Topic
Imagining the Arabian City in Japanese Manga and Anime: Urban Reconstruction in the Alabasta Arc of One Piece
What does an Arabian desert city look like when imagined through Japanese manga?
Japanese popular culture offers a rich framework to explore urbanity and spatial representations. One piece is one of the most manga and anime which structure and narrative are merely intertwined with geography and urbanity. Each arc is named after a place––typically an island––and these locations are culturally embedded and symbolically charged. Many of them are fictional reconstructions of countries or regions from the real world. Among these settings Alabasta stands out as a compelling example for examining how Arabian urban imaginaries are reconstructed in Japanese popular culture through the “Alabasta Arc” of Eiichiro Oda’s manga and anime One Piece. Rather than illustrating a specific existing city, Alabasta is configured as a hybrid desert metropolis that combines architectural and narrative motifs associated with both Middle Eastern and North African urban traditions. Palace complexes, fortified city gates, expansive public squares, and oasis-based infrastructures constitute key architectural elements in the anime, evoking historical urban forms found in cities such as Cairo or Baghdad—particularly those associated with the Abbasid era—while simultaneously reflecting long-standing Orientalist imaginaries of desert kingdoms in global adventure narratives.
By adopting an intercultural and intermedial approach, the paper analyzes how the urban environment of Alabasta is constructed across both manga and its anime adaptation. The island is composed of several cities, among which are the capital city of Alubarna and the casino city of Rainbase, both function as key narrative spaces structuring the Arc’s political conflict and ecological crisis, while themes such as water control and rebellion highlight the role of infrastructure and environmental conditions in shaping the modern imaginary and representation of desert urban life.
Sources
- Barthold, W. (2018). The swordsman as the artist: Aesthetics of fragmentation in Eiichirō Oda's One Piece. ImageTexT.
- Dubourg, E., Safa, R., & Thouzeau, V. (2025). Charting the rise of imaginary worlds in history. Humanities & Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-04877-x
- Lotman, Y. M. (1990). Universe of the mind: A semiotic theory of culture. I. B. Tauris.
- Onemu, U. (2020). The economies of anime: Anime as soft power, a cultural product, and (trans)national medium. Brunel University Research Repository.
- Singh, M. P. (2021). Odyssey of the cultural narrative: Japan’s cultural representation in Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece. Global Media Journal.
- Westphal, B. (2011). Geocriticism: Real and fictional spaces. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ibtihel Ghourabi (Aix-Marseille University)
Ibtihel Ghourabi, PhD candidate at Aix-Marseille University, co-supervised by INaLCO (France), is preparing a thesis entitled “Imagology of Space: Dialogue Between French Literariness and Japanese Spatiality. The Case of Judith Gautier and Pierre Loti.” Her research examines the experience and representation of space and place in contexts of cultural otherness, both in travel narratives and works of fiction, through comparative, intermedial and semiotic perspectives.