Forty years of Dragon Ball have produced plenty of anecdotes, and just as many urban legends. We have gathered 20 facts that can actually be checked, most of them told by Akira Toriyama himself or by his editors in interviews and official guides. The original manga, serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995, runs 519 chapters across 42 volumes and had sold more than 260 million copies worldwide by 2022.
1. Journey to the West meets kung fu
The foundation of Dragon Ball is the Chinese classic Journey to the West: Goku is the Monkey King Sun Wukong, Bulma the monk Tang Sanzang, Oolong the pig Zhu Bajie. Toriyama blended it with Hong Kong martial arts films and said the series would never have existed without Jackie Chan's Drunken Master. Editor Kazuhiko Torishima, for his part, picked the novel partly because it was in the public domain and because a Chinese setting was rare in manga at the time.
2. The title comes from Bruce Lee
The name Dragon Ball was inspired by Enter the Dragon and by the many knockoff kung fu films of the era that put the word "dragon" in their titles.
3. It was supposed to last a year
At first Toriyama thought the story would run for about a year, or end once the Dragon Balls had been collected. While keeping it easy to follow, he aimed it at a slightly older audience than Dr. Slump.
4. His wife named the Kamehameha
Toriyama came up with the names of almost all the techniques, except the most famous one. Undecided about what to call Master Roshi's energy wave, he turned to his wife Yoshimi Katō, a former manga artist known as Nachi Mikami, who suggested "Kamehameha".
5. He hated naming attacks
The author found it silly to shout the name of a move: in a real fight, he joked, you would be dead before finishing the sentence. It was Torishima who insisted. Toriyama went along with it methodically, giving English names to someone like Vegeta and more refined kanji to Piccolo.
6. The tournament island is Bali
The setting of the World Martial Arts Tournament is modeled on Bali, which Toriyama visited in 1985. More broadly, he wanted an Asian-inspired world to move away from the American West Coast feel of Dr. Slump.
7. Goku visits Arale's village
During the Red Ribbon Army arc, Goku lands in Dr. Slump's Penguin Village and meets Arale. Toriyama explained that the detour was an attempt to steer back toward comedy and adventure, before accepting that readers mostly wanted fights.
8. The author's cameo is a robot
Shy and reluctant to appear in public, Toriyama had represented himself with a little robot since 1980, both in his manga pages and in interviews. Fans call it "Tori-bot".
9. One assistant and no rough drafts
A manga artist usually goes from a rough draft to a storyboard and then to the final page. Toriyama skipped the draft, simply because it was less work, and had only one assistant. When the series began he had storyboards ready for just three chapters. During serialization he started two days before the deadline: storyboards from midnight to six in the morning, then inking until night, about a day and a half in total.
10. Fan mail, in reverse
The author read readers' suggestions but often did the opposite. Many wrote to him asking him not to kill Vegeta, which is exactly what he did.
11. Frieza and the bubble economy
Frieza was created during Japan's economic bubble and inspired by real estate speculators, whom Toriyama called "the worst kind of people". According to his editors, the Frieza arc was the peak of the series' popularity.
12. The Ginyu Force restored the balance
With enemies growing ever stronger, Toriyama struggled to keep the story balanced. He created the Ginyu Force, with their theatrical poses, precisely to even things out midway through the arc.
13. Letting Goku grow up was a crisis
Toriyama aged Goku up because fight scenes were easier to draw with an adult. Torishima was against it and called it his biggest crisis on the series, with the author threatening to end the manga. In the end readers accepted the change without complaint.
14. Gohan was meant to take over
After Cell's death, Toriyama wanted Gohan to replace his father as the lead, but decided the character was not suited for it and changed his mind. The Android and Cell arc was hard on him too: he feared he could not top the Frieza arc.
15. "Too square"? Even squarer
In the second half of the series some readers complained that the art had become too angular. Toriyama's response was to make it deliberately even squarer.
16. The creator who mixed up his forms
In a 2013 V-Jump interview, Toriyama said he thought the long-haired form was Super Saiyan 2, when it is actually Super Saiyan 3. All the forms and their debuts are covered in our guide to Super Saiyan transformations.
17. Blond Saiyans by mistake
Vegeta states that pure-blooded Saiyans always have dark hair. Yet a TV special and an episode of Dragon Ball Z show Saiyans with blond, red or blue hair: color choices by the animation staff, now considered mistakes.
18. The flop that brought Toriyama back to the movies
Toriyama served as a consultant on the American film Dragonball Evolution (2009). He found the script bland and far from his world, suggested changes that were ignored and later said he could not call the result Dragon Ball. With Battle of Gods (2013) he was involved right from the writing stage.
19. There is a Goku Day
Since 2015, May 9 has been "Goku Day" in Japan, recognized by the Japan Anniversary Association: in Japanese, 5 and 9 can be read as "go" and "ku".
20. Piccolo's last wave
Toriyama's final contribution to Dragon Ball was a correction to chapter 103 of Dragon Ball Super: he asked Toyotarō to redraw the ending so that Piccolo, as he leaves, waves back at the reader. The chapter came out on March 28, 2024, less than a month after the author died on March 1 at the age of 68, with a small tribute at the bottom of the page.
Did you know? The manga helped push Weekly Shōnen Jump to its all-time record circulation of 6.53 million copies a week.
Many of these stories point to the same thing: Dragon Ball was made in a hurry, week after week, by an author who preferred improvising to planning. That is also why the characters' names are a running joke, as we explain on the names and puns page.