Not a lot is known about One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda. Like most mangaka, he keeps his personal life under wraps and rarely comments on anything unrelated to his work. However, fans know a little about the mangaka's family life. It turns out Oda's wife is a real-life version of Nami, one of his most popular characters.

In One Piece, Nami is the navigator of the Straw Hat Pirates. When she meets Luffy early in the series, she becomes the third member of the crew, insisting it will only be a temporary partnership. Initially, she comes across as stingy and manipulative, but she has a noble goal — buying her friends and family out of slavery. Eventually, she joins the Straw Hats properly. Nami consistently performs well on character popularity polls and is One Piece's most iconic heroine, inspiring fan art, memes and more. She's known for being cunning, loyal, and a prodigious navigator.

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Update on September 10th, 2023 by Louis Kemner: Who is Eiichiro Oda's wife? What does she have to do with her husband's legendary shonen series? Fans are eager to know more about how Eiichiro Oda found true love in his work and built a family of his own after creating the beloved character Nami, the tsundere navigator.

Eiichiro Oda Met Wife Chiaki Inaba at Jump Festa

Oda's wife Chiaki Inaba cosplaying as Nami

Chiaki Inaba is a former cosplayer, model, and race queen. At Jump Festa 2002, Inaba was cosplaying as Nami for a One Piece stage show. It was there that she ran Eiichiro Oda, and the two hit it off. They dated for a couple of years and married in 2004. Today, the two are still together. While Oda lives separately because of his rigorous work schedule drawing the One Piece manga, they still see each other often.

When Oda and Inaba's story emerged, fans were quick to point out that the mangaka had married a real-life lookalike of his character. Indeed, Nami is a popular cosplay character, but Inaba certainly stands out from the rest. She resembles Nami very closely — especially the pre-time-skip version of the character (before Nami grew her hair out).

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Oda Married a Real-Life Nami, But They Keep Their Life Private

A split image of Eiichiro Oda's Wife Chiaki Inaba and One Piece's Nami

With how private mangaka tend to be, stories about their personal lives don't circulate very often. When they do, it's often for negative reasons. In 2016, Oh My Goddess! creator Kōsuke Fujishima also married a cosplayer. Her name was Nekomu Otogi, and she was 20 years old.

Since there was a 30-plus year age difference between Fujishima and Otogi, this became a major talking point, with claims that the relationship was problematic. Oda and Inaba's marriage has been subject to no such controversy. They live privately and have had two daughters. Hopefully, the two will remain together for a long time.

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Who Is Nami In One Piece?

Nami the navigator in live action one piece

Nami is one of the first major characters who ever appeared in Eiichiro Oda's ongoing One Piece saga, though the exact details vary between different versions. She made her debut in the East Blue saga not long after Roronoa Zoro the swordsman appeared, presented as a master thief who hated pirates but ironically, was better at plundering treasure than any of them. At first, Nami was a troubled and secretive person who isn't the loyal crewmate protagonist Monkey D. Luffy thought she was. Nami was preoccupied with her personal mission to buy back her native village from Arlong the pirate, who had captured it and turned it into his private kingdom during Nami's childhood. Nami was ready to betray the Straw Hats to complete her mission, only for Arlong to double-cross her. Cornered, Nami embraced Luffy as a genuine friend with her plea "Help me." She has been a loyal, lovable Straw Hat ever since.

Around the time Eiichiro Oda met his future wife in 2002, when the latter cosplayed as Nami, it wasn't yet clear what Nami's overall story arc would be like. The One Piece anime had only been running for around three years, and the Alabasta saga had just ended. Nami was at her strongest in the narrative, and her thrilling adventure in Arlong Park was still fresh in fans' minds. She finally learned to fight for real in Alabasta and got a glow-up. Nami's character had a lot of momentum as the sole female member of Luffy's heroic crew at the time, which may have inspired Chiaki Inaba to cosplay that character. Unfortunately, Nami's character arc has lost momentum in the years since, hitting a plateau as the same person she's always been, though she is still impressive in her usual capacity as Luffy's invaluable navigator.

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More recently, the live-action One Piece series on Netflix made Nami's character fresh and exciting all over again thanks to actor Emily Rudd's outstanding performance. Netflix did Nami's character a few much-needed favors this time around, such as making her a combat-ready character from the start, fighting off Marine grunts with a wooden staff and keeping pace with Luffy and Zoro. In addition, this series introduced Nami earlier, giving her more than just a cameo in the Romance Dawn arc as opposed to the original One Piece anime.

Nami was a major player right away and met Luffy around the same time Roronoa Zoro did, which gave Nami more screen time while also giving her a chance to interact with Zoro before either of them became fellow Straw Hats. Nami and Zoro were in the same boat, literally and otherwise, and their on-screen chemistry benefitted from that. Nami and Zoro traded verbal barbs as their original selves before their relationship became defined by their shared Straw Hat status, and they vaguely bonded over rejecting Luffy's offer to be a crew together. On a cosmetic level, Nami's character was more tasteful than ever, wearing comfortable and practical outfits as a beautiful young woman while not being reduced to fan service, as she was in many arcs in One Piece's anime. Nami was best defined by her personality, skills, and backstory, not being "the girl" or fan service fodder, and that made her more cosplay-worthy than ever before for any One Piece fan.