It’s official: One Piece has officially sold over 600 million copies. Instead of celebrating the occasion like a normal person, series creator Eiichiro Oda set fans on a voyage of their own, sending them on an adventure to find out what the titular treasure is written on a piece of paper at the bottom of the ocean.
In a YouTube video released by the official One Piece channel, titled “What is the One Piece,” the silhouette of what has to be Oda himself is shown writing something down on a piece of paper. Afterwards, he rips a piece off the said piece of paper, places it inside a tiny treasure chest, along with a bunch of other doodads, before setting sail and sinking the chest to the bottom of a vast ocean. The video ends with the message “the one piece does exist,” basically goading fans to find it for themselves before he finally reveals the truth behind the long-running series’ treasure himself.
While fans aren’t entirely buying the idea that the above video is anything more than a publicity stunt, that hasn’t stopped them from ballparking where the chest made its descent, based on scant clues from the video, in under 12 hours. In a Reddit post (first reported by GamesRadar), one user hypothesized that the chest must be at Suruga Bay in Shizuoka. How they arrived at that triangulation was thanks to a few nautical facts, like that the location must be off the coast of Japan from the looks of the Japanese coast guards on the boat, no land being visible looking southwest of the chest’s drop point, and that the depth must be at around 600 meters, where the fine sediments seen in the video aren’t being disturbed by strong currents. Other facts that helped narrow down where the treasure may be include that Suruga Bay is close to Tokyo, where Oda resides. Nami would be proud of their savviness.
All that said, our thankless Reddit sleuth hasn’t ruled out that this whole thing could just be a stunt with the map and footage being doctored to create a sense of the grand voyage that Gold Roger set a whole generation of pirates in the series on the hunt for, but in real life. However, as when Luffy was offered a couple of outs by outright being told what the One Piece was and the location of the final, uncharted island it resided on for the past 800 yearsboth in the series and its non-canon film, Stampede, they’d rather not take the easy way out to discover the truth.
“If we find the One Piece, I vote we destroy. Just like in Stampede,” they wrote.
What manga readers do know is that Oda has confirmed that its long-sought-after treasure isn’t “the friends we met along the way” but an actual, physical thing. What’s also known about the current state of the manga is that it’s tied to the void history that the world government wants to keep under safeguard from the public, to the point of ordering a buster call on anyone who gets close to discovering that truth. With One Piece being in its “final stages” (granted, this was stated in 2019), it feels like the series is inching ever closer to revealing what the treasure is, based on the big reveal at the end of the Egghead Island arc.
So, for the time being, fans will have to sit on their hands and hope they don’t die before the truth is finally revealed. Hopefully, the second season of Netflix’s One Piece Live-action series, a 1,100+ chapter manga, an upcoming anime remake, and the “second season” of One Piece proper will keep fans satiated by the time Oda finally reveals the series’ nearly 30-year-old secret.
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