Nazawaka City Vigilante Corps

Nazawaka City sits in the northern reaches of East Blue, a walled town known for one-sheet-at-a-time artisan paper drawn from its Naka River. Its primary security body is the Vigilante Corps, a force that answers to the village headman. It began as paid muscle protecting the town from pirates who attacked along the river, then hardened over time into a private organization commanded by the Nazawa Family. Under headman Matsuba Nazawa's governance it came to be staffed mainly by swordsmen.

Numbering close to twenty, the corps serves as the city's main line of defense. Its members are a rough, occasionally brutal lot who prize raw strength above everything. With only a couple of exceptions, they are all ex-pirates carrying bounties between one and eight million Berries, their combined total reaching roughly 40,000,000. That figure later became literal capital: after the corrupt local Marines were exposed and the criminal headman ousted, the bounty money was collected and used to rebuild the town's paper trade.

Umeno Nazawa stands apart as one of the few members who was never a pirate, and Roronoa Zoro briefly enlisted during his stay in the city. About a month after Zoro joined, he, Umeno and Tsubaki uncovered that the sitting headman Taketo Nazawa had likely burned down the paper workshop and murdered the previous headman, Matsuba. When the bribed Marines waved the case away, the three recovered Matsuba's hidden will naming Umeno his rightful successor, foiled Taketo's scheme to export the prized Seven-Colored Paper, installed Umeno as headman, and handed Taketo and his loyal corps over to the Marines.