Goku is Gohan’s father by blood.
Piccolo is the one who raised him.
That’s not a controversial take in Japanese fandom. It’s basically the consensus. And the reasons behind it point to something Dragon Ball does quietly, almost accidentally, that most action manga never bothers with: a portrait of what parenting actually looks like when the person doing it never planned to.
Born to be an enemy
Piccolo is the reincarnation of the Demon King who tried to conquer the world. His entire reason for existing is to kill Goku. Then Goku dies fighting his brother, and somehow Piccolo is left alone with Goku’s four-year-old son.
He takes the kid into the wilderness and trains him for a year. The line he says during early training, roughly “curse your fate, the way I had to,” isn’t villain dialogue. Japanese readers take it as confession. Nobody was listening when Piccolo was that age. Gohan listened.
What Goku missed
Here’s the uncomfortable thing Japanese fans sit with: Goku is a bad father.
Not cruel. Not cold. Just… absent. Dead for a year, then off training, then dead again. When he’s around, he sees Gohan as a warrior with untapped potential, excited about what Gohan could become.
Piccolo sees a kid.
A Japanese blogger writing about this contrast put it well: during the Cell arc, when Goku pushes Gohan to fight Cell and Gohan clearly isn’t ready, it’s Piccolo who gets angry. Not at the enemy, at Goku. He’s watching a father use his son as a weapon, and he can’t stay quiet. By that point, Piccolo has spent more time with Gohan than Goku has. He knows what Gohan actually wants, which is to not fight at all.
Goku never quite figures that out. Japanese readers have written about this contrast for decades: Goku loves Gohan the way someone loves a promising student. Piccolo loves him the way someone loves a child they didn’t expect to love. That second kind is harder to write. Toriyama wrote it anyway.
There’s a specific dimension to this that Japanese readers track and Western readers tend to miss. Goku’s absence isn’t malicious. He’s not a neglectful father in the way a story usually frames neglect: there’s no resentment, no coldness, no deliberate withholding. He’s just someone for whom the pull toward fighting and self-improvement is so fundamental that everything else, including his son, exists in a different category of concern. He loves Gohan genuinely. He just doesn’t love him in a way that registers as presence.
Piccolo has no template for what parenting is supposed to look like. He was born as an instrument of revenge, trained to be a weapon, feared and avoided his entire life. He figures out how to be present for Gohan not because he knows how, but because he’s there when Gohan needs someone and he doesn’t leave. That’s the whole of it. Japanese readers understood this without the series explaining it, because the series didn’t explain it. It just showed the training sessions. The quiet meals. The moments where Piccolo says nothing and Gohan talks anyway.
“Run.”
The moment Japanese fans come back to most is the Saiyan arc.
Nappa is attacking. Gohan is about to be killed. Piccolo steps in front of the blast.
He’s spent a year drilling Gohan to be fearless. To fight. To push through pain. And now, dying, the word he chooses is: run.
Not fight. Run.
Japanese fans read this as the moment Piccolo becomes a father in any real sense, not the moment he decides to, he never decides anything that cleanly, but the moment it becomes undeniable. Everything he trained Gohan to be, he’s now willing to die so Gohan never has to be.
His last words before losing consciousness: “You were the only one who ever talked to me like a normal person.” That line lands differently when you remember what Piccolo is. The reincarnation of pure evil, feared by everyone, avoided by everyone. One kid treated him like a person. Piccolo never forgot it.
Why this lands the way it does in Japan
Western readings of Piccolo tend to focus on the cool factor. Stoic, powerful, strategically sharp. The mentor who pushes harder than anyone.
Japanese fans have that reading too. But there’s something underneath it.
A recurring thread in Japanese fan writing: Piccolo is a character who had no model for how to love someone. Born without parents, shaped by inherited rage, avoided his whole life. And then he figures it out, not through any revelation, just by spending time with a kid who needed him.
There’s a concept that comes up in Japanese discussions of this relationship: becoming family through shared time and hardship rather than blood. It has specific cultural weight in Japan in a way that doesn’t translate cleanly. Piccolo and Gohan are one of the clearest examples of it in Dragon Ball, maybe in shonen manga more broadly, and Japanese readers feel that without needing it stated.
The training scenes do it. The death scene does it. The moment in the Frieza arc when Piccolo shows up and Gohan just says “Piccolo-san!” and the relief comes flooding through him. That does it too.
He came back. He always comes back.
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