Zoro’s Three-Sword Pose in a 2001 Bandai Shokugan Figure

Roronoa Zoro Bandai Shokugan Figure, One Piece (circa 2001)

One Piece in Its Early Days

By 2001, One Piece had been running in Weekly Shonen Jump for four years, and its anime adaptation — produced by Toei Animation and broadcast on Fuji TV — was roughly two years old. The story follows Monkey D. Luffy and his crew as they sail in search of the world’s greatest treasure; at that point in the series, the crew was moving from the East Blue into the early Grand Line. One Piece was already a dominant presence in Japanese pop culture and beginning to find audiences in parts of Europe. Merchandise production was ramping up fast, and Bandai was among the first major toy makers to license the IP at scale.

Roronoa Zoro and the Three-Sword Style

Zoro is the crew’s swordsman and, throughout the entire run of One Piece, consistently one of the most popular characters after Luffy himself. His defining technique is santoryu — the three-sword style — in which he holds one blade in each hand and a third in his teeth simultaneously. It is an immediately recognizable image, and this figure reproduces that stance in a super-deformed, or chibi, format: the proportions compress the body to exaggerate the head, while the key costume details remain intact. His green hair, black forehead bandana, bare scarred chest, and all three swords are present in the sculpt. Zoro’s stated ambition is to become the world’s greatest swordsman, and that single-minded drive has made him a fixture of One Piece merchandise from the very beginning.

Shokugan: Japan’s Candy-Toy Tradition

Shokugan — a contraction of shokuhin gangu, meaning “food toy” — pairs a small collectible figure with a piece of candy, typically a tablet or gum. The category goes back to 1970s Japan, when inexpensive sets aimed at children sold for around 100 to 200 yen at corner stores and supermarket checkout counters. By 2001, shokugan had grown beyond its original audience. The format was in the middle of a collector boom, partly driven by manufacturers bringing in more accomplished sculptors to raise the quality of figure work, and the One Piece line from Bandai’s shokugan division was part of that wave.

Bandai’s shokugan releases from this period were typically sold in box sets containing several different characters across multiple waves, with Zoro appearing in nearly every one. The figure itself is molded in hard plastic; shokugan of this era were generally fixed-pose rather than articulated, though the specific construction of any given piece is best confirmed by inspection. The painting reflects the standards of 2001: fewer colors and less fine detail than later lines, but fully character-accurate for the time. These early releases predate the sculpting techniques that became standard in Bandai’s World Collectible Figure line from 2008 onward, which means they represent a distinct and early chapter in how One Piece characters were rendered in three dimensions. For collectors who follow the history of the franchise’s merchandise, pieces like this one sit at the beginning of that story.