Dragon Ball: How One Manga Changed What Boys Want to Be

By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled

I was eight years old when I first encountered Son Goku.

This is not an unusual statement for a Japanese person of my generation. There is an entire generation of Japanese men — now in their forties and fifties, now with children or grandchildren of our own — for whom the encounter with Goku was not merely an encounter with a fictional character but an encounter with a specific idea about what a person could be. About what it meant to be strong, and what strength was for, and what you were supposed to do with it.

I want to tell you about that idea. And about the manga that delivered it. And about why, more than forty years after Dragon Ball began publication, Son Goku is still the most recognizable fictional character in Japan and one of the most recognizable fictional characters on earth.

The Beginning: Akira Toriyama and Weekly Shonen Jump

Dragon Ball began publication in Weekly Shonen Jump on November 20, 1984. The creator, Akira Toriyama, was already an established figure in Jump — his previous series, Dr. Slump (1980–1984), had been one of the magazine’s most popular series, a gag manga about a genius inventor and his android creation Arale. Dr. Slump was funny, visually inventive, and enormously popular. It was not Dragon Ball.

Dragon Ball was something different. Where Dr. Slump was primarily comedy, Dragon Ball was adventure — a long, escalating adventure story that began as a loose adaptation of the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West (using the character of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, as the template for Son Goku) and became something that nobody had seen before.

Toriyama did not, by his own account, begin Dragon Ball with a clear long-term plan. The early chapters — Goku’s childhood, his first mentor Master Roshi, the initial search for the seven Dragon Balls that give the series its name — have a specific quality: the quality of a story being discovered as it is told, with a creator who is following his instincts rather than executing a predetermined structure.

This origin is visible in the work. Dragon Ball‘s early chapters are looser, more digressive, more playfully inventive than the tightly constructed battle arcs that define its middle and later periods. They are also, in their way, delightful — the specific pleasure of watching a creator who is genuinely having fun, following a character wherever he goes, discovering what the world contains.

What the world contains, as it turns out, is increasingly strong opponents. And this discovery — the discovery that there is always a stronger opponent, that the horizon of strength is never reached — is the structural engine that drove Dragon Ball for eleven years and 519 chapters.

Son Goku: The Character Who Defined a Generation

Son Goku is not a complicated person.

This is the first thing to understand about him, and it is not a criticism. Goku is perhaps the purest distillation of a specific set of values in the history of manga protagonists — a character whose simplicity is itself a kind of perfection, in the way that the simplest tools are often the best ones for their purpose.

What Goku values: fighting strong opponents. Food. His friends and family. Finding opponents stronger than himself so that he can grow stronger. More food. The feeling of a good fight against a worthy opponent. Significantly more food.

What Goku does not value: power for its own sake, recognition, the safety that comes from not taking risks, the comfort of not being challenged.

This value system is presented without irony or complexity. Goku is not conflicted about wanting to fight. He is not ashamed of caring more about the quality of the fight than about the outcome in terms of winning or losing. He is not sophisticated about the political implications of his choices or the social context of his battles. He is a person who loves fighting and who fights the strongest people he can find because fighting them is the thing that makes him feel most fully alive.

For eight-year-old me, encountering this character for the first time, the effect was immediate and specific. Here was a version of strength that had nothing to do with domination, with status, with the exercise of power over others. Goku’s strength was entirely oriented toward challenge — toward finding something harder than himself and engaging with it fully. He was strong not to be stronger than others but to be stronger than he had been. The competition was vertical, not horizontal.

This reorientation of strength — from dominance to growth, from competition with others to competition with your previous self — is, I think, the deepest influence that Dragon Ball had on the generation that grew up with it. We absorbed a specific idea of what aspiration looked like. Not the aspiration to be better than other people, but the aspiration to be better than you were.

The Structure: From Adventure to Battle Manga

Dragon Ball‘s structure across its eleven-year run can be divided into two broad phases, with a hinge moment that changed the series’ nature permanently.

The first phase — roughly the first hundred chapters, covering Goku’s childhood and early adventures through the first World Martial Arts Tournament and the Red Ribbon Army arc — is an adventure manga. It contains combat, but combat is one element among many: exploration, friendship, humor, the discovery of the world’s extent and the variety of things it contains.

The hinge moment is the arrival of Raditz — Goku’s older brother, a Saiyan warrior who arrives from space to tell Goku that he is not of Earth but of an alien warrior race — in chapter 195. This arrival fundamentally changes what Dragon Ball is.

From this point, the series becomes — in its second phase, which runs under the title Dragon Ball Z in its anime adaptation — primarily a battle manga. The escalating power of opponents, the introduction of the power-scaling system (first the scouter readings, later the Super Saiyan transformations), the specific structure of long arcs organized around increasingly difficult fights — all of this flows from the arrival of Raditz and the revelation of the Saiyan backstory.

