One Piece is one of the longest and most famous stories in the world. In addition to the manga, anime and merch in all possible forms, there is now also a dedicated One Piece gym in Tokyo. MeinMMO editor Sophia Weiß visited the gym for you.
The Brag Men One-Piece Gym is located in Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s most famous districts. It covers the entire ninth floor of a shopping center and has everything a gym needs: cardio equipment, machines, free weights and a class room.
It is named after a book from the One Piece manga, which tells incredible stories about the Grand Line. By the way, Brag Men means something like braggart – that’s why no one in the world of One Piece believes what’s in the book. The literary work can be found in Chapter 115 (Volume 13) and Chapter 397 (Volume 41).
To find out whether the real Brag Men in Tokyo are braggarts or well-trained city pirates, I treated myself to a few hours in the gym on my last trip to Japan.
The entrance to the Brag Men is smartly decorated with a barrel and a couch, like from the manga.
An event gym with great attention to detail – The Brag Men
You can visit the gym just like that – even as a foreign and unannounced visitor. There are a total of five different packages, one of which is dedicated to young people aged 13 and over. The gym explains exactly how this works on its homepage.
The prices are more expensive than I’m personally used to. But that’s because it’s an event gym in the middle of Tokyo. This is where the expensive rents and license costs come together.
But that shouldn’t deter anyone from visiting: the gym is furnished with an incredible amount of attention to detail. Directly opposite the entrance you can see a pillar on which the Japanese voice actors of Luffy, Zorro, Nami, Usopp and Sanji have immortalized themselves with their signatures.
On the wall to the left, Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, left a motivating saying for the trainees:
Miracles only happen to those who never give up!
Many of the walls in the gym are decorated with larger-than-life panels from the manga: Behind the adductor and abductor machines, the pirate emperors Big Mom and Kaido meet for the first time. Behind the lat pulldown, Luffy confronts Blackbeard. And next to it, Whitebeard’s very first appearance takes up the wall.
Luffy’s black and red Gear 4 hand wraps around a second pillar and seems to grip so tightly that the concrete cracks. The course room is furnished as if it were the foredeck of the Thousand Sunny – including large screens on the walls that make you think you are on the high seas. You can see exactly what this looks like on the Brag Men Instagram.
At the same time, the best of the One Piece anime soundtrack plays in the background. There is even a shelf with all the One Piece manga available so far and seating. For the short break between sets.
Here are a few impressions for you. Click on the images to enlarge them:
Each locker is named after a different character: Benn Beckman, Pandaman, Borsalino…
The signatures of the speakers of the first five Straw Hats.
In the One-Piece Gym you not only lift normal weights, but also Berry
There are one-piece decorations throughout the gym – like the steering wheel with log port on the Thousand Sunny.
Gear 4 Luffy shakes a supporting pillar.
There are several of the (almost) life-size manga panels to look at.
Quick cosplay on the lat pulldown!
Extra effort under the strict gaze of the pirate emperors
For me, the trip was definitely worth it: one thing is that I fulfilled my training quota. The other thing is that I trained in perhaps the coolest gym ever.
Sitting on the lat pulldown and watching Whitebeard’s big mustache move up and down in front of me over and over again was extremely entertaining. At the leg press, Kaido’s mural stared at me with incredible disdain. Of course, I added a lot of extra weight to it.
I definitely didn’t want to disappoint the Pirate Emperor. He didn’t notice that I had to deal with severe muscle soreness the next day.
But I had a lot of fun with the gimmicks that had nothing to do with the training: If you wanted, you could do upper arm exercises with a sandbag shaped like a leg of meat. A statue of Chibi Buggy, Buggy the Clown without his torso and legs, lets you try to pull him apart.
Luffy defeats Buggy in their first meeting in the East Blue and shoots him into the wind. But Buggy’s torso and legs remain behind and so the miniature pirate clown sets off in search of his body.
But the whole decoration is just like that… One Piece: A stool looks like a porneglyph. The floor is reminiscent of ship planks. Boxes are stacked on the walls like in the Sunny’s storage room. The doors to the course room have portholes.
Basically, I trained on the Straw Hats’ ship. Zorro and his huge barbells just weren’t there right now. He probably got lost during training. Classic.
After three, almost four hours of sweating, I was pretty drained. Shower, buy another location-exclusive T-shirt and go eat udon. By the way, Japanese noodle soup is the perfect meal for after a workout.
Would I train at the One Piece Gym again? Yes, absolutely. Can I recommend the studio? Absolutely, as long as you like One Piece.
Brag Men is a great event gym that is set up with a lot of heart and attention to detail. Definitely worth a visit. So if you have a few hours of unplanned time on your next visit to Japan and a few days in Tokyo, stop by. I scheduled my visit to coincide with the weekend of the Monster Hunter Now Carnival. You can read about everything that happened here: I walked through Tokyo with 20,000 players to get beaten up by dragons in a Monster Hunter Now event