12 Nov 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: The Buster Call on Ohara – One Piece and the International Law of Destroying a People’s Past
[Estéfany Rocha Monteiro is a Brazilian lawyer and researcher. She studied at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and has previously worked with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the United Nations.]
Since 1997, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece has followed Monkey D. Luffy, a young pirate searching for the legendary treasure that gives the manga its name, across a world of islands, kingdoms and competing political orders. As that voyage expands, it also uncovers a history that the World Government has tried to place beyond investigation: one hundred years, known as the Void Century, are missing from the historical record, and research capable of recovering them is prohibited.
Evidence of those missing years nevertheless remains on Poneglyphs, stone inscriptions dispersed across the world and written in an ancient script that very few people can decipher. No single inscription restores the history that has disappeared, since their contents acquire meaning through comparison with other Poneglyphs and with historical materials preserved elsewhere. On Ohara, generations of archaeologists had brought those practices together around the Tree of Knowledge, an immense library in which the study of books, archaeological evidence and the ancient script had developed into a common scholarly tradition.
The consequences of the prohibition are told through Nico Robin, who grows up inside that scholarly community and learns to decipher the ancient script while still a child. When government agents discover what the Oharan archaeologists have been studying, Professor Clover is shot as he begins to explain what their research has revealed about the civilisation that existed during the missing century, while a Buster Call, a World Government military protocol authorising overwhelming Marine force against a designated target, is activated against the island. The bombardment reaches the researchers together with the place and materials through which their knowledge had been produced, accumulated and transmitted.
As the Tree of Knowledge burns, the archaeologists spend their final hours carrying books towards its windows and throwing them into the lake below. Ohara is destroyed, most of its scholarly community is killed and eight-year-old Robin escapes with knowledge that will make her a fugitive for much of her life, while the collection disappears beneath the water. The scene appears to join the fate of the books to that of the people who had worked through them, until Oda returns to Ohara many years later and allows those two histories to separate.
That return occurs through Dr Vegapunk, a scientist employed by the World Government who had known Clover and visited Ohara after its destruction. He finds that the scholars’ final effort had preserved much of the collection: giants had recovered the books from the lake and carried them to Elbaf, where Vegapunk later gained access to the materials and continued research informed by what the Oharan archaeologists had discovered. By the time another scholar can work through the collection, the books have crossed the destruction of the library that assembled them, while much of the linguistic knowledge, research memory and intellectual community that had surrounded them survives only through scattered people and relationships.
The books that eventually reach Elbaf are unusual in one respect: their recovery preserves much of a collection whose original library and scholarly community have been destroyed. In actual armed conflicts, the loss of a library has often included the loss of the records it held. On 25 August 1992, shelling set fire to the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, destroying much of its documentary holdings. In a 2007 study of libraries and archives affected by the wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, András J. Riedlmayer examined attacks on collections alongside the persecution and displacement of the communities whose histories those collections preserved. He also followed the institutions into the post-war period, when recovery and reconstruction were bound up with disputes over identity, historical representation and belonging.
The destruction of libraries in the Balkans also forms part of the wider history examined by Rebecca Knuth in her 2003 book, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. Alongside Bosnia, Knuth considers the fate of written culture under Nazi Germany and in Kuwait, Maoist China and Tibet, tracing the place of books and libraries within political projects directed against communities and their histories. Riedlmayer’s account attends to the institutions and their post-war fate, while Knuth examines the political purposes served by attacks on written culture across several settings. Both raise a problem that the survival of Ohara’s books leaves open: preserving documents is connected to the survival of the people, practices and institutions through which those documents can acquire historical meaning.
The same relationship is present in Ohara’s destruction. Clover is shot while attempting to explain the history his colleagues have uncovered, the researchers are killed as their library burns, and the World Government’s prohibition on their work survives the bombardment. The attack has already received attention as a possible subject of international criminal law: in a November 2025 study, Uthpreksha C considers whether the killing of civilians, the persecution of the archaeologists and the destruction of cultural property could engage Article 7 of the Rome Statute. The later chapters of Oda’s story pose a further question alongside responsibility for the attack. Once the rescued books reach other readers, the account of destruction has to accommodate the survival of a collection and the loss of the institution that once gave it a place within a shared practice of research.
The recovery of the books therefore opens an issue extending beyond the moment of the Buster Call. Riedlmayer and Knuth locate the destruction of libraries within histories of conflict, persecution and the struggle over historical representation; the legal reading of Ohara published in 2025 concentrates on the conduct of the attack. Oda’s subsequent account makes it possible to ask what the rescued volumes preserve when the original repository is gone, what remains uncertain about the archaeologists’ records and interpretations, and what follows from a prohibition on researching those materials. In this context, this article examines the different forms of injury that may remain after documentary materials survive an attack on the institution and community through which they were assembled, interpreted and transmitted.
