On March 1, 2024, Akira Toriyama died from an acute subdural hematoma. He was 68.
The announcement came two days later, on March 8. And for a few hours, something unusual happened in Japan, a country that is generally not given to public displays of emotion about celebrities, which was that a very large number of people seemed to stop what they were doing.
I want to try to describe what that felt like from here, because I think it was different from what it looked like outside Japan.
The word “death” in Japanese pop culture news usually moves through a predictable cycle. Announcement, tributes, a few days of coverage, then it fades. This did not follow that cycle. The conversation kept going. A week later, people were still writing long posts about specific chapters. About the first time they saw Goku go Super Saiyan. About what the series had meant to them at eight years old, and what it meant to them now.
What Dragon Ball actually was in Japan
Outside Japan, Dragon Ball is a beloved franchise. An anime you grew up watching. A set of characters and fights that live in the memory of a particular generation.
In Japan, it is something slightly different. Something closer to shared infrastructure than entertainment.
Dragon Ball ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995, eleven years, five hundred and nineteen chapters. For most of that run, it was the top-selling manga in Japan. Not occasionally, not competitively: consistently, dominantly, for years. The anime adaptation began in 1986 and ran for nearly a decade before transitioning to Dragon Ball Z, which itself ran until 1996. The combined run covered most of the childhood of an entire generation.
When Japanese people of a certain age say Dragon Ball was part of their childhood, they mean something more literal than nostalgia usually allows. The manga was in the weekly magazine their parents bought. The anime was on television after school. The characters were on every piece of merchandise you could imagine. There was no opting out. It was simply there, the way certain things are simply there when you are growing up.
I’m 1992. That puts me right in the middle of the Dragon Ball Z generation. I didn’t choose to watch it any more than I chose the language I speak. It was on.
March 8, 2024
The announcement dropped in the early afternoon. Within hours, it was the only thing on Japanese social media.
What struck me was not the volume of the reaction but the tone. The word I kept seeing was 元気, genki: which roughly means energy, vitality, the quality of being well and alive. Goku’s catchphrase, his signature, the thing he embodies above all else. People were writing things like: “Thank you for all the genki you gave us.” Not grief exactly. Something more like acknowledgment of a debt that had been sitting there for decades and now needed to be said out loud.
French President Macron posted a photo of himself with a signed Toriyama illustration and wrote that Dragon Ball was part of his generation’s childhood. Athletes, musicians, politicians across the world said similar things. The tributes came from eighty countries. There is almost no other manga artist, possibly no other Japanese artist of any kind, whose death would have produced that kind of global response.
In Japan, people talked about where they had been when they first read the Saiyan arc, which chapter they remembered most clearly, the specific feeling of waiting each week for the next installment. It was the kind of conversation that usually only happens around major historical events, where everyone remembers exactly where they were.
I remember sitting in a meeting and seeing the notification come through on my phone. I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I knew what to say. The meetings continued. But something had shifted in a way that was hard to articulate until later.
Dragon Ball DAIMA, and the problem of watching it
By the time of his death, Toriyama had spent years working on Dragon Ball DAIMA, a new animated series announced for 2024, his most direct creative involvement in the franchise in years. He did not live to see it air. It began broadcasting in October 2024, seven months after he died.
In Japan, there was something very uncomfortable about watching that series. It was good. It was recognizably his: the humor, the designs, the lightness he had always brought to even the most dramatic moments. And he would never know how it was received.
The question that came up repeatedly in Japanese discussions was one that nobody had a satisfying answer to: what happens to Dragon Ball now? Not commercially. The franchise will continue, new series will be made, the merchandise will keep selling. But creatively. The thing that made Dragon Ball what it is was not the characters or the fights or the power scaling. It was a specific sensibility, a way of drawing movement and expressing joy, that belonged to one person.
One Japanese artist, asked to contribute to a tribute collection, wrote something that stayed with me. They said that Toriyama’s art had something that could be imitated in every technical sense and still not be there. That there were drawings by him, ordinary action panels, nothing especially famous, that were somehow complete in a way that copies were not.
I’ve thought about that observation a lot. It’s the kind of thing you can feel but not fully explain. And it’s the kind of thing you only start to articulate when the person is gone.
Watching DAIMA with that in mind was a strange experience. There were moments that felt completely like him. There were moments where you could sense the seams, the places where his collaborators were filling in. The ratio was high enough that the series worked. But knowing what you were looking at changed how you watched it.
The specific thing he was good at
One thing that gets lost in the global tributes is how specific Toriyama’s gift was. He was not a great dramatic writer in the conventional sense. His plots were famously loose. He would introduce characters and forget about them. He would escalate stakes and then deflate them with a joke. Continuity was not his strong suit, and he didn’t pretend otherwise.
What he was, specifically and without equal, was good at making things feel alive on the page. The way a punch landed. The way Goku’s expression changed between panels. The specific geometry of a fight scene that somehow communicated speed and weight even in static images. Japanese manga artists have talked about this for years: that there is something in Toriyama’s action sequences that cannot be reproduced by studying them technically. You can copy the lines. You cannot copy whatever it is that makes the lines work.
This is what the Japanese artist in the tribute collection was pointing at. And it’s what makes the question of Dragon Ball’s future genuinely hard. The franchise has excellent artists working on it. They understand the visual language he built. But visual language is not the same as the person who invented it, and the gap between those two things is visible to people who grew up reading the original.
Toriyama himself seemed mostly indifferent to legacy. He gave interviews reluctantly, talked about his hobbies more than his work, and expressed more interest in his next project than in the significance of his previous ones. If he had thoughts about what Dragon Ball meant to people, he mostly kept them to himself. That restraint, the gap between what he created and how little he talked about it, was itself a kind of generosity. The work was the statement. Everything else was just noise.
What 40 years actually means
The franchise has now passed 260 million copies sold worldwide. The 40th anniversary in 2024 was marked with a commemorative film scored by Hans Zimmer, global fan events, and the announcement of further new projects. Dragon Ball is, commercially, in better shape than it has been in decades.
And yet the Japanese conversation around it after March 2024 had a quality that was different from the usual anniversary celebration. The feeling was less “look how far it has come” and more something like: we know now, in a way we did not fully know before, that the thing we loved was finite. It was made by one person, and that person is gone.
Goku survives everything. That is the premise. That has always been the joke and the comfort of Dragon Ball: whatever happens, the energy persists.
Toriyama did not. And I think that is why the reaction in Japan felt different from a typical celebrity death. It was not grief for a person most people had never met. It was the first time that Dragon Ball, the actual Dragon Ball, the thing that had been there since before most of us could read, felt like something that could end.
The franchise will go on. New artists will draw Goku. New stories will be told. Some of them will be good. But Japanese fans who grew up with the original know what they’re looking at now when they watch those new stories. They know what’s there and what isn’t. Forty years of something being simply there, and then it isn’t anymore. That’s what March 2024 was.
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