VIZ Media

VIZ Media, LLC, headquartered in San Francisco, California, is a major American anime, manga and Japanese entertainment company formed by the merger of VIZ, LLC, and ShoPro Entertainment. The company is commonly referred to as "Viz", the same name used in previous incarnations of VIZ LLC.

Viz also produces a manga and anime review magazine, Animerica; as well as an English language version of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump (shōnen manga) magazine, and a shōjo manga monthly called Shojo Beat.

It formerly published Animerica Extra, a monthly manga anthology (which was converted to shōjo partway through its run), and PULP magazine, an adult-oriented monthly manga anthology that featured story lines inappropriate for younger readers, though not pornography (see seinen, josei).

It is jointly-owned by Japanese publishers Shogakukan and Shueisha, and licensing house Shogakukan Productions (ShoPro), a Shogakukan subsidiary.

One Piece
Viz is the one that produces the English One Piece manga. While the changes in this version are not as extreme as the 4Kids's changes, there still remains quite a few criticisms.

The earliest criticism of the Viz interpretation of One Piece pertained to the format of its English volume covers; unlike other Shonen Jump titles such as Naruto or Bleach, which were almost identical in layout to their tankobon counterparts, One Piece's cover design experienced several changes. The large central portrait on each cover was shrunk and centered, with a "sparkly" border depicting a map added to fill in the space. Additionally, the "Shonen Jump" label traditionally branded above or below a manga's title was replaced with a large red "ONE PIECE" bump, which apparently led some readers to believe the series was named "ONE PIECE ONE PIECE". When asked about this change, Viz Media (then Viz Communications) explained that the title could be easily misread as "NEP ECE" (Eiichiro Oda himself expressed amusement at how easily this mistake could be made ; however, no response was given regarding the layout change for the cover portrait.

Throughout the serialization of One Piece in Shonen Jump, fans of the Japanese version have expressed great uneasiness because of Viz's positions toward Americanization. The names of attacks originally in other languages, like Zoro's santoryu (in Japanese) and Sanji's martial arts (French) are sometimes (but not always) fully translated in English, thus obscuring the equivocal meanings (including puns) intended to be enjoyed by the author. Additionally, Viz does not put full effort to localize language-based puns, and will sometimes completely ignore them; this lassitude renders a number of the visual gags in the manga detached from the plot and incoherent. Finally, Viz's desire to appeal to younger readers (in spite of One Piece being advertised as a "TEEN" product) have driven the company to omit almost all instances of profanities; while fans did not object to this strong degree of bowdlerization, profanities have been replaced with "pseudo-swears", such as "darn", all of which among older fans have been widely viewed as annoying and even insulting. Emotionally profound scenes in One Piece, such as the dialogue between Nami and Arlong in Volume 9, are held to have been reduced in impact when compared to the Japanese edition due to the simplified language. Another example is, when Luffy was angry that Mihawk almost killed Zoro in Volume 6, Luffy said "Darn you" instead of "Damn you." In some ways it reduced the amount of tension Luffy clearly felt against Mihawk.

After the English adaptation of the anime began on the Fox Box (later renamed 4Kids TV), Viz renamed the character Roronoa Zoro to Roronoa Zolo, and later editions of the first four volumes of the series were changed to match this. The rising profile of the series in North America put both VIZ and 4Kids at risk of lawsuit from the trademark holders of the fictional character, Zorro (though inspiration for the name comes from zorome, a Japanese term for a repetition of numbers). The majority of fans were either outraged or bewildered by this change, which was made abruptly after fifty chapters of the previous spelling, and with numerous spellings by Oda (in English) on related media. While "Zoro" is the official romanized spelling of the character's name in Japan, both spellings would be pronounced the same way by a native speaker of Japanese.

In 2005, Viz Media began altering the artwork of the One Piece manga, editing out controversial religious icons such as manji (known as a swastika by westerners, but usually differentiated from the manji by a 45 degree rotation and hooked arms facing clockwise). While fans did not object to these changes, issue by issue comparisons lead to the revelation that these changes were inconsistent; sometimes the manji were edited, and other times there were arrows documenting the signifiance of manji in Eastern cultures. These edits are not present in the actual volumes.

Despite these inconsistencies, there were few complaints to the art edits until One Piece chapter 96, where Viz Media altered the name of the island-city "Loguetown" to "Roguetown". Fans were outraged. The city in question was described numerous times throughout successive chapters as the "town of beginnings and endings" where Gold Roger was born and died, the setting of the prologue and epilogue to his (and Luffy's) story. This change was received with heated and violent criticism, as many older fans felt Viz was trying to restrict One Piece's accessibility to diverse audiences by removing literary elements from the story; some accused Viz of outright discrimination against Eiichiro Oda, for he does not speak English and therefore has difficulty expressing what he wants to in a different language.

However, there is far more animosity directed toward 4Kids Entertainment for their more extreme treatment of the One Piece anime than with Viz Media. This is because anime is a far more accessible medium of entertainment, as it can potentially reach more customers than a manga can. Like 4Kids in some respects, some of Viz Media's translations are written to appeal to younger individuals, but in a dissimilar fashion to 4Kids, references to death, foreign culture elements, religious symbols, and violence remain intact, despite the random omission of swear words.

The Title Pages in the US Shonen Jump
Another notable change is in regards to the title pages of each chapter in Shonen Jump -- starting in mid-to-late 2005, Viz started dropping some of the title pages in each issue, with no replacement references to the chapter number or title, in effect making a One Piece segment one giant chapter or a regular-sized chapter with a double-length chapter. There were some issues (such as the June 2006 issue) where the cover promises three full chapters of One Piece, only to have the three chapters "welded" together by removing the title pages, making the chapters' starts and ends undistinguishable. In the September 2006 issue, the first One Piece chapter in that issue began with the first page of the story, with the "One Piece" logo slapped upon it, with no chapter number or title. The consequence of this is that the episode numbers would end up being skipped, creating an illusion that Shonen Jump is skipping chapters, or even rejoining a story in progress. Also, some of the important parts of the side story on the title pages (in this case, one involving Koby and Helmeppo) are skipped over, much to the chagrin of those who follow it. It is unclear exactly why Viz was removing some One Piece title pages; this practice is also limited to One Piece, as the other series represented still have all their title pages. The title pages have appeared intact in the graphic novels, leading some to believe that the practice has been used as "extra incentive" to get readers to buy the collected volumes.