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One Piece Manga Creator Eiichiro Oda Receives Award from Home Prefecture

The Kumamoto Prefectural Government announced on Wednesday that it will present One Piece manga creator Eiichiro Oda with a People's Honour Award in a ceremony on April 15.

Eiichiro Oda was born in Kumamoto on January 1, 1975, and he continues to support the area to this day. He designed boxes for the area's mandarin oranges and worked on local revitalization campaigns with One Piece art, particularly after Kumamoto Prefecture suffered a series of damaging earthquakes in 2016.

While he was still in high school, Oda was a runner-up for the Tezuka Award for new creators from Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1992. He began serializing the One Piece manga in Weekly Shonen Jump on July 19, 1997. The manga has 360 million copies in print in Japan and 70 million copies in print in over 42 other countries and territories, for a total of more than 430 million copies in print worldwide. The manga won the 41st Japan Cartoonist Awards in 2012, and set a Guinness World Record in 2015 for "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author."

Source: The Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web