Nami (Nami?) is a fictional character from the anime and manga series One Piece. Nami means “Wave” in Japanese. She is the navigator and the second member of Straw Hat Pirates to join the crew.

In a recent Japanese Fan Poll, Nami was ranked 7th most popular character. She is more popular in the United States, where a 4Kids fan poll ranked her the fourth most popular anime character.

Being a member of the Straw Hat Pirates, she has her own bounty of 16 million Belli. She is the first member of the Straw Hat Pirates to appear in the (anime) series, but the third to align herself with the crew, and the fifth to actually join. In the manga, she appears third.

Possibly one of the best (or even the best) navigators currently sailing the Grand Line, Nami is more-or-less in charge when the crew is sailing on the Going Merry (Merry Go in the English translations), somewhat fulfilling the roles of treasurer and quartermaster as well (mirroring real-life, where the quartermaster was more or less in charge on pirate ships and the captain being more of a strong fighter whom the crew could put their trust in).

Nami has a tattoo on her left shoulder which represents mikan and pinwheels (a homage to her past), where she used to have a tattoo for being a member of Arlong’s Crew. Near the beginning of the series, Nami wore thick, low cut leather boots and a simple blouse. However, during the Arlong Park arc and thereafter, Nami wore open-toed shoes and more revealing outfits (With the tattoo no longer being a secret). As of Chapter 435, Nami changed her shoes to high heeled boots. She usually pairs her tops with skirts with rings on them. Her overall physique matured suddenly (according to Oda, this is so because she is only 18 and still in her “growth phase”).

According to the author (in response to a fan’s question), Nami’s dress size was 34-22-34. The author has also replied to a fan’s question to saying that right now Nami’s measurements are as follows: Height 169 (5′6.5) B 95 W 55 H 85, though her breasts seem to grow and then “reset” throughout the arcs (this is much more obvious in the manga). He has also said that Nami resembles a cat, that he uses the color orange to represent her, and she smells of mikan and money.

Her nickname, “Cat Burglar”, comes from “dorobō neko”, which can also mean “manstealer” in Japanese.

Even before One Piece officially began, Oda had ideas for a Nami-like character.

In the original pilot for One Piece, Romance Dawn: version 1, there was a character called Silk, who was the daughter of a pirate and also abandoned when she was young. Appearance wise, Silk was almost exactly like Nami in both face and dress, although Silk had much longer hair. While some aspects of her personality were close to Nami’s, she was still very different.

In Romance Dawn: version 2 there was another Nami-like character called Ann. Ann, like Silk, had clothes similar to Nami’s. Ann’s personality was much closer to Nami’s, but it was still a long way off from the one Nami was ultimately given by Oda.

Along with Nico Robin, Chopper and Usopp , Nami is one of the smartest of the Straw Hats and the third smartest character during the East Blue saga according to Oda, the first being Ben Beckman of the Red-Haired pirates and the second being Captain Kuro. She is an excellent navigator and has the ability to recognize and analyze even the slightest changes in the weather through sheer intuition, thus saving the ship and the crew from the very unstable Grand Line weather on multiple occasions. She is also in charge of the money the crew has.

She respects Luffy’s qualities as a leader, but often gets angry of his irrational thinking and short attention span, but she trusts him deeply. Nami is almost always the one who gives orders on the ship (much to Zoro’s resentment) because of Luffy’s usual lack of common sense. She often comically beats or hits her other crewmates for their nonsense, which occurs quite often. Acting as the “mother” of the crew, Nami doesn’t understand or approve of the boys’ often macho attitudes and principles.

These are the only situations where Nami doesn’t get the final word, as seen when she tried to talk sense into Luffy and Usopp’s great fallout. Nami is good friends with Nico Robin, the only other female and sensible person currently on the Straw Hat crew. Robin is the only person Nami doesn’t try to boss, and Nami has stated that Robin is the only person who understands her, though in a comical fashion.

Nami is greedy and will do anything, aside from endangering her friends, for money, due to her past - After having gathered money for 8 years (and even before that often stole things), Nami is naturally accustomed to it, stating that after being freed from Arlong, the money is all hers nows, but thinks of her friends as more important.

(While on Sky Island, Luffy asks her, “What’s more important, adventure or your life?” She responds, “My life. Followed by my money.”) She is very manipulative and often takes advantage of Sanji for his devotion to her and Usopp to maintain her weapons. Roronoa Zoro manages not to fall for her deception, but ends up a victim like the rest, usually due to debt and blackmail. Nami also tries to avoid fights, and is one of the less adventurous and brave members of the crew.

However, since the invention of her Clima Tact (A weapon that forms weather patterns, also called the Weather Forcer in the English dub), she is now seen fighting her own battles instead of becoming the ‘easy target’, as she doesn’t want to be the one being saved anymore.

Her two favorite things are money and mikan (mandarin oranges), often translated to tangerines (the English manga uses “tangerines”), because of her love of her foster mother, Bellemere. It seems she is more fond of her orange trees than the money; when the crew returned to Water 7 and had their belongings returned to them, Nami was overjoyed at seeing the trees that she hugged one of the tree with tears coming out of her eyes, but did not hug the money like she usually does. And when Franky was talking about what he did with the 200 million belies that he stole Nami didn’t seem as upset. This hints at the possibility that she is becoming less greedy.

Nami’s dream is to draw a perfect map of the world, a task not yet accomplished by anyone due to the harsh nature of the oceans in Grand Line. The first map Nami plotted was the island Cocoyashi village is on.

Nami also has an obsession with fashion, as she is never seen wearing the same clothes. This was not present in the early chapters and started after the Captain Kuro arc. This is similar to Bulma, the main female character of Dragon Ball (Eiichiro Oda’s favorite manga), who is never seen with the same hairstyle. Nami also appears to have an inhumanly high tolerance for alcohol, even more so than Roronoa Zoro. In Whiskey Peak, she was seen out-drinking 14 different Baroque Works members, losing only because she pretended to collapse in order to fool the bounty hunters, or possibly because of her determination to win the prize money.

Nami is an orphan found by Belle-Mère, a female Marine, on a battlefield as an infant. The marine adopted her along with Nojiko, another child, and the three became as close as a real family. However, this ended when the infamous Fish-Man pirate Arlong took over Cocoyashi Village (or Coco Village in the English language manga and dub), their adopted hometown, and imposed a fee on every single adult and child in the village in order to ‘live’.

Since Belle-Mère could not pay for her entire family’s monthly fee for living, Belle-Mère was used as an ‘example’ by Arlong to demonstrate to the townspeople what will happen to them if they ever go against him or fail to pay the fee. Belle-Mère is then brutally murdered by a shot from Arlong in front of Nami and Nojiko. Nami was then kidnapped and forced to become a cartographer for Arlong. However, Arlong struck a deal with Nami: if she brought him one hundred million Belli (the form of currency in One Piece), he would free her village.

Nami realized then that if she ever told the citizens of Cocoyashi Village, she might be bringing them false hope, as she couldn’t possibly guarantee her success, and knew that one day she might be forced to run away. Although Nojiko eventually told them, Nami lived in the belief that they still hated her for joining Arlong’s crew. She then swore to never again ask anyone for help.

She spent eight years making maps and stealing treasure from pirates in order to buy back her village.

It was during this time that she met Luffy during the situation with Buggy in Orange Town (as seen in the Buggy the Clown Arc) and temporarily joined up with him with the reasoning that she will get most of the treasure that is found. (in the anime, she met Luffy briefly in the first episode, as he was escaping from a ship she was robbing.

