“Set sail for One Piece, it’s the name of the treasure in the Grand Line!” That 4Kids One Piece opening rap lives in my head rent-free and will never ever get old.
Now, we literally have the equivalent of the One Piece out there in the bottom of Earth’s vast oceans. On March 3, the official One Piece YouTube channel released a video entitled “ONE PIECE: The 600 Million Milestone — What is the ONE PIECE?”
Celebrating the milestone of over 600 million copies of the manga being sold worldwide, the video asked the same question fans have been asking for decades. It also confirmed that One Piece creator, mangaka Eiichiro Oda, has known the answer from the start.
The answer has lingered in Oda’s mind for years, until recently when he finally put it to paper, placed it in a treasure chest, put the treasure chest in a pressure-resistant case…and gave it the same treatment as the Heart of the Sea from Titanic (1997).
It was dropped into the middle of the ocean.
The stunt was to create a real-life One Piece. Normally this is where the story would end, a poetic fate for a secret only known to the mangaka. All done to celebrate a huge milestone. Sitting in the dark depths of the ocean while time passes and its secrets are embraced by the cold darkness that surrounds it.
The Discovery
Just a day passed until One Piece fans found the treasure’s approximate location. One Piece fans are a different breed, I gotta tell you.
Since the video has scenic shots of the boat that sunk the treasure into the ocean, Reddit users went to work determining the drop location. The video shows a Japanese Coast guard boat, which narrows the dump to somewhere near Japan. Further context clues include:
- No visible land in sight
- Open sea
- No coastline on the horizon
- Drop depth of 651 meters
And to top it all off, the YouTube video contains shots with timestamps of 3:40 p.m. Japanese local time in February 2026. From there, fans could geolocate the boat’s exact position using time, approximate date, the position of the sun in the sky, and the aforementioned context clues. They determined the location of the treasure is at coordinates 34°42’46.8″N 139°09’07.6″E.
This places the treasure just south of Kamakura and East of Shizouka, Japan, between the island of Oshima and the town of Kawazu in the Izu Peninsula.
The question is, what will happen next? Now that the coordinates are public, will fans set sail themselves to find the treasure? How on Earth do they plan to even reach 651 meters below the ocean’s surface? Or, will Oda intervene and resurface the treasure first?
What do you think? Let us know down in the comments. Until next time! Don’t give it up, give it up, give it up!
