My name is Nate, and I'm a One Piece fanboy. I read the manga and watch the anime and movies. I own 2 tshirts and a handkerchief with One Piece logos. I sometimes read chapters of the manga on the internet prior to their publication. I even bought copies of the manga I already owned because I wanted to read them at that very moment. Hell, I learned Japanese to read the manga. How did it come to this?
My One Piece story starts in Marburg, Germany in 2001. Yeah, that's right noobs, 2001. There was a display in the window of the local comic shop that I was always passing for the newly arrived One Piece manga. I wasn't about to pick up and read a manga, but damned if that flag was not cool as hell. My girlfriend thought the same... and being a really cool person, talked with the shop owner and managed to snag me one of the mini paper flags!
Then my fanhood went dormant for a couple years... until I came to Japan under completely non-fanboy auspices. I started watching all sorts of anime for a little cultural understanding, and for a little alleviating the boredom. It wasn't long before I happened onto Kaizoku Fansubs. Soon, I found out that One Piece was pretty much the most popular manga in Japan, (with over 100,000,000 books in print as of april or so this year) and that my senpai was really into it too. It was pretty much downhill from there, with the full collapse this summer.
In the last few weeks, I've reached a level of Japanese ability where I can read the manga with no translation, and can watch the anime without subtitles pretty proficiently. As soon as I realized I could, I decided I wanted to catch up to the most current issue of the manga as soon as possible... and so I read over 3000 pages of manga in the last few weeks. And two weeks ago, I took the last step, and boarded the fantasy ship from One Piece, the Going Merry.
That was the real reason I went to Odaiba. I'm not actually a connoisseur of malls, and consumer paradises. For a few years now, Fuji TV has run a going merry cruise through the bay during their big summer festival. Below are a couple of pictures I snapped on the Going Merry, but someone else I met in the Kaizoku Fansubs forum (oh, the shame of it all!) took a lot more pictures, and often, a lot better ones.
robin is 姉さん系
zoro is packing
attacking odaiba with a water cannon
And last, another picture that's not mine. Rock bottom. Cosplay.
the real franky wears a speedo, poser.
There but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I.
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