Eiichiro Oda has once again had a change of editors in his staff, as is usually the case. For the unaware, Oda switches his own editors every few years, as a practice to continuously inject new talent in the position in editor to make sure the manga stays fresh and original. A couple weeks ago Oda mentioned in one of his messages that his editorial team was shifting, but we didn’t get an official announcement from Shueisha until today, July 8th.

Usually, a change of editors in Oda’s team means that the manga editor (the one who reviews Oda’s chapters and helps him change the story when necessary) steps down to a media editor (the one who takes care of promotion, branding, media, etc.), while the media editor resigns from One Piece entirely. However, this time it’s a little different, as we are not having a succession in editors! Rather, the current manga editor will retain his position, but will simply have a second editor to work alongside him.

So Takano, the current editor who has been at the helm since the start of Act 2 since early 2019, will retain his position as manga editor but he will be joined by a second editor for the manga. Naito will also remain as the media editor just like he was before, so these three editors will lead One Piece for the foreseeable future (four if you want to count the general editor for media at Jump).

And the new editor in question is… Yuuji Iwasaki! According to his official job description on Shueisha’s site, Yuuji Iwasaki (岩崎 湧治, first name Yuuji – family name Iwasaki) is a Jump editor from Sendai, Miyagi, loved in the Jump department for his positive and cheerful attitude. He was originally a football player in school who almost entered the Japanese league, but instead went to study Commerce and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. He just joined Shueisha this April and according to the site is brand new to the editorial manga scene and seemingly hasn’t worked on other previous series.

 

Iwasaki mentioned to Oda that his favorite food is sweet things like chocolate and his favorite hobby is soccer, as previously mentioned, which he claims he’s very good at. So just like Oda addresses Takano as “Takano-gym” (instead of -kun/-san) due to how much he likes to exercise, Oda decided to address Iwasaki as “Amazaki Football Club”, or Amazaki-F.C. for short (amai is Japanese for sweet, hence the pun).

 

 

 

Having joined One Piece during late June during the start of the Onigashima storyline within the Third Act of Wano, Takano and Iwasaki will work together with Oda to work on the manga and hopefully make it even better than it currently is. I’m looking forward to the results in the manga!

You can check the video of the official announcement below (in Japanese) where Iwazaki shows off his sick pro football skills: