The Moment
Vol.1, page 143 in the Japanese edition; VIZ Vol.1 at the corresponding panel. The yard of the navy-base town. Zoro — tied to a post, nine days starved — has just watched a straw-hatted stranger walk into a firing line and take a volley point-blank: 「効かーん!!!!!」 — "BULLETS CAN'T HURT ME!!" The only sensible response is the one Zoro gives: 「てめェ．．．！！一体何者なんだ！！！」 — "WHAT ARE YOU!?"
The answer comes in two balloons, with the swagger of a marquee:
「おれは」 「海賊王になる男だ！！！」 "I'M THE GUY..." / "WHO'S GONNA BE KING OF THE PIRATES!!!"
By the bottom of the same page, Zoro has picked a side — 「まァいい．．．ここでくたばるくらいならなってやろうじゃねェか．．」「海賊に！！！」 — "BUT I'M NOT READY TO DIE WITHOUT A FIGHT! ALL RIGHT! ... YOU'VE GOT YOURSELF A PIRATE!!!" Two pages later the recruitment closes on a gag — 「やったァ！！仲間になってくれんのかよ！！」 answered by 「わかったらさっさとこの縄を解け！！」, "REALLY!? YOU'LL JOIN MY CREW!? / I DON'T HAVE MUCH CHOICE! NOW, UNTIE ME!!" — and the chapter that contains it is titled, with the series' whole staffing plan in two characters: 第６話「１人目」 — "CHAPTER 6: NUMBER ONE."
A Sentence Built for Reuse
What debuts here as a retort turns out to be standing equipment. The manga reprises the sentence verbatim — always split across two balloons, always at a moment when someone has just written him off or demanded to know what he even is:
| Vol. / p. (JP ed.) | Japanese | VIZ |
|---|---|---|
| 1 / 143 | おれは／海賊王になる男だ！！！ | I'M THE GUY... / WHO'S GONNA BE KING OF THE PIRATES!!! |
| 5 / 94 | おれは／海賊王になる男だ！！！ | 'CAUSE SOME-DAY... / ...I'M GONNA BE THE KING OF THE PIRATES!!!! |
| 11 / 172 | おれは！！！／海賊王になる男だ！！！ | I... / ...AM GOING TO BE KING OF THE PIRATES!!!! |
| 23 / 49 * | おれは／“海賊王”になる男だ！！！ | I'M... / ...GONNA BE KING OF THE PIRATES!!! |
(* Japanese edition page; VIZ at the corresponding panel. By Vol.23 the title has grown decorative quote marks — “海賊王” — as if the phrase itself had become a brand.)
The Vol.5 reprise shows the sentence doing its real job. Kuro of the Thousand Plans has just fallen; the crowd's stunned chorus — 「やりやがったＣ（キャプテン）・クロを…！！」, "HE BEAT CAP'N KURO!!" — collapses into the same question Zoro asked: 「てめェは一体．．．何なんだ！！？」 — "WHO ARE YOU?!!!" And the same two balloons come out. The sentence is, functionally, Luffy's answer to what are you — not a boast volunteered but an identity produced on demand, like papers at a checkpoint.
The Sentence, Piece by Piece
| Piece | Reading | Role |
|---|---|---|
| おれは | ore wa | topic: "as for me" |
| 海賊王になる | かいぞくおうになる | a full clause — "will become the Pirate King" — used as a modifier |
| 男 | おとこ | "man" — the noun being modified |
| だ | da | plain copula: "am" |
The engineering here is the relative clause. Japanese builds "the man who will become the Pirate King" by parking the whole clause 海賊王になる directly in front of 男 — no "who," no "that," no comma, no change of word order inside the clause. [clause]+[noun] is the entire recipe: 海賊王になる男, "the become-the-Pirate-King man."
And look what that structure does to time. The future is packed entirely inside the modifier; what the sentence itself asserts runs on a bare present-tense だ. Luffy is not promising anything here; he is stating a current identity whose definition happens to contain the future. The p.57 vow says I will become. This says I already am the man who becomes — kingship as a standing credential, presented to a stranger the way one presents a business card.
Words to keep: 男 (おとこ, man), 何者 (なにもの, "what sort of person" — Zoro's word), 縄 (なわ, rope — the first thing a new crewmate asks removed), てめェ (hostile "you" — rough orthography included).
The Voice
This is the version Luffy uses on people — recruitment, defiance, introductions — and its register is strangely calm: a noun and a copula. No exclamation is grammatically necessary; the three Oda adds are pure volume, not structure. The audacity is entirely in the semantics: treating an unclaimed world title as one's fixed identity, then closing with だ as if the matter were administrative. That the first person to accept the credential is a starved man tied to a post — who signs on with a growled bargain — piracy over dying here — only sharpens the joke the chapter title then lands: this is employee number one.
The Echoes
Third grammar of the dream-triptych: the scrambled vow (word order as emphasis), the んだ explanation to Coby (fact-stating), and this relative-clause billing (identity) — with the Baratie cleft completing the set in Volume 6. Cross-series readers will find the same machine, at the same volume, in another orphan's mouth: 「オレは火影になる忍だぞ！！」 — identity containing destiny, shouted from inside a snake.
In English
"I'M THE GUY... / WHO'S GONNA BE KING OF THE PIRATES!!!" is the one form of the catchphrase family that crosses into English with its architecture intact — because unscrambled Japanese and natural English happen to agree here: self first, title last. VIZ mirrors the two-balloon delivery cleanly in every reprise, though the wordings drift (GUY / I / I'M — the frame holds, the fill wobbles, a miniature of the consistency problems this site documents). The Vol.5 reprise pays the biggest local cost: VIZ's "'CAUSE SOME-DAY..." converts the credential back into a promise — someday is exactly the word the Japanese construction is built to avoid needing. The irony, documented in the word-order Pitfall, is that the vow version was the only one VIZ could not mirror, because it was the only one Oda scrambled.
Take-away
Japanese relative clauses are the gateway skill this line drills: any plain-form clause can modify any noun, with zero connective tissue. 海賊王になる男 is the same machine as 昨日読んだ本 ("the book I read yesterday") or 母が作った料理 ("the food my mother made") — clause, then noun, done. Master the pattern and half of written Japanese unlocks. And note the stylistic dividend: by folding the future into a modifier and predicating with plain だ, Japanese lets a speaker present destiny as identity — a nuance English must approximate with "the man who WILL be," leaning on stress where Japanese leans on architecture. When the series needs Luffy to answer what are you, this is the sentence it reaches for; learn it as his ID card, not his slogan.