The second phase is the Dragon Ball that most international audiences know — the Saiyan Saga, the Frieza Saga, the Cell Saga, the Buu Saga. These are the battle arcs that defined shonen manga power escalation for a generation and that established the template that virtually every subsequent battle manga has either followed or reacted against.

The Power Scaling Problem and the Super Saiyan Solution

One of the structural challenges of any battle manga is the power scaling problem: as the protagonist grows stronger, opponents must grow correspondingly stronger to remain threatening. This escalation is narratively necessary but logistically difficult — at some point, the numbers become so large that they lose meaning, and the reader’s sense of what any given power level actually represents dissolves into abstraction.

Dragon Ball encountered this problem and solved it, multiple times, in ways that are worth examining because they reveal Toriyama’s structural intelligence.

The first major solution is the Saiyan race — the revelation that Goku belongs to a warrior species with specific biological properties, including the ability to grow stronger after recovering from near-death experiences and the potential for transformation into a Great Ape under a full moon. The Saiyan backstory recontextualizes Goku’s exceptional strength as having a specific origin, which grounds it even as it scales it upward.

The second and most famous solution is the Super Saiyan transformation. The moment when Goku transforms into Super Saiyan for the first time — in chapter 317, against Frieza, in response to the death of Krillin — is the most famous moment in the series and one of the most famous moments in the history of manga. The golden hair, the teal eyes, the specific quality of the power surge depicted in Toriyama’s art — this transformation established a visual language for power escalation that has been imitated, referenced, and parodied more times than can be counted.

The Super Saiyan solution works because it resets the power scale — it gives both the reader and the narrative a new baseline from which escalation can recommence — while preserving the significance of what came before. Goku’s base form strength is not negated by Super Saiyan; it is the foundation that Super Saiyan builds on. The transformation is cumulative rather than substitutive.

The Villains: A Gallery of Excellence

Dragon Ball‘s villains are, considered as a group, one of the series’ greatest strengths and one of its most significant contributions to manga’s visual and narrative vocabulary.

Piccolo — the first major antagonist, the Demon King’s reincarnation, who begins as Goku’s most dangerous enemy and becomes, over the course of the series, one of its most beloved characters. Piccolo’s transformation from villain to reluctant ally to genuine father figure for Gohan is one of the most carefully developed character arcs in the series. His relationship with Gohan — the alien warrior who did not choose to care for the human child left in his charge and who comes to care for him anyway — is the emotional core of the Saiyan Saga and some of the best writing Toriyama did across the series’ full run.

Frieza — the most iconic villain in Dragon Ball and arguably the most iconic villain in shonen manga history. Frieza is a galactic emperor — a being of extraordinary power who rules through fear, who has committed genocide as a business practice, who is refined and elegant and utterly without remorse. The Frieza Saga is the longest single arc in the original Dragon Ball manga run and the arc that contains the most famous sequences in the series. Frieza’s multiple transformations — each revealing a greater power than the one before — established the transformation-as-power-reveal structure that battle manga has used ever since.

What makes Frieza work as a villain, beyond the visual design and the power levels, is his specific quality of malevolence. He is not misunderstood. He is not a sympathetic figure who made wrong choices. He is a person who enjoys causing suffering, who finds in his power a license for cruelty, who operates without any constraint of conscience. This simplicity — the clarity of his evil — makes him a pure antagonist in a way that Toriyama’s later villains, most of whom carry more complexity, are not. Against the backdrop of Dragon Ball‘s increasing moral complexity, Frieza stands as the series’ clearest expression of what Goku is fighting against.

Cell — a bio-engineered entity created from the cells of the Earth’s strongest warriors, who seeks to absorb Android 17 and 18 to reach his perfect form. Cell is the most intellectually interesting of Dragon Ball‘s major villains — a being who is literally composed of the series’ cast, who reflects back at them a version of their own nature stripped of its moral content. The Cell Saga is also the arc in which Gohan — not Goku — is established as the most powerful fighter, and in which the question of what strength is for is asked most directly.

Majin Buu — the final major villain of the original series, and the most unusual. Buu begins as a simple, almost childlike force of destruction and transforms across the Buu Saga through a series of absorptions and separations that reveal increasingly complex versions of the character. The Buu Saga is the most tonally varied arc in the series — it ranges from genuinely funny to genuinely affecting, and the final resolution of Goku’s relationship with Buu is one of the most distinctively Goku moments in the series: not a battle to the death but the promise of a future fight, offered to a former enemy as the greatest expression of respect Goku knows how to give.

The Influence: What Dragon Ball Did to Manga

The influence of Dragon Ball on subsequent manga and anime is so pervasive that it is almost invisible — like grammar, which structures every sentence but is not noticed until it fails.

