particular can be tiresome at first; characters will introduce themselves or perhaps the narrator will describe a location, only to be followed up with pages upon pages of flowery poetry yet again describing each facet in excruciating detail.
Once you “get” the flow of the writing, though, the series becomes impossible to put down. It’s pulpy junk food as an adventure tale! The banter between Monkey and Pigsy is on par with, if not heavily surpassing, the best that Toriyama ever put to the page with his own characters. The fights elevate themselves to insane degrees, with incredible tales of double-crossings, weapon acquisitions, godly rage, and more.
There are plenty of other Journey to the West references in Dragon Ball if you care to dive in. The Furnace of Eight Trigrams, An’nin, the Mountain of Five Elements...the entire ending-filler-arc to the TV series is filled with references and retellings.
Journey to the West references are so prevalent in Japanese media that you have probably seen them countless times without realizing it. Without even going into full-on Journey to the West-inspired episodes, you’ll occasionally see passing references and costumes.
Other shows will do one-off episodes retelling the story in their own way. Characters like Ginkaku and Kinkaku have not only appeared in Dragon Ball, but have been adapted as somewhat major characters in Naruto!
If you are a Dragon Ball fan, you owe it to yourself to check out Journey to the West. A story about a monkey who gets trapped under a mountain and then cleans up horse crap can’t be too bad a read, right?
MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu and enjoys poop jokes.
Dragon Ball Theology
Gods, deities, guardians, attendants…
By Jake Schutz
In a V-Jump interview that was part of the lead-up to Battle of Gods, Toriyama explained that “gods and aliens” have long been staples of his work. That’s why he designed Beerus as a cat: to help set him apart from the gaggle of gods that had come before. Over here in the U.S., nobody would bat an eye if you said DBZ features loads of aliens, but if you said it features a ton of gods too, you’d probably be met with more than a few blank stares. Here, the series isn’t typically seen in that light, and a big part of the U.S. reaction to Battle of Gods was hype based on the idea that this was the first time Goku and the gang would take on a foe of literally godlike power. A big part of it, of course, is that this is the first time FUNimation has really embraced the mythological side of the series. Their Battle of Gods English dub freely tosses around the G-word, whereas before this they mostly tiptoed around the issue by claiming there’s a Guardian of Earth named Kami, and a Supreme Kai in charge of a bunch of other Kai guys. Even on the Japanese side of things, Toei was apparently confident that fans would find the title enticing, and not just think “oh, is Dende finally going to throw down with Mister Popo?”
One factor in this bit of collective amnesia is that while the series has more gods than you can shake a pointed stick at, they tend to not quite live up to expectations. In that same V-Jump interview, Toriyama explains that he prefers to make his gods pretty much the same as humans. Nothing better demonstrates this than the fact that one of the first major gods in any of his works, the God of the Galaxy who appears towards the end of Dr. Slump, is an older gentleman who likes puns and dirty mags, and who happens to look exactly like Kame-sen’nin. In the Dragon Ball tankobon #3 Q&A corner, Toriyama is upfront about how he recycled this god’s character design for one of his human characters. And just as Dr. Slump’s God gets casually outclassed by Arale and friends, the various deities throughout Dragon Ball likewise get surpassed by the Z-Warriors before too long.
While Dr. Slump’s version of God doesn’t turn up until almost the end of the series, we’re introduced to the concept of gods right off the bat in Dragon Ball. Shenlong means “Divine Dragon,” and in chapter 1 Bulma refers to him as the “god of dragons,” while in chapter 23 Pilaf prophetically calls him “God’s dragon.” But these initial references aren’t followed up on until the release of the Adventure Special, when the manga was midway through the Demon King Piccolo story arc. In the Q&A section of this special DB-centric issue of Weekly Jump, a fan asked Toriyama about who made the Dragon Balls. This prompts Toriyama to say he’s “thought up something really cool”: that the Dragon Balls’ creator “would have to have been God, I guess.” Apparently Toriyama was quite taken with this idea, since he incorporated it into the main storyline as soon as the Piccolo arc wrapped up. Since Piccolo broke Shenlong, in chapter 162 Goku has to go ask Shenlong’s creator to fix him. And as Karin explains, Shenlong’s creator is “God, of course.”
