My husband sent me an older article with a section of an interview with One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda. The question that was asked was if the Straw Hats were real, what nationalities would they have? This question is essentially asking what country they would originate from. Now this was an older article back from 2015. It seemed my husband just happened across it, but apparently Oda’s answer gave way to some interesting conversations.

For this post, there’s only one character I really want to focus on: Usopp. So every character got a distinct country, that Oda said was based off of their appearance or “image”. Now there are some other characters that I raised an eyebrow over, but none as much as I did Usopp. In the research I read I saw that other fans wanted Usopp to be fro m India or Italy.

So where Oda say Usuopp was from? The continent of Africa. He’s from the whole continent of Africa. So the other characters get to have a specific country except Usopp. So the next question I have is why doesn’t Oda seem to know any countries in Africa? Africa is such a big continent with various types of cultures and languages. Surely Usopp has an image after one of the countries? Oda could have looked on Google to see the different countries, the article was written in 2015. So I’m positive there was at least google. com.

Why is it sill okay to not fully recoginsze Africa or minorities in general. Zoro doesn’t look like he comes from Japan, nor does Nami, to me, looks Swedish. Usopp is usually one of the weakest of the Staw Priates. But after completiting his training, he has grown in his skill. I’m just tired of being left out of anime, on not talking about minorities. Minorities watch anime just as much as any other consumer and spend pleny of money to do so.

Overall it would just be nice to know that we exist in the anime community. Some are doing just that like Adorned by Chil and Cannonbusters, but others may not have that type of platform yet. I just think some acknowledgement would make things a lot more fun, like seeing yourself in the characters. Let’s hope for this change in the future.

Insert image: 2channel, The Otaku’s Blog, edited by RocketNews24 See you tomorrow, peace.