Japan recently marked 15 years since the devastating 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that claimed thousands of lives and left countless families without homes. As people online reminisced about their experiences, X users who were in elementary school at the time realized that they had a collective memory of receiving volumes of manga donations at their schools, but that they couldn’t find anything about them online.
The mystery gained attention when user Mimosa Salad (@yeqq88465) posted, “During the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, I’m pretty sure Eiichiro Oda donated a full set of One Piece volumes to my elementary school. I used to read them nonstop during recess, but when I Google it, nothing comes up for some reason.”
The post triggered a wave of comments from those who experienced the same thing. One user from inland Iwate wrote, “I tweeted about it a few years ago and tried Googling it, but nothing came up. I was like, ‘Who did this?!’ I’m glad to find someone like me.” Another user from Miyagi chimed in by saying that the books were for in-library use only at their school and assumed that “they’d been donated to every single school in Miyagi.”
The mystery was finally solved when user RN黒猫レオパード (@rto0y) unearthed a 2012 blog post from Otomo Elementary School. It turned out that the donation was not a personal, unrecorded act by Eiichiro Oda, but a large-scale initiative by publisher Shueisha. The company offered all 68 volumes (at the time) to any elementary school across the six Tohoku prefectures that requested them, with the aim of helping children regain their spirits after the events of the earthquake disaster.
In the case of Otome Elementary School, bringing comics to school premises was prohibited, so the library made an exception for One Piece. “We decided that students could read them inside the library, provided they agreed to not take the books out of the library and not bring in other manga.” The gesture was reportedly well-received, according to the blog post, and the library was full of children reading One-Piece during recess. Even those who owned the manga enjoyed reading it in the library together with their friends.
That school was likely not the only one to make an exception thanks to Shueisha’s offer, as another user on X recalls the One Piece manga donation “causing a revolution” at their school, as it had never allowed comics in its library previously. Amidst the recent wave of negative news in Japan’s manga industry, the silent gesture by Shueisha has gathered much praise.
