Billboard Japan has published its year-end Hot Manga chart for 2026, and the top three places have gone to One Piece, One Piece and One Piece. Volume 113 of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate saga is the year’s number one, volume 115 is second and volume 114 is third, which leaves every other comic in Japan fighting over fourth like passengers arguing about the last lifeboat.
The chart, released on 14 November, covers the 52 weeks from 27 October 2025 to 25 October 2026 and blends shop sales with ebooks and other measures. Volume 113 came out in November 2025, right at the start of the counting period, and then simply refused to leave: it appeared in the weekly chart for 45 of the 52 weeks, more than any other book, finishing first in physical shops and seventh in digital. Volume 114 followed in March and volume 115 in July, so the series was releasing a new book roughly every four months and each one went straight onto the podium. The odd running order, with 115 ahead of 114, is just the newer book selling faster in less time.
The supporting statistics are the sort that stop sounding like publishing and start sounding like geology. Shueisha announced in March that One Piece had passed 600 million copies in circulation worldwide. Volume 115 was the 59th in a row to have a first printing of more than three million. The anime began its Elbaf arc in April. And the manga itself, which started in Weekly Shōnen Jump in July 1997, reaches its 30th anniversary next year, a fact the Jump editorial department noted in its thank-you message along with due respect to Oda and gratitude to the readers who have been sailing with Luffy all this time. Some of those readers started as schoolchildren and are now buying it for their own.
For the record, the rest of the top ten runs as follows. Yoshihiro Togashi’s Hunter × Hunter volume 39 is fourth, proof that absence makes the heart grow fonder and the print run larger. Spy × Family volume 17 is fifth and Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End volume 15 sixth. Seventh, eighth and ninth go to three consecutive volumes of Yasuhisa Hara’s Warring States epic Kingdom, which has now reached volume 80 and is the only series here that can look One Piece in the eye on shelf space. Tenth is the first volume of the Jujutsu Kaisen spin-off Modulo. Nine of the ten are Shueisha titles; Shogakukan’s Frieren is the lone outsider, and two series between them hold six of the places.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have watched plenty of long-runners coast into their fourth decade on goodwill and reprints. This is not that. A comic 115 volumes deep is outselling everything launched since, in the home market, in a year when it also had to share the shelves with itself. Oda has said for years that the story is in its final saga. On these numbers, his publisher will be in no hurry to see him find the treasure.
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