Eiichiro Oda

Eiichiro Oda has been married to Chiaki Inaba since November 7, 2004. Inaba is a former model, actress, and tarento who played Nami during the One Piece Spectacle Stage at Jump Festa, where she met Oda.

Oda and Inaba have two daughters, born in 2005 and 2009. Oda is known for maintaining a private personal life and rarely appearing publicly without his fish-headed caricature or another way of concealing his face.

Oda decided at the age of four that he wanted to become a manga artist. His early interest in pirates was encouraged by Vicky the Viking, while Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball became his most important manga influence. He also admired works such as Kinnikuman, Captain Tsubasa, and Fist of the North Star.

At 17, Oda submitted Wanted! to the Tezuka Awards and received second place in the 1992 competition. The recognition helped him enter Shueisha's manga world. He later won the Hop Step Award for Ikki Yakō and left his architecture studies to pursue a professional career in Tokyo.

Before becoming a serialized creator, Oda worked as an assistant to Shinobu Kaitani, Masaya Tokuhiro, and Nobuhiro Watsuki. He assisted Watsuki on Rurouni Kenshin and was credited with helping create the character Honjō Kamatari. These positions gave him experience drawing backgrounds, crowds, and other elements of professional manga production.

Oda developed the pirate-themed one-shot Romance Dawn in 1996. Its central character, Monkey D. Luffy, became the protagonist of One Piece, which began serialization in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1997. The series quickly became a major success and has circulated more than 600 million collected volumes worldwide.

Oda wrote the story and served as an executive producer for One Piece Film: Strong World, while also contributing more than 120 drawings for the film's production guidance. He later provided character designs and worked as a producer or executive producer on One Piece Film: Z, One Piece Film: Gold, One Piece: Stampede, and One Piece Film: Red.

He collaborated with Akira Toriyama on Cross Epoch, a crossover one-shot combining characters from Dragon Ball and One Piece. In 2011, he also worked with Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro on the One Piece and Toriko crossover Taste of the Devil Fruit.

Oda was an executive producer of the 2023 Netflix live-action series One Piece. He also designed a character and monsters for the video game One Piece Odyssey.

One Piece has set major publishing records in Japan. Volume 56 received an initial print run of 2.85 million copies in 2009, while volume 67 reached 4.05 million in 2012, a record for an individual book in Japan at the time.

Oda received the Grand Prize at the 41st Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 2012. He has also received Sondermann Awards, the Kumamoto Prefecture Honorary Prize, a special lifetime achievement award at Napoli Comicon, and the Shin Watanabe Award. Guinness World Records recognized One Piece for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author.

After the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, Oda supported recovery efforts in his home prefecture through messages, artwork, and a major donation. The Kumamoto Revival Project included the unveiling of a bronze statue of Luffy in 2018.