Akira Toriyama is an Anime God

What it is like to experience a cultural phenomenon.

1996 - I was 14 years old. I lived in Kernersville, NC. It was a bedroom community and a suburb of Winston-Salem (and Greensboro kind of). I can’t speak to Kernersville of 2024, but in 1996 it was a lot of things I associate with the suburbs.

It was white. It was “safe.” It was centrist central and a breeding ground for misogyny, racism, homophobia, and prosperity gospel. Rich, but not wealthy. Two guys I went to middle school went on to form Beloved, a band that signed to the Christian punk label Tooth & Nail.

Some of the kids I hung out with stole booze from their parents and we would drink on the school bus or after school. I learned to make friends by putting other people down, it made me popular with some of the popular kids. I learned how to hate other people as much as I hated myself.

Punk rock was, by that time, as loaded with jock stereotypes as any high school teen flick. We’d had Nirvana, but Green Day and the Offspring blew the doors off. We were one year away from Blink-182 making their mainstream debut. Even my escape from white homogeneity was infected by that same toxicity.

Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers made its debut when I was in sixth grade. I watched it, but it was the first time I realized that this kid’s show ain’t for me. Godzilla was not taken seriously. Video games were one medium where Japanese culture was embraced, but at that time suburban people mocked video gamers. Especially people playing role-playing games.

I got to borrow an SNES to play Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is, for those unfamiliar, still a gold standard in Japanese role-playing games. The artist on that game, unbeknownst to me at the time, also worked on the Dragon Warrior/Quest games.

I knew what anime was - Akira. Vampire Hunter D. Ninja Scroll. At that time anime was synonymous with hentai for people in my world. Most of what you could find in the suburbs was hiding behind blackout screens at F.Y.E. in Hanes Mall. That landed anime squarely in the “unsafe” category and also in the “reinforcing negative mentalities” category.

It was also reserved for a caste of people below comic book fans, video gamers, and tabletop gamers. Anime was not just for nerds, it was for perverted nerds.

In 1996, we moved into a rental house while we waited for our new home to be built in Yadkinville, NC. I changed middle schools in 8th grade. It was one of the worst years of my life. I had a school with no friends, no foundation and no future.

I came back to visit my old haunts once or twice. I was received as a ghost. My old friends had moved on without me. I made two friends in the new section of Kernersville I now inhabited, but I was lonely. I was sad. I was bullied. I was just the kid who loved bands that they only listened to on the radio sometimes. And I played the uncool video games. I didn’t play sports at this school. I barely survived it.

The summer after that year, we moved into our new home. I was even further from civilization now and that posed its own issues. I knew absolutely no one. I had no where to go, I couldn’t go steal beer from my friend Matt’s dad. I couldn’t play guitar with my other friend Matt.

I would stay up until five in the morning, sometimes even later. Television still went off the air in those days, I know because I was awake to see it. I would watch Nick at Nite or Disney channel shows. I would listen to music and play video games alone in my room for hours on end. I ran through the woods for miles, listening to the same 3 or 4 tapes on repeat.

This Revolution Was Televised

Far removed from my suburban (and later rural) hell, there were small roots breaking the foundation of the American mainstream. Where Speed Racer, Robotech, and Voltron had failed, another show tried and failed as well. A young boy with a tail searching for the mystical Dragon Balls. The more grown up version, later tagged with a Z, came and went too.

1998, I am now 16 years old and driving. I have friends and a foundation again. I had a future to look forward to, even if I was still deep in depression and dealing with the influence my environment had on my development. The internet existed and allowed me to see behind the curtain, to find bands that weren’t on the radio or major labels. Labels put out CD samplers that made their way into Best Buys for $5s.

Video games are more culturally acceptable. Gamers are still mocked as basement dwellers, but almost everyone I knew played them. Shows like X-men and Batman: The Animated Series had chiseled away at the comic book stereotype that still lingered. We didn’t know Hayao Miyazaki yet.

Adult animation existed and was mostly subversive. Viacom helped open the door to alternative animation with a two pronged approach. The Simpsons obviously blew that door off the hinges, but then we got Nicktoons (Ren and Stimpy, Rugrats) and Liquid Television (Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux) in the early 90s. Cartoons were no longer safe shorts or the Honeymooners in space.

Cartoon Network launched in 1992, but their offerings were stale. They were still safe. They showed Hannah Barbera cartoons.

In 1994, Mike Lazzo was tasked with creating a show for adults who were still watching Cartoon Network after dark. You might recall that I was watching a lot of late night TV a few years later when Space Ghost Coast to Coast was in its early years.

Space Ghost changed a lot of things for Cartoon Network. It was suddenly something people talked about in secret. It was, much like punk rock and video games, a little slice of strange that people who were disaffected could trade like cool currency. It was popular with college kids, adults and kids. The show started on TBS, but found its home on Cartoon Network.

Cartoon Network expanded their late night offerings with Toonami, which was hosted by Space Ghost’s Moltar. Toonami had a late night block and an afternoon block, where it showed a lot of anime.

Sailor Moon was one of those shows, which found massive success and was a landmark in representation. I was not in a place at the time to appreciate or understand the cultural significance of that show but it was far more than just a footnote in this revolution. The other breakout from that block, however, impacted my life and the world at large.

Rock the Dragon

When I tell you that Dragon Ball Z changed the world, I want you to know that I understand the hyperbolic nature of many of my statements. This is not one of those statements. My sister and her friends in college watched Dragon Ball Z. We would call each other after episodes aired to talk about theories and geek out about crazy episodes.

Anytime we got one of the dreaded breaks, at first because there was nothing else translated and later because they could not translate fast enough for US audiences, it was gut wrenching. Syndicated shows aired daily, so we blew through their offerings and wanted more.

Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, these were shows people watched in the United States. It wasn’t culturally acceptable yet, but we were getting there. DBZ was violent. People died. It was not divorced from problematic elements (Bulma fanservice and Mr. Popo immediately spring to mind), but it told a story and was mostly consistent. The animation was electric.

Akira Toriyama, the person behind the art in Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, was the creator. The story was originally based off Journey to the West, but incorporated elements of super hero comics and martial arts movies. It was exciting. It was so very alien to what we got from American animation at the time.

The impact of Toriyama and DBZ on global culture is hard to understand in retrospect. So many Shonens copied the show and we are flooded by its descendants. Bleach, Naruto, My Hero Academia, One Piece. Watching Goku and his friends on their adventures feels almost generic, in large part because of how many conventions it established.

His work in JRPGs had lead to multiple cornerstones of a genre that exploded in the wake of Final Fantasy 7. He helped make anime safe for the mainstream, opening the door for Hayao Miyazaki films to get theatrical releases. Miyazaki just won an Oscar for The Boy and the Heron. Manga, where Dragon Ball started, is now one of the most popular print medias in the world.

You don’t have to take my word for it, here is some of the tributes he got after his death: Artists and animators pay tribute to Dragon Ball’s Akira Toriyama - Polygon

He’s a presence that will forever loom in the global cultural landscape, but also in my own.

The first real band I was ever in was called The Saiyans and our first release was Akira Toriyama is an Anime God.

It was also the reason I met my best friend. Jamil was talking about DBZ in English class and I was the only other person that watched it. Anime had leveled up, it was now a part of the subversive currencies that I traded in. We bonded over the show and many other on Toonami. We also had a love of obscure video games. He helped me develop my first found family. He’s still my brother to this day and someone I love as much as anyone.

We might have been the friends we are today with out it, but I doubt it. I doubt I even understand the totality of the impact that Toriyama had on my life. But of two things I am certain - I’m glad that he lived and the world is worse without him.