Censorship and the world of One Piece
So I didn’t originally plan on doing two columns on One Piece — these were going to be one single article, but it was just way too long, way too much information, to send together as one email, so I split it up (this second part is also obviously late, which I apologize for). While the subject is One Piece, I’m also hoping that these particular articles help reveal more about the translation process and the idea of censorship in general, with One Piece serving as just one particular example.
I’ve actually talked a little bit about censorship before in my piece about “executive meddling” and Batman: The Animated Series back in April. I think there’s a difference between that particular kind of censorship and the kind faced by anime in America, though. The pressure Executive Meddling and Standards and Practices placed on BTAS came before the episodes were made, usually allowing the writers and animators time to course correct and find new ideas they liked better than the original ones that were shot down. Anime and manga, though, have already been published or broadcast in Japan, so their censorship involves changing a finished product, and thus altering the original writer and artists’ intentions. As evidenced by my point about the manji on Ace’s back in part one of this series, I’m not 100% against every single instance of censorship forever and ever until the end of time, but in general, I think a series should be presented as close to the creator’s intentions and original release as possible.
That has rarely been the case for manga and anime in America, though. While I didn’t know it at the time, the anime I grew up on — all the series that made the genre start booming in the United States — had essentially been hacked to pieces by censorship. The first English Sailor Moon dub is notorious for its terrible scripts and voice acting — though it produced an occasional gem — but they also changed all the characters’ names to sound more American, added screen wipes and effects straight out of Windows Movie Maker, and tacked on a “Sailor Moon Sez” moral segment to the end of each episode. The original Japanese version of the two-part first season finale featured each of the Sailor Soldiers dying, one-by-one, to take down the last of the Dark Kingdom’s forces, Sailor Moon’s brainwashed love sacrificing himself at the last second to save Moon, and Moon herself using up all her lifeforce in the (successful) final attack on Queen Beryl, but all being reincarnated at the end, albeit with no memory of their friendships or lives as heroes. The American censors were so scandalized by this that they hacked it to pieces, cramming the content of these two episodes together into one practically incomprehensible finale. It was a mess.
(The Sailor Moon dub is also famous for changing Sailors Uranus and Neptune — a lesbian couple — into “cousins” but removing absolutely none of their romantic scenes or subtext.)
Then there’s the original Dragonball Z dub, which — in a series full of death with an actual afterlife that multiple characters spend a lot of on-screen time in — was unable to actually state that any characters died, making up nonsense about the cast being sent to another world when defeated that served to only further confuse an already complex mythology. Most infamous is the episode where villain Nappa blows up an entire city and his partner says “Good thing it’s Sunday and these buildings are empty,” when Nappa blows up planes and a hero yells “don’t worry, I can see their parachutes,” when Nappa hacks off Tien’s arm and instead of writhing in pain, he just taunts “Wait til it grows back!” Spoiler alert: Tien can’t regrow his arm.
Not all of these early dubs, for all their changes, were hated. The original English dub of Digimon, for example, is a bit of a gag dub. The writers didn’t want any silence in the series, so any time there were establishing shots they’d just have the off-screen characters continue yammering on with silly puns and dad jokes that didn’t exist in the original script. It changed the whole tone of the series to a more comedic one, but there’s a sizeable portion of the fan-base that prefer the English take precisely because it’s more silly and playful.
Still, as anime caught on in the United States, this kind of censorship and editing started to fade away as fans demanded more pure translations and executives started to realize that their potential viewers weren’t alienated by the more foreign aspects of their series. One dubbing company, though, remained infamous for hacking up and dumbing down their properties, and unfortunately, this company is instrumental to the story of One Piece in America: 4Kids Productions.
4Kids is probably best known for their dub of the Pokemon anime. While there are certainly some changes made to their take on Pokemon — name changes, editing out guns, referring to rice balls as “donuts,” removing an entire episode about James and Misty competing against each other in a beauty contest — it’s largely faithful, and rather beloved. I think this is because Pokemon already fell into the age range 4Kids was aiming for: kids aged, let’s say, 6-10. The real problem came when 4Kids got their hands on properties meant for older children. Even their Yu-Gi-Oh! dub is infamous for moments where their editing unintentionally turned serious moments comedic. Take the scene where Kaiba holds a gun to a man’s head; 4Kids removed the gun, but left Kaiba holding his pointed finger at a terrified man’s head. Or there’s the scene where Kaiba threatened to jump off the castle wall they were standing on if Yugi made his next move and defeated him in their duel; 4Kids changed it to Kaiba telling Yugi that if the force of his next attack knocked him off the wall, it would be on Yugi’s head, despite their attacks being carried out by holographic avatars that have never had the power to physically effect humans before or since. They didn’t put much work into their edits, is what I’m saying.
