ONE PIECE — Filming Locations & Real Places

Finish binging the One Piece live-action and, weirdly, Cape Town starts pulling at you.

I looked up where the Straw Hats' first voyage through the East Blue was actually filmed.

The answer: Cape Town, South Africa. At Cape Town Film Studios — one of the largest film production facilities on the entire African continent — the crew built full-scale sets for the Going Merry, Baratie, Loguetown, and even the snow-covered Drum Island.

What's even more surprising is that creator Eiichiro Oda actually visited the set in person. He reportedly signed off on every detail of the sets and props himself, which explains a lot about why manga fans were willing to trust this adaptation from the start.

The in-universe One Piece world map — East Blue, Grand Line, all of it — obviously doesn't correspond to anywhere on the real globe. It's a purely fictional layer that exists only in the manga, anime, and now the live-action.

리알토 다리와 대운하, 베네치아(워터세븐의 실제 모티브) · Saffron Blaze 촬영 · Wikimedia Commons

What is real, though, shows up somewhere else entirely. In Kumamoto, Oda's hometown, there are statues of the Straw Hat crew, and once you learn they weren't built as a tourist gimmick but as part of an actual earthquake-recovery project after the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake, those statues start to look different.

Rewatching the live-action with the source material in mind, it becomes clear this was never just an action-adventure — from the start, it's a story about gathering a crew. Zoro's vow as a swordsman, Sanji's longing for the All Blue, Usopp's courage — the way all these desperate personal dreams eventually converge into one shared voyage is exactly what's carried this series for more than two decades.

From the moment Luffy eats the Gomu Gomu fruit and sets sail with Shanks's promise held close, through Loguetown and into the Grand Line, the entire scale of the story shifts.

Watching Zoro, Nami, Usopp, and Sanji join one by one to form the Straw Hat crew hits differently on a rewatch too — it's not just 'recruiting,' it's Luffy crossing paths with each of them at the most desperate moment of their own lives.

From there, as Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook, and Jinbe join and the crew gets pulled into the conflicts of islands like the Alabasta Kingdom, what's interesting is that this isn't just adding characters — it's how the whole world keeps expanding.

사그라다 파밀리아, 바르셀로나(도플라밍고 왕국의 실제 모티브) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Then there's the Summit War around Ace and the Whitebeard Pirates — the exact point where a story that started as small East Blue adventures completely transforms into an epic that touches the World Government and the deepest truths of its history. What that war leaves behind, for Luffy and for the story as a whole, is something you really need to see for yourself.

Follow the new conflicts that come after, like the rise of Blackbeard's crew, and it starts to make sense why this manga is still nowhere near finished — it just keeps expanding its world.

Filming has continued at the same Cape Town studio through Season 3, so it seems like this city is only going to matter more to One Piece fans going forward.

So instead of assuming it's all just a set built somewhere and moving on, it's worth knowing that places like Table Mountain in Cape Town or the statues in Kumamoto are real places you can actually go.

Whether Luffy actually becomes Pirate King, what One Piece even is — I won't spoil that here. It's a story that's still going, so follow it yourself and find out.