After helping defeat Captain Kuro in Syrup Village (i.e: Captain Kuro arc), and reaching the Baratie restaurant with Luffy, Nami took off with the crew’s loot and ship and headed for Arlong Park. Nami was only 7 million beli short of fulfilling her end of the deal, but Arlong shamelessly used Nezumi, a corrupt Marine captain, to steal all of the money, thus ensuring that Nami would forever be in his crew, without breaking his promise.

Later, Luffy arrives and after seeing a distraught Nami in the process of carving the Arlong tattoo off her arm and screaming Arlong’s name in anger, he accepts her plea for help. Along with Sanji, Zoro and Usopp, he battles and defeats Arlong and his crew. Nami’s village is freed, and she rejoins the crew as a permanent member. On her way out of the village, Nami wished to say goodbye to no one.

She left the money back in Nojiko’s house, and runs onto the Going Merry after stealing all of the villagers’ wallets at the same time. This causes certain opinions for Nami to spring up, like Sanji cheering on Nami, Zoro saying that Nami might betray them again, Usopp saying that she hasn’t changed, and Luffy laughing. She was nearly defeated by Kalifa

Recently, in Chapter 435, Nami received her first bounty: 16 Million Beli. Amusingly this puts her above Buggy the Clown, the villain introduced in the same arc as Nami, and on the same level as Captain Kuro, another cat themed character. Out of all the Straw Hats, she is the only one complaining about the fact she got a bounty, though she says “at least my picture was cute”.

It was revealed that the photographer told her he was a W7 reporter so she willingly posed. Later, Genzo is seen in Coco Village, loudly declaring that Nami’s picture “would attract more perverts than bounty hunters!” (she was photographed while wearing a polka dotted bikini) Humorously, Nojiko questions why Genzo has a large blown up version of the picture on his wall.

When Usopp rejoins the crew, while both he and Luffy are crying over each other, she says, with tears in her eyes, that they aren’t that cool.

Nami, along with Chopper and Usopp, went riding on a mini-version of the Going Merry before they tumbled into a moat on the floating ghost island, Thriller Bark. After being chased by a Cerberus-like monster, they were invited to Dr. Hogback’s mansion by the mysterious Hildon.

On the way to the mansion, they hear a bit about Dr. Hogback, but Nami freaks out and asks Hildon to stop the cart. Hildon leaves the passenger section of the cart to speak with the driver. Ten minutes pass by, and they realize that Hildon left them in a cemetery filled with zombies. Nami gets bitten by one of the zombies, and fears that she’ll turn into one herself. They run away from the zombies, and realize that they have arrived at the Hogback Mansion.

After having dinner at the mansion, she takes a bath with Chopper and Usopp guarding the door. She tells them through the door that they’d leave when night falls, pointing out that the entire mansion was full of zombies, and thus was no safer than outside. She also voiced her suspicions about Dr. Hogback, pointing out that if he had nothing to with the zombies, he wouldn’t be living on the island.

Just then, a voice says that she is a smart woman, and something invisible pins her arm against the wall, presumably the same thing that attacked the Thousand Sunny. The voice says that she is weaker than the woman on the ship (Robin) and that it favors the weak. Putting something over her mouth gagging her when she begins to scream, it declares “You….become our bride!” Hearing her cries for help, Usopp and Chopper rush into the bathroom. Chopper smells out the invisible creature, and Usopp shoots it as it tries to escape out the window without Nami, though the creature is later heard talking to Dr. Hogback, and thus appears unharmed.

Now, Nami, Chopper, and Usopp are trying to escape from the zombie-filled mansion, and accidentally ended up in the secret passageway leading to Dr. Hogback’s secret lab. They ran down the passageway and discovered many pictures of a happy, healthy, and living version of the zombie Cindry hanging on its walls.

They read that Cindry is no longer alive, when they are telling this to Dr. Hogback a zombie walks in. The zombie is a general who instantly hits Nami, Chopper and Usopp with the back of his sword. Although they seem to be fine, ten seconds later they are affected from the hit. Nami also notices that the general acts like Brooke.

