One Piece Breaks Down Oden's First Meeting with Amatsuki Toki

With the war for Wano Country ramping up in the manga, One Piece has taken a slight detour in order to show us the past of one of its most influential players in Kozuki Oden. The wandering samurai found himself with a dream of opening up the borders of Wano, exiled from his capital city and becoming the Daimyo of the outlaw land that was Kuri within the country's walls. After begging the legendary pirate Whitebeard to add him to his crew, Oden inadvertently found himself meeting his future wife, Kozuki Toki!

With Oden begging a young Whitebeard to take him on his journey across the Grand Line, the giant pirate turned down his request and instead offered him a challenge. If Oden could hold on to the back of his ship as it sped through the ocean for three days, then he would be allowed to be a part of Whitebeard's crew. Jumping at the chance, Oden held onto a chain behind Whitebeard's ship and seemed to be accomplishing the task, until...

In the distance, Oden heard the cries of a woman who was fighting off a group of pirates, and in his haste to save her, let go of the chain that was attached to Whitebeard's vessel. The woman in question was Toki, his future wife, and even though Oden was quite hideous looking from the days of being pulled through the ocean, the attraction between them couldn't be denied.

As fans of One Piece know, Toki ate a devil fruit that granted her quite a unique ability, that being the power of time travel. When her husband Oden was killed, instead of using her power to escape, she joined him in his fate but sent the nine samurai of Wano into the future to one day accomplish Oden's dream of opening the borders of the country for all.

What did you think of the way that Oden met Toki? How do you foresee the Wano Country arc ending? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the Straw Hat Pirates!

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.