But this God turns out to not be quite what anyone would expect. For one thing, he looks just like Piccolo, who at this point is the big bad of the entire series (imagine if Batman went to heaven and found out God looks just like the Joker). God wasn’t always God: he used to just be a talented martial artist, like Goku. And like Goku, one day this martial artist met God. The problem is, Gods have lifespans just like regular folks, so this God needed a successor to take over when he kicked the bucket. The martial artist wanted the job, but to meet requirements, first he needed to expel all the evil from his heart. When the old God died, the martial artist became the new God, the evil that used to be in his heart became Piccolo, and the rest is history.
If you’re a bit confused, I should explain that the Japanese word for God is “Kami” (神). The FUNimation English dub left the word untranslated, typically treating it as the character’s name rather than his title, and for his title they used “Guardian of Earth.” “Guardian” became their catch-all PC replacement for “god” throughout the series, up until their dub of Battle of Gods. Even in Japanese the different gods in Dragon Ball are described as “watching over” their domains, so “guardian” isn’t an awful description for them, and the term does have something of a history being used as a replacement for “god” (see for instance ‘70s Doctor Who, where the “White Guardian” and “Black Guardian” serve as off-brand stand-ins for God and Satan). Viz’s manga translation mostly leaves “Kami” untranslated when referring to the green guy, but also usually keeps it clear that the term means “God” and is a title, not a name. They even introduce the character simply as “God” in Dragon Ball volume 16 before switching over to “Kami” (often with the Japanese honorific “sama” tacked on the end), and they freely use “god” to describe all the later ones who pop up.
In his Daizenshuu 4 interview, Toriyama admits that when he created Piccolo, he hadn’t yet thought up the idea of Namekians. Instead, he says he only came up with that when he introduced God. But even this might surprise some: right off the bat, Toriyama intended Dragon Ball’s God to turn out to be an alien. Of course, Dr. Slump’s version of God lives in a house in outer space and monitors civilizations on planets throughout the galaxy. And God’s backstory in Dragon Ball is that he started out a martial artist and only became God when the old God gave him the job. That this martial artist turns out to be from Namek rather than Earth doesn’t make too much of a difference in Dragon Ball’s worldview.
Instead, the big theological implication of Toriyama throwing aliens into the mix is that once Raditz shows up and we learn there are all sorts of other inhabited planets out there, “God” is suddenly demoted to simply the “God of Earth.” That’s what Enma calls the green guy, when he brings Goku over to the afterlife in chapter 205…though he’s still usually referred to simply as “God” throughout the rest of the series, and we never do learn his name (another reason English speakers tend to leave “Kami” untranslated and treat it as the character’s name). The implication is that every planet has its own God, equal in status to Earth’s version, but in the manga we never really see or hear much about these guys (even in the anime, we just get one-off references to the God of Planet Vegeta, or the God of Planet Conuts). Instead, we’re introduced to their superiors, the next level of the divine hierarchy.
First there’s the aforementioned
“Enma Daio” (Great King Enma)…a deity Toriyama didn’t simply make up, for once. Originally Yama Raja (King Yama), the Hindu God of Death, he was incorporated into Buddhism and in this way ended up a standard feature of the afterlife in the Japanese imagination. He turns up in more manga and anime than you would believe, including Dr. Slump. When Goku died, it was inevitable that he’d meet this guy. Toriyama’s only real innovation in depicting Enma is that he dresses him and his ogre servants up as typical Japanese salarymen, and gives the whole afterlife a relatively realistic air. As he says in Daizenshuu 4, this was mainly done to set the afterlife apart from God’s rather mystical palace down on Earth.
Next up on the totem pole, we have Kaio, the “King of Worlds.” As the ogre who drives Goku to Snake Road explains, Kaio “stands above all the gods of the universe.” In other words, since Earth and all the other planets in the universe each have their own God, Kaio is in turn king of all those worlds, and by extension king of all those gods. This simple setup stands until near the end of the Namek story arc. In chapter 323, Kaio introduces himself to the Great Elder of