Frieren edges out One Piece in Japanese manga sales despite lengthy hiatus

One Piece remains a cultural giant even as newer series dominate charts

One Piece might be one of the biggest names in manga, but a new report from Oricon suggests newer series are increasingly capable of challenging its dominance. Tracking half-year manga sales from November 2025 through May 2026, Oricon lists Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End as the top-selling manga in Japan, beating One Piece by around 20,000 copies.

On paper, that might sound like a major upset for one of Weekly Shonen Jump’s legendary “Big Three," the globally influential trio of Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece. In reality, the gap is fairly narrow: Frieren’s 1,618,600 million vs One Piece’s 1,598,500 million in manga sales. What makes Frieren’s performance especially notable is how it achieved those numbers despite frequent hiatuses and a dramatically smaller catalog of volumes compared to Eiichiro Oda’s long-running pirate epic.

One Piece has effectively become one of manga’s most stable institutions, even with its regular breaks. Readers have long grown accustomed to Oda taking scheduled pauses every three to four chapters, creating a release rhythm that has become normalized over nearly three decades of serialization. Frieren, by comparison, has experienced multiple extended hiatuses in just a few years of publication, including its current break, which began in October 2025 amid reported health concerns affecting creators Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Much of Frieren’s recent sales momentum can likely be attributed to the explosive success of its anime adaptation. Following the anime’s debut, the manga reportedly doubled from 10 million to 20 million copies in circulation worldwide. Its second anime season, which premiered in January 2026, appears to have sustained that momentum into this year’s sales period, helping the series reach roughly 1.62 million copies sold in Japan during Oricon’s latest half-year tracking window.

More broadly, Frieren overtaking One Piece highlights how dramatically the manga industry has changed since One Piece first debuted in 1997. Even though the Japanese manga market has shrunk compared to the US, it’s increasingly driven by concentrated bursts of cultural momentum largely fueled by anime adaptations, social media visibility, and accessible back catalogs rather than longevity alone. Frieren is far from the first series to capitalize on that shift, with titles like Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Blue Lock also surpassing One Piece in sales during peak popularity periods.

Still, temporary sales rankings do little to diminish One Piece’s historical position within the industry. The franchise has more than 600 million copies in circulation worldwide and has spent years dominating annual manga sales charts. At this stage, One Piece functions less like a seasonal bestseller and more like a permanent cultural institution. Frieren may be winning the current moment, but One Piece still defines the era it helped create.