(Also, 4Kids invented the entire concept of the “Shadow Realm” wholesale. In the original Yu-Gi-Oh!, they just threatened to kill each other. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the Shadow Realm was cooler.)
In 4Kids’ defense — and this is the only time in my life I’ll ever utter that phrase — they never wanted to dub One Piece in the first place, but they were essentially forced to, as American distributors forced it into a package of other series 4Kids was buying to broadcast. Now One Piece has its fair share of violence and weapons, but it’s a series with a primary demographic of 12-year-old boys. It wouldn’t need much editing to air in America. The problem, again, is that 4Kids was aiming for a much younger target demographic, and they hacked and butchered One Piece to pieces in the process of bringing it to air, essentially ruining any chances the series ever had to find mass appeal in America in the process.
The voices were strange and grating, especially their take on Sanji, which can charitably be described as a man doing a bad Brooklyn accent while holding his nose. In one sequence they changed the spikes Don Krieg launched at Luffy into poison suction cups. Sanji’s cigarette was changed to a lollipop. In Nami’s backstory, where Arlong kills her mother Bell-Mere in front of her eyes, they instead have Arlong drag Bell-Mere off to “the dungeon.” Arlong had been on the island five minutes at that point — what dungeon? Why do we never see her again, then? There were two whole story arcs (Laboon and Little Garden) that 4Kids just decided not to dub at all, removing the episodes entirely, and it’s not because they were objectively bad episodes or too adult to edit — they just thought they slowed down the pace of the series and chucked them, despite both arcs being essential to the ongoing story and their removal creating massive plot holes.
Batman: The Animated Series was allowed to use guns because they were tommy-guns, models kids couldn’t get their hands on and thus couldn’t replicate. All the guns in One Piece are antique flintlocks, and the 4Kids dub aired on the same network that BTAS once had. They probably could have gotten away with leaving most of the guns intact, but instead changed most of them to water pistols. The one exception is the time Helmeppo holds a pistol to Coby’s head. They changed this to SOME SORT OF HAMMER/BOOT THING ON THE END OF A SPRING.
Every time I see this I want to die.
Most infamous is the theme song. This is the original Japanese One Piece theme song.
Now, this is the theme song Funimation eventually used for their dub when they took One Piece from 4Kids.
What’s the difference? Not much — the lyrics are just translated into English, and slightly tweaked to fit the music and rhyme scheme. That’s it.
Now, here’s the theme song 4Kids created instead.
If you didn’t click on this, well…it’s an expository rap. Enough said. Clearly, 4Kids was trying to change One Piece into something it wasn’t, fit its square peg into a round hole. It’s the worst kind of censorship/editing, as far as I’m concerned, because it shows no faith in or respect for the original series. As I mentioned, Funimation eventually got the rights for One Piece’s American translation and created a far better, more faithful English dub, but by that point it was really too late to salvage the series’ reputation in America.
Interestingly, even in Japan the One Piece anime was subject to some censorship in comparison to the manga. In the manga, for example, in his backstory Sanji, as a child, is stranded on a deserted island with a pirate named Zeff. Zeff gives Sanji a small bag of food to last him a month, but keeps a giant bag of food for himself. After running out of food, Sanji discovers that Zeff’s bag is full of treasure; he gave all their food to Sanji, and sawed off his own leg and ate it to survive. In the anime, they changed things so that Zeff lost his leg in the storm and shipwreck that stranded them, and simply ate nothing while on the island. I guess cannibalism is a bit brutal for kids TV, even in Japan.
I talked a bit in the first part of this piece about Viz’s American translation of the One Piece manga, but I’ll mention that, for whatever slight liberties or mistakes they made with the tone or exact translation of the script, any actual censorship is almost nonexistent, and I appreciate that. The only real exception comes with a storyline called “Skypiea.”