Methodologically, the essay treats the bombardment of Ohara and the later recovery of its books in Elbaf as successive episodes within a fictional case, tracing the fate of (i) the collection and its repository, (ii) the records and scholarly practices through which its contents could be interpreted, and (iii) the freedom to pursue the research for which the archaeologists were targeted. The legal comparison draws on the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) recommendations on documentary heritage, scholarship on archival practices and the International Criminal Court’s reparations order concerning Timbuktu. Its contribution lies in distinguishing the interests that physical preservation may protect from the additional losses and continuing restrictions that require separate legal and evidentiary assessment. The first section examines the protection of books, libraries and the activities undertaken within them; the second considers what the rescue of Ohara’s collection leaves to be established about its research record; the third addresses the kinds of harm that a reparations proceeding could recognise, subject to the law applicable to an actual attack.
The Books, the Library and the People Who Read Them
The books now kept in Elbaf and the Tree of Knowledge that once housed them followed different paths after the Buster Call. The 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict addresses that difference by protecting certain movable cultural objects and the buildings principally devoted to their preservation or exhibition. Under Article 1(a), manuscripts, objects of historical or archaeological interest, scientific collections and important collections of books or archives qualify when they meet the Convention’s threshold of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people; Article 1(b) separately covers repositories such as major libraries. Article 4 regulates acts of hostility against protected property, subject to its conditions concerning imperative military necessity. Accordingly, in an armed conflict governed by those rules, the survival of books could establish the preservation of some protected objects while leaving the destruction of a qualifying library to be assessed on its own terms.
The Tree of Knowledge also supported the work carried out around its collections. Clover and successive generations of archaeologists deciphered the ancient script, compared inscriptions with other sources and taught new researchers how to examine the evidence of the Void Century. Article 15 of the 1954 Hague Convention addresses personnel engaged in the protection of cultural property, subject to the interests of security; its limited subject matter leaves the scholars’ broader activities to be considered under other provisions. Article 15(1)(a) of the ICESCR protects participation in cultural life, and Article 15(2) addresses the conservation, development and diffusion of science and culture. In General Comment No. 21 (2009), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights discusses access, participation and contribution to cultural life as interconnected forms of engagement with cultural knowledge. Those obligations provide a distinct basis for asking how a continuing prohibition on historical investigation affects people seeking to study and communicate their society’s past.
The archaeologists’ methods also invite an assessment under Article 15(3) of the Covenant, which requires States Parties to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research. General Comment No. 25 (2020) includes natural and social sciences within the Committee’s account of science, while giving weight to methods that permit critical examination and the testing and verification of findings. The practice described on Ohara involves the decipherment of inscriptions, the comparison of sources and the revision of historical interpretations; whether a comparable activity falls within the provision would depend on those methods and the relevant circumstances. Oda’s account nevertheless makes the practical effect of the prohibition clear. The research was forbidden before the library was attacked, and the books’ eventual recovery does not itself authorise their unrestricted study. The move from Ohara to Elbaf thus preserves the material needed for further investigation while leaving the treatment of the people who undertake it as a separate question.
When the Record Remains
In Elbaf, the books recovered from Ohara’s lake are housed in the Owl Library, and Robin, who escaped the bombardment as a child, reunites with Jaguar D. Saul, another survivor connected to their preservation. The meeting returns a reader of the ancient script to the collection that her teachers tried to save, while the books themselves have acquired a new institutional home. Their survival, however, establishes only part of the history of Ohara’s research. The manga leaves open how much of the archaeologists’ working record was recovered with the volumes: catalogues, annotations, provisional transcriptions, correspondence and records of provenance may have survived in whole, in part or not at all. Until those possibilities are established, the rescue of the collection cannot be treated as evidence that every relationship between its contents and the scholars’ earlier findings remains recoverable.
The uncertainty surrounding the working record has consequences for the preservation of documentary heritage. UNESCO’s 2015 Recommendation concerning the Preservation of, and Access to, Documentary Heritage Including in Digital Form addresses cataloguing, metadata, contextual documentation and arrangements that enable collections to be identified and consulted; as a recommendation, it provides non-binding guidance. Writing in 2002, Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook examined how appraisal, arrangement, description and access influence the records that remain available and the histories researchers can construct from them. The institutional practices considered in their work help explain the significance of the information that may have accompanied the Ohara books. A surviving text can be legible while the evidence needed to identify its original arrangement, provenance or relationship to another source has become uncertain.
