'One Piece' Reveals Wano Country's Plight

One Piece fans have been waiting for Eiichiro Oda to start the Wano arc of the manga, and while it's introduced plenty of cool samurai elements, it's also shown a much darker side of this world caused by Kaidou.

Like every other land visited thus far, Luffy quickly realizes that Wano has been ravaged by pollution from Kaidou's factory, and because of this, people are running out of food.

In the manga, Luffy meets a young girl named Tama and learns that she's starving and can only afford a single bowl of rice after weaving and selling hats. It turns out Kaidou's factories have been polluting the water in Wano, and not only that, the only part of the country that's surviving at all is the land belonging to the Shogun.

Kaidou's armies have wiped out most of the land as well, and Luffy soon learns that it has infected the animals too as all of their meat has become tainted through that pollution. The Shogun has areas where they have clean reserves of food and supplies, but hasn't shared it with the rest of Wano.

Considering how isolated Wano is from the world, and the World Government alliance, their plight is infuriating and just shows how deadly Kaidou's influence can be. Could even be a more fearsome threat than Big Mom in the end at this rate.

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has been collected into 87 volumes, with a few chapters yet to be included. It 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 430 million copies sold worldwide.

Eiichiro Oda also revealed some upcoming news for One Piece's future in a recent interview as well. Stating that he was about 80% done with the series at this point with the Wano arc, this might scare some fans a bit seeing how much more has been revealed about the series' world, but it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the ending will most likely still be years away.

The new live-action One Piece series also got some new information as it was revealed that the series will portray the Straw Hats' adventures from the very beginning, and will take place in the East Blue. One Piece's anime series is currently in the middle of the "Whole Cake Island" arc and is now streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.