Skypiea might be my favorite One Piece storyline (and you can be sure someday that I’ll do a whole newsletter about it, but not today), but it’s also one of the more controversial. For those familiar, it’s the Pinkerton/In Reverie/On A Wire of One Piece — the storyline that was widely panned when originally introduced, but later redeemed and often even adored by the same fans who once hated on it. It’s been interesting watching the complaints about it fade away over the years. At the time it was derided for being the longest single storyline of the series; now there are several that have been longer. It was derided for being a “distraction from the overall storyline,” but at the time the overriding story was just “travel from island to island, having adventures until we find the One Piece”; it was Skypiea, through the new character of Nico Robin, that first introduced elements like the Poneglyphs, the Void Century (100 years of the world’s history that are not only missing, but illegal to study), and their connection to Gold Roger and the One Piece that have become integral parts of the series’ myth arc, actually making Skypiea one of the most important arcs in the series in terms of the overall story. It also introduced concepts like mantra and dials which ended up becoming essential to the series as it moved forward.
Skypiea finds Luffy and his crew riding a massive waterspout to a country on an island in the clouds, Skypiea. The American censorship comes in because Skypiea is modeled after, well, heaven. The inhabitants of Skypiea are clearly based on popular depictions of angels; when Luffy’s crew first arrives on “Angel Beach,” they’re greeted by a blonde young woman in a white robe with wings playing a harp. The ruler of Skypiea is even referred to as “God.” That said, the residents of Skypiea — including the former “God,” Gan Fall — make it clear that in Skypiea, “God” is just a title given to their ruler, and that they’re not considered truly divine (the exception is Skypiea’s current “God” himself, Eneru, a deranged narcissist who has a God Complex and literally thinks himself holy. He is canonically one of the single most powerful characters in the entirety of One Piece, so his megalomania isn’t without justification; he’s only defeated this early in the series because he’s made of electricity, and Luffy, being made of rubber, is his one natural enemy in the world).
Obviously, religion is a bit different in Japan than it is in America. One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda’s favorite manga/anime is Dragonball, which he takes great inspiration from, and Skypiea is clearly inspired by Dragonball’s own religion system, where Earth’s “God” is not an actual immortal holy deity, but simply a powerful being given a title. The American Dragonball translations solved this by referring to the character as “Kami,” the Japanese word for God, and Viz’s One Piece translation does the same, referring to Eneru and his position as Kami, and his “Priests” as “Vassals” (One of the priests, Ohm, also owns a dog named Holy, which Viz changed to “Holly” in the American translation).
It’s clearly a necessary change if only because America is a much more “traditionally” religious country than Japan, but it definitely feels arbitrary, just done because they were forced to. Characters still refer to Eneru as the “omnipotent Kami,” refuse to “pray to the Kami,” etc. The meaning is clear, even as Viz switches between the words God and Kami depending on whether a character is talking about the general concept of a God or Eneru and/or his position specifically. It almost feels like Viz feels contempt for having to make the edits at all, and after all the censorship and edits One Piece has faced in America, that’s an attitude I can rally behind.
CHECK OUT
This isn’t going to be my section to sell you on One Piece, because I could probably spend five whole newsletters longer than any of these trying to do that. Instead, I want to highlight a YouTuber (maybe the only good YouTuber) named TotallyNotMark, whose recent One Piece videos are what inspired me to take the plunge and start re-reading the series in the first place.
Mark has spent most of his time on YouTube making videos about Dragonball, which is how I discovered him, and I think he’s a shrewd and intelligent critic. His videos are exactly what I look for when I talk about the media I love; criticism based in love of the subject, but not ignoring its flaws, and willing to take a deep dive into the mechanisms that make the storytelling work. I think my favorite of his videos is this one about Goku being a flat character and why that’s not a bad thing; it made me re-think a character I haven’t always had the most love for.
A little over a month ago Mark started to feel burnt out making videos about Dragonball and decided to read One Piece for the very first time, going in completely blind and doing a video about one storyline a week. His enthusiasm about the series made it impossible for me to not dive back into it myself. Here’s my favorite of his reviews so far, his take on One Piece’s first classic storyline, “Arlong Park.”
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!