According to The Guinness Book of Records, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece sold 320,866,000 units worldwide between its launch in 1997 and 2015 when it was first listed by Guinness as a record breaking series.
One Piece, which is an on-going series that still tops the bestseller lists in Japan, was initially launched by the Japanese publisher Shueisha in its weekly magazine Shonen Jump in July 1997.
Since its magazine launch One Piece, now the world’s bestselling manga, has also been published in book format in more than 92 tanko-bon single hardback volumes.
The pirate adventure, One Piece, which features a young pirate Monkey D. Luffy fighting the World Government, is now what industry observers call an international media franchise, and includes anime spin-offs and much more.
One Piece has also had a huge cultural impact in Japan and outside the nation that has led, for instance, to some of Japan’s most interesting authors, such as Fuminori Nakamura, penning essays about the series and its cultural impact, as well as academic papers such as Pirates, Justice and Global Order in the Anime One Piece.