The power scaling system — opponents arranged in tiers of increasing strength, the protagonist’s growth measured against those tiers — is the fundamental structure of virtually every battle manga published after 1984. Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer — all of them use this structure, with variations. All of them are in some sense in conversation with the system that Toriyama established.

The transformation-as-power-reveal — the moment when a character’s true strength is dramatically demonstrated through a physical change — is Dragon Ball. Super Saiyan is the template. Every subsequent transformation in every subsequent series is either following the template or deliberately departing from it.

The specific visual language of fight scenes — the energy blasts, the speed lines, the panel composition that conveys force and impact — was substantially established by Toriyama and has been the baseline of action manga visual language ever since. Toriyama’s art is unusually clear — his fight sequences are easy to read, which sounds like a small thing until you have experienced the confusion of fight sequences in which the action is difficult to follow. The clarity of Toriyama’s action choreography is a specific craft achievement that influenced how artists learned to draw fights.

The protagonist archetype — the powerful, cheerful, food-loving fighter who is motivated by the love of combat rather than by the desire for power — recurs throughout shonen manga in forms that are recognizably descended from Goku. Luffy in One Piece is the most direct descendant. Naruto shares many of Goku’s qualities while adding more psychological complexity. The cheerful, powerful, essentially good-natured shonen protagonist is, in a very real sense, Goku’s legacy.

Dragon Ball in Japan: A Cultural Constant

I want to say something about what Dragon Ball has meant in Japan specifically — not as a global phenomenon but as a domestic cultural institution — because I think the international reception of the series, while enormous, is different in kind from what the series means inside the country where it was made.

In Japan, Dragon Ball is not primarily a nostalgia property. It is a living culture — maintained by Dragon Ball Super, the continuation of the series that has been published since 2015, and by the continuous cultural references to the series that appear in Japanese media, advertising, political speech, and daily life. When a Japanese politician or public figure wants to indicate that something is the strongest version of itself, they reach for Dragon Ball vocabulary. When a Japanese comedian wants a reference point for power escalation, Dragon Ball is the reference. The cultural vocabulary of the series is genuinely active — not archived nostalgia but living language.

The Dragon Ball franchise — including the ongoing Super manga, the anime adaptations, the film productions, the merchandise, the video games — generates revenues that place it among the highest-grossing media franchises in history. This economic fact reflects a cultural reality: Dragon Ball is not a product from a previous era that is remembered fondly. It is a product that continues to be consumed, that continues to find new audiences, that continues to produce new content that the existing audience engages with.

For my generation — the people who were eight years old when Goku first appeared in Jump — the relationship to Dragon Ball is the specific relationship of people who grew up with something and have continued to grow alongside it. The series that formed us is still there. The character who showed us something about what strength could mean is still fighting, still eating enormous quantities of food, still finding stronger opponents and engaging with them fully.

There is something in this continuity that I find genuinely moving. The eight-year-old who first encountered Goku is forty-something now, with his own children, in his own life. And Goku is still there — still exactly who he was, in all the important ways, still demonstrating the same uncomplicated relationship to challenge and growth that made him matter in the first place.

The Personal Note: What Goku Taught an Eight-Year-Old

I said at the beginning that encountering Goku at eight years old was an encounter with a specific idea about what a person could be.

Let me try to articulate the idea more precisely, now that I have the vocabulary of forty-something years of thinking about it.

The idea is that strength is something you grow into through engagement with difficulty — that the purpose of difficulty is to make you capable of more than you were before, and that this expansion of capability is itself the reward, independent of what you do with it. Goku does not fight to defeat his enemies. He fights because fighting is how he grows. The enemies are, in a specific sense, his teachers. The strongest of them — the ones who push him past what he thought possible — are the most valuable.

This is not a lesson that translates directly into every area of life. Most of life is not a martial arts tournament. The opponents we face in ordinary adult life are not villains to be defeated. The power scaling of employment and family and health and aging does not work like the power scaling of Dragon Ball.

But the underlying orientation — toward challenge as opportunity rather than as threat, toward difficulty as the material from which growth is made — is one that I have tried to maintain, with very uneven success, across four decades of adult life. I cannot prove that Dragon Ball is the source of this orientation rather than simply one early expression of a value I would have developed anyway. But I know that the image of Goku — grinning at a stronger opponent, genuinely glad to have found something harder than himself — was in my mind long before I had the language to describe what it was showing me.

That is what the great works of popular culture do. They give you images before you have language, and the images do their work in the years before the language arrives to explain them.

Thank you, Toriyama-sensei. For all of it.

— Yoshi 🐉 Central Japan, 2026

Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Shonen Jump: The Magazine That Changed the World” and “How Doraemon Taught an Entire Generation of Japanese Kids to Be Kind” — both available on Japan Unveiled.