Aspiring pirate kings share hugs with each other and a bit of Japanese culture with the world.

Considering how anime and manga were still pretty much a niche hobby in most parts of the world when One Piece got started back in 1997, it’s amazing to see how huge of a global fanbase the franchise has today. Not only are there people around the world keeping up with the epically lengthy series’ new manga chapters and anime episodes, Netflix’s Western-made live-action adaptation has defied the odds and become a hit too, with its second season set to start streaming on March 10.

And as even further proof of just how big the One Piece fan community has grown, even Sesame Street’s Elmo is looking forward to Season 2, appearing in a promotional video with Luffy’s live-action actor, Iñaki Godoy, in which he teaches the Muppet a useful Japanese vocabulary word.

“Elmo’s all ready to join the Straw Hats,” he enthusiastically tells Iñaki, then declares “Elmo’s going to be king of the pirates!”

Iñaki is clearly impressed not just by Elmo’s enthusiasm, but also by the Mupet’s Luffy cosplay outfit. Still, it takes more than just a cool look and sense of adventure to really be part of the Straw Hat crew. “That’s why I want to teach you a special new word of the day,” Iñaki explains. “It’s actually a word that my dear friend Luffy taught me. The word is nakama.”

Though it’s a Japanese word, nakama is a term near and dear to the hearts of overseas One Piece fans, as it’s often left untranslated in fan translations and discussions about the series. “Nakama is a Japanese word to describe very special friends,” Iñaki tells Elmo. “Friends who are like family. They care about each other, help each other, and stick together no matter what.”

That’s actually a pretty good description. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty linguistics, nakama is usually used to refer to someone with whom you share a common purpose or goal that you’re trying to achieve, often by working together. In that sense, nakama has similarities to terms such as “comrade,” “partner,” or “cohort,” but with a warmer, less formal feeling. It can also sometime be extended to refer to someone with whom you have a strong in-spirit partnership, even if you’re not directly collaborating with each other, as long as your values and ideals largely align and you’re both working towards your dreams that stem from them.

▼ Nakama is written with the kanji 仲間, with 仲 representing a personal relationship and 間 usually meaning some sort of space or interval, but combined like this the characters create a sense of being within the same close mental/emotional space as someone else.

Pronunciation-wise, Iñaki and Elmo both put a lot more emphasis on the “ka” part of nakama than a native Japanese speaker would (the three syllables are meant to be pronounced with roughly equal stress), but their attempts are still easily understandable. Netflix’s onscreen captions go back and forth on whether or not nakama is supposed to be capitalized, but linguistically it shouldn’t be, and while it’s very sweet when Iñaki says “I love you too Elmo! We’re nakamas!”, that should actually be “We’re nakama,” since, as with most Japanese words, “nakama” is used to refer to both a single special friend or many of them.

▼ Preview video for the second season of Netflix’s live-action One Piece

Those little linguistic quibbles aside, it’s pretty cool to see One Piece being not just a fun adventure story, but also a means by which people, including young kids, can learn a bit about another culture and its language, and now that Elmo has become part of the extended One Piece nakama network, he can join us in wondering what’s inside that treasure chest that series creator Eiichiro Oda just tossed into the ocean.

Source, top image: Instagram/netflix
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