One Piece Adventures

One extremely unexpected thing that happened to me prior to setting off on our Japan adventure was the fact that I began reading One Piece. Historically, I had always thought of One Piece as a very, very long and very, very silly franchise that had always seemed too ridiculous for me to care about. I was at least somewhat aware of it as a child; in third or fourth grade, I had a friend who liked it, and then sometime around 2008 I rented the Alabasta movie at Blockbuster one day. But as a teenager and even well into adulthood, I never met anyone who talked about it or tried to sell me on it. I never even had any tumblr mutuals who liked it! So beyond knowing a few of the main characters' names and the fact that some guy was made of rubber, it had no impact on my life for over twenty years.

...Until quite recently!! As of December 2024, in fact. Which is insane, and slightly alarming, because it only took me four or five months after starting it to get to Wano. But I digress. The important thing is that since I started reading One Piece in December, I got to enjoy all of the One Piece excellence that Tokyo had to offer us in February!!

There are a whole bunch of One Piece stores around the country; ten in total, I believe. We made it to three different ones on our trip - the locations in Sunshine City, Ikebukuro; Character Street in Tokyo Station; and Harajuku. I didn't know this until we arrived at the the second store and the cashier showed me, but each store has a special stamp area, where you can take a free flyer and get a giant stamp that's unique to each store!! The Harajuku store also had a lot of really cute merchandise unique to that location. They also had a giant Chopper statue in cute street fashion!!

I bought a lot of stuff, mostly at the Harajuku location! I got a plush Chopper keychain where he is a crepe!! I also got a Chopper cup (affectionately dubbed "the chup") that I've been using non-stop since our trip. It's a small melamine cup, and I've mostly been using it to drink fun things, like chocolate milk or pink lemonade. I bought a pair of cute standees of the Sunny and the Merry, and a few other small things here and there. One thing that's especially cute about these stores is that all of the prices are listed and tallied up in Beli (where one Beli is equivalent to one yen, of course).

Another really cool thing about visiting these stores was seeing production art for the current arc in the anime, including character sheets and turnarounds, framed on the walls! They also had what appeared to be original Oda manuscripts from different color spreads (or at the very least, really great reproductions)! Even if you don't buy anything, they were definitely worth the visit just for the atmosphere!

This giant Gear 5 Luffy statue was in the Harajuku store as well. Technically, at the time of our visit and where I was in the manga, I wasn't supposed to know about Gear 5 yet. But he was plastered absolutely everywhere, so it's not like it was really a big secret.

I had a great time looking at all of the One Piece merchandise during our trip! I always lamented the fact that OP stuff seems to be everywhere instead of things that I was actually interested in, but now that I realize how good it is, I can reap the spoils wherever we go. It was thrilling to bounce around and be especially annoying about pirates while Ally waited patiently. What a good sport! (LOL).