Minatomo (East Blue)

Short and elderly, Minatomo has sun-darkened skin and hair of a dark gray hue, with a scar marking his left cheek and a generally stern cast to his features. He dresses in workman's clothing across various shades of blue and keeps a cord knotted around his forehead.

Beyond a short fuse and zero patience for any door in disrepair, little is recorded about his character. The instant he catches sight of a broken one, he sets to mending it on the spot, a quirk that accounts for nearly everything known about him.

Born in Wano Country, Minatomo slipped out of the land unlawfully some fifty-five years back, leaving in the company of Shimotsuki Kouzaburou, Shimotsuki Furiko, and around twenty-two others to make a new home in the East Blue. A relative of his who carries the same name stayed behind in Wano. The character traces to an SBS joke through which Oda accounted for a drawing error in the very first chapter, where a door at Partys Bar appeared intact again only moments after Higuma had kicked it from its hinges. By that explanation, Minatomo swapped in a replacement during the narrow gap before Higuma cracked a bottle over Shanks, moving so fast that no one caught him at it.

From there the anime began slipping him into crowd shots as an Easter egg in the vein of Pandaman. He surfaced among the onlookers at the Loguetown cooking contest, appeared beside Bokuden as the Straw Hats readied to depart Warship Island, and was spotted repairing a restaurant door on Drum Island while Usopp, Vivi, and Dalton searched for Doctor Kureha. He likewise joined the effort to restore the village of Silk once the Straw Hats had put an end to the menace posed by Crescent-Moon Gally. Tellingly, he has never turned up in the manga itself, and even a carpenter who looks exactly like him during the Wano Country Arc was confirmed to be someone else entirely.