For a reader working with the recovered collection, the next step would therefore be to establish which links to its earlier scholarly life can still be documented. Marks within the volumes, surviving catalogues, Vegapunk’s own research, Saul’s knowledge of their recovery and Robin’s ability to decipher the script might each preserve part of that record; their contents and reliability would need to be examined before any conclusion about particular losses could be reached. The distinction affects the kind of history a recovered archive can support. An inscription may remain available for translation even where the earlier archaeologists’ reasons for connecting it to other evidence can no longer be reconstructed. That is a question about the condition and use of surviving evidence, with consequences that extend beyond the physical conservation of the books.
Where records concern serious violations and possible accountability, their preservation acquires an additional function. The 2005 Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity, prepared by Diane Orentlicher, addresses measures against the destruction, concealment and falsification of relevant archives in Principle 14 and access by victims and historical researchers in Principle 15. These principles concern records relating to violations of human rights and humanitarian law, and their subject matter cannot be extended to every historical document imagined in One Piece. Within their defined field, they connect documentary survival to the ability to establish and contest accounts of past abuses. Once those evidentiary functions are identified, a further question arises in a real case of cultural destruction: which established injuries, including losses affecting a collection’s use and its community, could an applicable reparations regime address?
Repairing What Survived
The International Criminal Court confronted that problem in proceedings arising from attacks on religious and historic buildings in Timbuktu, Mali. Following Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi’s conviction for intentionally directing attacks against protected sites, Trial Chamber VIII issued a Reparations Order on 17 August 2017, examining damage to the buildings alongside consequential economic loss and moral harm suffered by individuals and the affected community. The order considered the consequences of destruction for people connected to the sites while assessing harm within the scope of the conviction and the evidence before the Chamber. Although a library presents different uses and possible losses, the Timbuktu proceedings permit a closer examination of how damage to protected cultural property and injury to a community may enter the same reparations assessment.
That relationship between the property itself and the people attached to it has also been contested. In 2017, Marina Lostal criticised the prosecution’s emphasis on the intangible and communal dimensions of cultural heritage in the Al Mahdi case, arguing that such an emphasis risked obscuring the autonomous protection owed to cultural property. Her criticism concerns the prosecution’s treatment of the cultural sites and must be distinguished from the Chamber’s subsequent reparations findings. Applied to the issues raised by Ohara, the distinction affects what would first need to be proved: a claim for the destruction of a protected repository requires the relevant rule, violation and injury to be established, while claims concerning lost records, disrupted cultural participation or restrictions on research involve further factual and legal questions. The survival of books therefore does not settle the scope of harm associated with the destruction of the place in which they had been preserved.
An assessment of a comparable real-world attack would begin with the wrongful conduct established under the applicable regime and the losses attributable to it. Depending on the evidence, appropriate forms of reparation might concern surviving collections, the rebuilding of facilities, recovery of catalogues, restoration of professional capacity or measures enabling access to the material. The continuing prohibition on researching a recovered archive would require an examination of the obligations governing scientific freedom and cultural participation, whose legal bases differ from the provisions protecting cultural property during armed conflict. The books transported to Elbaf allow these inquiries to be considered together while preserving the separate conditions under which each could produce a remedy.
Conclusion
The books rescued from Ohara’s lake eventually reach the Owl Library, where Robin can study materials that the bombardment was meant to place beyond her reach. Their return alters the story of the destruction without reversing it: the Tree of Knowledge has been lost, most of the scholars who worked there are dead, and the extent to which their annotations, catalogues and unfinished interpretations survived remains uncertain. International law offers different points of entry into these consequences. The 1954 Hague Convention addresses qualifying cultural property and repositories during armed conflict; the Covenant’s guarantees concerning cultural life and scientific research bear upon the conditions of studying and communicating knowledge; and reparations practice directs attention to the established wrong, affected interests and proven losses. Recovery of a collection can therefore coexist with injuries whose repair depends on evidence extending well beyond the condition of the surviving volumes.
The continuing ban on research into the Void Century makes that difference consequential for Robin and for the readers who inherit the Oharan scholars’ work. A rebuilt library could house their books, and preserved research records might support renewed interpretations, while the power to prevent those interpretations from being pursued would remain to be examined under a different set of obligations. A closer study of the recovery of library collections and research records in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the restoration of catalogues, scholarly access and institutional capacity, would help test how those forms of loss are documented in an actual setting. The return of the Ohara books leaves the historical question open, together with the question of who may investigate the evidence that survived.