While unconscious, they were carried away by two zombie animals in a coffin to an unknown destination. The three manage to escape from the coffin, but end up in a garden of zombie animals. When a zombie was about to attack Nami, she was saved by a zombie resembling a cross between a penguin and a Bulldog with the personality, speech pattern, and fighting style of Sanji.

The dogpenguin continues to defend Nami for a while, but suddenly Absalom and Lola appear. Absalom turns invisible and takes Nami with him, but she use a thunder bolt on him and the shock makes him more in love with her. Then Lola chases Nami and she, Usopp and Chopper flee from her. Usopp and Chopper turn and face Lola, but she knocks them out of the way, and Nami stumbles.

Lola is about to stab her, when Nami claims that she is a man, a transvestite named “Namizo”, so she poses no threat to Lola’s attempt to marry Absalom. Nami then gives her some ideas of how to seduce Absalom, and Lola runs back to him, as Nami, Chopper and Usopp run away. Later, the trio witnesses Luffy’s shadow being placed into Oz, a zombie, and are discovered by Gecko Moria and his crew. As they escape, Nami is captured by Absalom, and the two disappear.

Unconscious, she is then taken to a wedding ceremony where she was to marry Absalom, with the zombie generals attending as guests. However, the wedding is interrupted when the zombie generals are beaten up by Oz, the zombie with Luffy’s shadow. Sanji then arrives, and as of chapter 463, appears to have defeated Absalom by throwing salt on him.

Nami is a highly skilled navigator and cartographer. She has the innate ability to sense changes in the weather and can even predict the appearance of the supposedly unpredictable cyclones of the Grand Line. She is also an excellent thief and pickpocket who can steal small items such as keys on light encounters without the victim noticing.

Nami is not as skilled a combatant as some of the Straw Hats, although she is able in wielding a staff, and can take down normal pirates or marines with few problems. She usually ends up fighting a female villainess. She is able to unleash quick and moderately powerful strikes, and during the Alabasta arc and beyond, uses a weather manipulating staff Usopp created for her, the Clima Tact (known as the Weather Forcer in 4Kids’ adaption), to fight.

The weapon is actually partly used for party tricks, but using certain combinations, Nami turns the tomfoolery of Usopp into a deadly force to be reckoned with, and is able to defeat one of the strongest members of the Baroque Works, Miss Doublefinger (Mr. 1’s partner agent, and Baroque Works’ second strongest female agent); one of the CP9 members and two lieutenants of Enel’s Enforcers, Hotori and Kotori, with the help of Gan Fall.

Currently, Nami has been given a Dial enhanced Clima-Tact, the “Perfect Clima-Tact”, by Usopp. The new weapon was powerful enough to wipe out an entire group of soldiers; with the Perfect Clima-tact, she also managed to defeat CP9’s Kalifa, securing her place as one of the crew’s most valuable members.

Before receiving her Climatact in the Alabasta Arc, Nami’s fighting style was much more deceitful, using her brilliant mind and her good looks to solve her problems. She would shamelessly manipulate one of her crewmates to fight in her place, usually by blackmailing Zoro, charming Sanji, or ordering Luffy around. In the fourth One Piece movie she is even seen posing seductively to get information out of a bartender.

She also had excellent luck: situations would arise that kept her out of the line of battles during fights. In a few rare cases, she’d used her looks to distract an opponent from attacking her. Her more manipulative battle-strategies began diminishing during the Alabasta Arc and beyond when she received her Clima-Tact and began to fight her own battles.

Some common techniques include Thunderbolt Tempo/Tempest (using Heat and Cool Balls, a cloud is formed, and by sending a Thunder Ball in, a huge bolt of lightning is summoned) and Mirage Tempo/Tempest (by manipulating the heat of the surrounding, Nami can create illusory copies of herself, which is further augmented by the Perfect Clima Tact’s Mirage Tempo Fata Morgana).

wikipedia.org