Hi there, your friendly (that’s debatable) not-so-neighborhood (unless you live in Europe) One Piece-related news reporter William here.

For the past year or so I’ve been reporting any One Piece-related news I could get my hands on. The reason why I started doing this basically full-time job is because I know how so many of us non-Japanese One Piece fans crave to be up-to-date with any and all One Piece-related news as quickly as possible, something that we, at the One Piece Podcast website have been trying to strive for, all while avoiding the loss of that je-ne-sais-quoi other professional websites might have lost long ago.

Today, however, I’m not bringing you any ground-breaking, majorly inspirational Oda-related translation or One Piece related news, but something that has, to my knowledge, not been covered very often. Of course, I can imagine that for a large number of you One Piece fans, these things might not mean a lot, but for some others out there, the content of this and future posts are exactly the kind of nitty-gritty stuff that interest them.

What I’m talking about is: One Piece rankings.

I’m sure a lot of you know by now that One Piece is but one manga series in a magazine full of diverse stories: Weekly Shônen Jump (週刊少年ジャンプ). This magazine started out in 1968 as a new project of the publisher Shûeisha, a company that was originally founded by Shôgakukan in the 1920s to publish entertainment magazines, and wanted to try and broaden its range of readers by reaching out to the shônen (young male readers) demographic of Japan (funny enough, Shûeisha was founded to publish entertainment magazines, but came relatively late in the Shônen manga magazine business).

Meanwhile, Weekly Shônen Jump, or Jump for short, has grown to become the magazine with the largest amount of issues sold in Japan. What’s more impressive is that the authors of this magazine all deliver about nineteen pages of amazing content to their readers on a weekly basis, something that was said to be an impossible feat for manga authors when weekly manga magazines started in the 1950s. Of course there are also legendary authors such as Osamu Tezuka who kept up more than two series at a time!

Many budding young manga artists wish to be published in this magazine due to the potentially high manga volume sales it can bring in return, resulting in an equally competitive environment.

However, Jump is a highly competitive environment. Stay unpopular for too long and you will end up losing your right to stay in the magazine. This popularity was revealed in the 90s to be mirrored in the way Jump arranges its series in the magazine. The further down in the popularity polls your series ranked, the further back your series ended up in the magazine. Vice-verse, the more popular your series, the closer your series will be featured to the front of Jump.

The popularity is measured via questionnaires sent in by readers of the magazine, and while the exact numbers aren’t public information, we as readers can still ascertain to a certain degree of confidence just how popular a series is by looking at the placement of a series in the magazine, taking into account certain rules.

First of all, series that are featured on the cover are often paired with what some people call “lead color pages”, i.e. the first color pages of the magazine. When this happens, said series will be featured as the first series in the magazine, no matter its popularity. Similar to these lead color page series, there are also series with regular color pages or color spreads. The placement of these series are just as unrelated to their popularity as the lead color pages, thus making it impossible for us to determine those series’s popularity in the particular issue they’re featured in.

Secondly, due to logistical reasons, Jump also only features the ranking of a series based on how they scored seven weeks earlier. For example, if a certain chapter is printed in Issue #1, us readers will only be able to determine how popular it was based on the ranking of the series in Issue #8 (if there are no so-called double issues in between that is).

So when we see a chapter of One Piece as the third series in Jump‘s line-up, that means, ceteris paribus (Ed. Note: William wanted to be clever, so I’ll translate. “Other things being equal or held constant.”), the chapter that had been the third most popular in the votes, was seven chapters earlier.

Thirdly, while we can be sure that the line-up in Jump is mostly based on the popularity of series, it has also been known that that isn’t the only thing determining a series placement in the magazine. As mentioned in the manga series Bakuman, which delves into the issues of creating a manga series for Jump, as well as a past SBS question to Oda and the Jump+ digital series Jump no Tadashii Tsukurikata, there’s more to it than just that.

The Editor-in-Chief of the magazine also has the power to choose the actual line-up of every issue of Jump. Apparently things like genre-monotony (having series with overlapping genres follow each other in the magazine), personal motivation (wanting to push a certain series more to the front of the magazine in hopes of having more people read it in order to increase popularity), and other reasons can also be taken into account. So while placement in the magazine isn’t the absolute way of determining a series’s ranking in terms of popularity, it is unfortunately the only tool at our disposal to determine how well-received a certain chapter was.

And this is where I would like to go back to the topic of One Piece.

One Piece has been featured in Jump for over 17 years. We’ve all come to love this series, I’m sure, otherwise you wouldn’t still be reading this, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is curious in discovering how One Piece has ranked in terms of popularity in the past. With that in mind, I’ve been busy for the past half a year trying to get my hands on old issues of Jump to check the placement One Piece has had in the past and graph each arc’s placement, keeping the above-mentioned caveats in mind.

For the next six or seven “JUMP Files,” I will be bringing you this data in the form of graphs showing the placement, and thus the ranking, of each One Piece chapter as far as is possible without actually working for Shûeisha and having access to the raw data.

With each arc I will also try and give some background information to attempt to explain the fluctuations, or lack thereof, of the One Piece ranking over time. By doing this, I hope we can form some sort of discussion on why people agree/disagree with a certain chapter’s ranking and hopefully bring something new to the already packed table that is the One Piece fandom.

Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy the next few posts and that they’ll interest you as much as it does me.

I would also like to thank Adil, Firecrouch and YonkouProductions for helping out with some of the data-gathering. Without them I would’ve spent even more time collecting some of the data needed for this.