Eiichiro Oda hasn’t merely hidden a plot point. He’s weaponised your curiosity against you, and honestly? You love it.
July 1997
That’s when this whole thing started. Now, twenty-nine years later, Oda has written the ending on a scrap of paper, stuffed it into a miniature treasure chest, sealed that inside a pressure-resistant glass sphere, and chucked the lot 651 metres deep into the ocean. There’s YouTube footage of the drop. He actually did it.
The Mockery That Isn’t
It looks like you’re being mocked, doesn’t it? Nearly three decades of weekly chapters. Thousands of hours of Toei Animation episodes. Endless pub debates about whether Joy Boy’s legacy is some ancient weapon or merely the bond between shipmates—only to have the author bury the answer where even James Cameron would need a decent submarine to retrieve it.
But here’s what Oda actually understands: certainty kills desire. The moment you know, the chase stops.
By ensuring the answer is physically real yet absolutely inaccessible, he’s maintained what behavioural economists call “the endowed progress effect”—you’re 99% through the story, but that final 1% remains tantalisingly out of reach.
You’re not consuming a manga anymore. You’re participating in a global exercise in delayed gratification, and frankly, it’s driving you mad in the most British way possible: polite obsession.
The Queue Forms Here
Imagine if the BBC had buried the ending to Line of Duty in a lead box beneath the Thames. There’d be riots in Wetherspoons.
Yet Oda has managed to turn the entire otaku community into a nation of queuers—patient, grumbling, determined to wait their turn, yet secretly plotting to jump the queue entirely.
That Submarine
You know someone’s going to try. Some crypto-millionaire in a bathysphere, panning the seabed with floodlights, hunting for a chest the size of a lunchbox.
But ask yourself:
- What would you actually do with the paper if you found it?
- Read it privately?
- Burn it?
- Post it on Reddit and ruin Tuesday morning for fourteen million people?
How does knowing that Oda definitely knows has chosen to physically distance himself from the answer by two thousand feet of saltwater change the way you trust him as a storyteller?
What would your relationship with the weekly manga actually become if the mystery disappeared before Monkey D. Luffy’s journey does?
When you picture that millionaire fan firing up their submarine engines, are they really hunting for treasure, or are they simply desperate to stop feeling small in front of a man they’ve never met?
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