real job”.
2- Oda began working for Shueisha’s Shonen Jump at 17 and currently stands as one of the world’s most prominent mangaka, earning an estimated ¥3.1 billion (US$26 million) per year.
3- Like most mangaka, Oda typically uses outlandish caricatures to represent himself in printed works. The most common of these is a striped tropical fish, best known for “giving” all of Oda’s weekly comments in Shonen Jump’s table of contents; in more detailed depictions (such as the Color Walks’ Monochrome Talk headers), this fish is usually given human ears and affixed atop a human body like a mask.
4- In 2007, Eiichiro Oda received not one or two, but, roughly one hundred threats (via e-mail) from a woman between September to December. The woman’s husband was an assistant at Oda’s office, who had been dismissed; the woman was arrested in 2009.
5- In 2002 Oda met Chiaki Inaba, a girl who was impersonating his Nami during the event Shonen Jump Festa. From that moment on, the two began dating, until in 2014, they have gotten married in a proper wedding. Two years later, in 2006, the couple also had a daughter.
6- According to Oda in an interview for Shonen Jump in the early days of One Piece’s run, his favorite villain in One Piece is Buggy the Clown (he joked that he literally threw him together). Oda has also claimed if he could eat any of the Devil Fruits, he would eat the Bara Bara no Mi.
7 -Oda’s favorite real pirate is Blackbeard (Edward Teach).
8- What does it take to be the best mangaka? Well, certainly it takes lot of dedication, wish to know more about how Oda lives out his everyday life? Do note, some of the information related to his lifestyle is from 2013, certain aspects of his lifestyle may have changed now!
-He is a smoker (in-fact, a chain smoker) and fans believe this is due to the “stress” involved in the profession.
-He prefers to work with the least amount of assistants required, he prefers to draw majority of the chapters himself.
-He has made it clear that he doesn’t like to copy and paste old art into new chapters, if a event or events have already been illustrated and needs to be re-used, he draws them all over again.
-He wakes up at 5 am, works until 2 am (21 hours!) and sleeps from 2 am until 5 am (3 hours) on an average day
-He “lives” in his workplace, his family visits him at his workplace, and he spends an average of one day with them without having to work at the same time.
-When asked “how does he blow of stress” Oda stated that he blows of stress by “writing an interesting manga.” When asked “when does he feel the happiest” he answered “while writing an interesting manga”.
-He listens to “Soul” music at his workplace.
-When asked what is his schedule for the week, he answered “three days of sketching and three days of working on the final piece”.
9- In his spare time, Oda enjoys watching films, both domestic and foreign; among his favorite are Seven Samurai, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Young Guns, Reservoir Dogs, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. Correspondingly, his favorite directors include Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Quentin Tarantino, and Tim Burton, along with Baz Luhrmann and Masahiro Makino.
10- With more than 490 million tankōbon copies in circulation worldwide, One Piece is both the best-selling manga in history and the best-selling comic series printed in volume, in turn making Oda one of the best-selling fiction authors.
