As many of you know by now, Naruto‘s fifteen year long manga serialization has come to an end in this week’s 50th issue of both the Japanese and English Weekly Shônen Jump. With this anticipated finale also comes the departure of Naruto‘s creator, Masashi Kishimoto, from the pages of Shonen Jump for the foreseeable future.

For international fans, the term “Big Three” is often thrown around as a reference to the “current three biggest manga in Jump”. For many years a lot of international fans have heralded Bleach, Naruto and One Piece as the big Shonen Jump flagship properties. Many series in Jump have achieved very high popularity in both sales and ranking but none have reached the heights Naruto and One Piece have set over the last decade and a half.

Being part of the Jump family — and especially being both of the creators of Jump‘s most treasured properties — over the years, Eiichiro Oda and Masashi Kishimoto have often mentioned each other in the Jump author comments, they have drawn parodies of the others’ respective series’ main character for their series’ tenth anniversary, and today, the One Piece Podcast would like to share with you a retrospective of the last fifteen years of Oda and Kishimoto’s interaction seen in and out of Jump.

Since fifteen years have past, this post cannot include every minute detail put in the background, like the infamous Straw Hat Tontatta, but if we do find any more, we will be sure to post them in the future.

Without further ado, here is a look at the last fifteen years of Oda and Kishimoto.

On the cover page of One Piece chapter 766 you can see Luffy eating a bowl of ramen — from what seems to be the infamous “Ichiraku Ramen” from Naruto — and sitting at a table with what appears to be Naruto eating a piece of meat. The green squares show the so-called “Naruto,” an ingredient in ramen, and in blue are highlighted certain series related references (the Kanoha mark, Ichiraku, the milk with the ramen) and in red, if you connect the first letters of the items on the menu written on the wall in the back, you can see Oda’s message to Naruto: 「ナルト、おつれさまでした。」(Naruto, thanks for all the work/Good job!). Of course the One Piece title itself was also given a facelift for this chapter.

Lastly, if you were to take the first syllable of each of the characters’ names in this scene, you would get ナ（ミ）ル（フィ）ト（二ートニー・チョッパー）(Na[mi]Lu[ffy, pronounced similarly to what we’d write Ruffy in Japanese]To[ny Tony Chopper])





Q: Were you aware of One Piece? KISHIMOTO: It is impossible to be unaware. (Both Naruto and One Piece) are serialized in the same magazine, and One Piece has always been running ahead of the pack. I have been able to work so hard writing Naruto thanks to One Piece.

(Source: The Asahi Shimbun, Nov. 10, 2014)

If you find any more references made from one series to the other, send them in to us at [email protected], on Twitter at OnePiecePodcast, on Facebook, or in the comments below and we’ll update this post! Congratulations to Masashi Kishimoto on finishing Naruto after fifteen long years, and we wish him the best of luck in the future!!