No more need to get up early on Sunday for One Piece fans.

For nearly two decades, being a dedicated fan of the One Piece anime in Japan has meant you need to get up early on Sundays. That’s because since October of 2006, broadcaster Fuji TV has aired new episodes of One Piece in the Sunday 9:30 a.m. time slot.

As of next month, though, even the hardest of hardcore One Piece fans can start sleeping in on Sundays, although they might now have to deal with sleepiness on Monday mornings, as One Piece, for the first time in its history, is going to be a late-night anime. The switch comes as the anime enters One Piece’s Egghead Arc, and starting April 6, One Piece will air at 11:15 on Sunday nights.

The change is significant for a number of reasons, most of all because One Piece is consistently one of the most popular anime series among young children in Japan. Yes, it has plenty of older fans too (the anime has been going on since 1999, after all), but like many long-running entertainment franchises in Japan, One Piece hasn’t really aged up its content or otherwise attempted to have the series grow up with its original audience. Sure, the stakes may be higher and the plot more complex than when Luffy first set sail, but much like Pokémon, One Piece has remained accessible and acceptable for kids, by Japanese standards.

Prior to its 18-year stint in the Sunday 9:30 morning block, Fuji TV showed One Piece at 7 and 7:30 on Sunday evenings, and originally it aired at 7 p.m. on Wednesdays, all times when kids could be expected to be home and awake. 11:15 at night, though, is likely going to be past a lot of younger One Piece fans’ bedtimes, especially since they’ve got school the next morning. By contrast, anime in late-night blocks have usually been filled with programming aimed at older viewers, especially otaku, who’re setting their own sleep schedules and willing to give up a little shuteye in order to watch new anime ASAP.

Fuji TV isn’t moving away from broadcasting anime on Sunday mornings entirely, either. Replacing One Piece in the Sunday 9:30 a.m. slot is a new original anime (i.e. not adapted from a preexisting work) titled To Be Hero X, which, ironically, looks pretty much exactly like the sort of thing one would imagine when hearing the term “late-night anime.”

Fuji TV hasn’t made any official comment on why it’s moving One Piece to a late-night slot. When the shift was first announced back in December, though, during a presentation at manga publisher Shueisha’s Jump Festa fan event, revealing the move displayed the on-screen text “Jump soon after watching the anime.” The new issue of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, the magazine in which the One Piece manga runs, goes on sale every Monday morning, so perhaps moving One Piece to a late-night slot is an attempt to have the newest One Piece anime episode be the last thing fans see before they go to sleep on Sunday nights, so that they’ll still be hyped up enough in the morning to go buy Jump and read the newest manga chapter.

Source: Sponichi Annex via Livedoor News via Jin, Fuji TV, Oricon News
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One Piece ©Eichiro Oda/Shueisha
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