Oda has spent twenty-five years embedding homages to classic manga and anime into One Piece’s biggest moments. Cyborg 009 became Germa 66. Nightmare Before Christmas became Brook. The three-round Davy Back Fight lifted its structure from Porco Rosso. Vegaforce One is Tetsujin 28-gō. Each time, the homage runs deeper than the surface: Oda borrows the concept, not just the look. When you apply that pattern to the ancient weapons, one answer becomes hard to ignore.
What the Text Tells Us About Pluton
The description of Pluton that appears in the text establishes three conditions. First, it is a ship — “the worst monster in shipbuilding history,” “the world’s worst warship.” Second, it is a weapon: “a single shot can destroy an entire island without a trace.” Third, it is sleeping underground — hidden deep beneath Wano, sealed away from the world.
Those three conditions point to one classic work.
Space Battleship Yamato: The Match
Space Battleship Yamato (1974, created by Leiji Matsumoto) is built on a premise that fits Pluton’s description exactly. The story begins in 2199: Earth is under bombardment by an alien empire called Gamilas, the oceans have evaporated, and humanity is dying underground. Hidden beneath the surface of the Kyushu wastelands — buried, dormant, waiting — is the legendary battleship Yamato, reconstructed with technology from deep space. It is raised from underground, launched, and sent on a mission beyond the solar system.
Its primary weapon is the Wave Motion Gun. One shot. One discharge of the Wave Motion Cannon, and the target is erased. The scale of destruction matches the text description of Pluton almost word for word. “A single shot can destroy an entire island without a trace” is how characters in One Piece describe Pluton. The Wave Motion Gun does that to fleets.
The Wano Connection
Wano is One Piece’s version of feudal Japan. The country is deliberately sealed, governed by a shogunate structure, and built on aesthetics drawn directly from Edo-period imagery. The ancient warship hidden beneath Wano’s soil maps to the Yamato — Japan’s legendary battleship, which has carried national mythology around it since World War II, and which Matsumoto used as the vessel for his 1974 series. “Yamato” is the ancient name for Japan. The warship hidden underneath the country named after Japan, waiting to be raised: the geography of the homage is part of the homage.
If Pluton Is the Yamato, Pluton Can Fly
The Space Battleship Yamato is not a naval vessel. It travels through space. The plot of the original series requires it to reach a star 148,000 light-years from Earth. The fact that Pluton’s template is a spaceship — not just a warship — opens a question about where Pluton is ultimately intended to go.
This is not an isolated detail. Enel reached the moon after the Skypiea arc and found the ruins of an ancient civilization there. Vegapunk’s verbal tic is “Quasar” — a word for one of the most energetic objects in the known universe, billions of light-years away. Blackbeard’s power is named Black Hole. The Five Elders carry planetary names. The ancient weapons are named after gods of the underworld and sky. One Piece’s vocabulary has been drifting toward the astronomical for years.
If the ancient civilization that Joy Boy came from was not just terrestrial — if the “One Piece” is not something buried at the bottom of the Grand Line but something that requires leaving the planet to reach — then the ship sleeping under Wano is not the end of the voyage. It is the beginning of the next one.
For the growing space thread across One Piece’s references, see Ivankov’s Model Is Frank N. Furter. For the complete location model guide, see The Real Grand Line.