Goku is the character you admire.
Krillin is the character you are.
That’s how a lot of Japanese fans put it, and it gets at something real. Western Dragon Ball discourse tends to focus on power levels, transformations, and who’s strongest. In Japan, the conversation about Krillin goes somewhere else entirely. It’s about what it feels like to be the friend of someone who has completely left you behind.
Krillin carries that feeling for the entire series.
Goku doesn’t really do friendship
Here’s what Japanese fans have been sitting with for decades: Goku is not actually a good friend in any conventional sense.
He disappears for years at a time. He forgets to stay in touch. He dies twice and seems genuinely unbothered by what that does to the people around him. When Krillin was killed by Tambourine, Goku went after the killer immediately, but that impulse came from his own rage, not grief for Krillin.
Toriyama himself said in an interview that Goku doesn’t really have friendship in the traditional sense. He was almost matter-of-fact about it.
Japanese fans didn’t take this as a character flaw, exactly. More like a confirmation of something they’d already sensed. Goku runs on self-improvement, and everyone else orbits that, including Krillin.
And Krillin just… accepts it.
That’s the part Japanese fans find both heartbreaking and admirable. A Japanese writer described wanting to be Krillin as a kid, not for his strength, but for the specific way he’d absorbed Goku’s emotional unavailability without ever turning bitter. He described it as a kind of mushin, a near-Buddhist detachment, applied to friendship. That might seem like a stretch. Japanese fans go there anyway.
He’s smarter than you think
Krillin’s track record in Dragon Ball is rough.
Three deaths. Repeatedly outpaced by the power scaling. By the Android arc, Bulma is genuinely surprised to learn he can’t fly. He spends the back half of the series delivering senzu beans and watching from a distance.
Japanese fans clock something that Western analysis often misses, though.
Krillin is the most strategically intelligent fighter in the series. Not the strongest. The smartest. He suppresses his ki to hide from enemies. He scatters energy blades to cut off escape routes. He receives the Spirit Bomb mid-battle and actually pulls it off: something nobody else could have done. Against Frieza, someone so far beyond him it’s almost absurd, he still finds angles.
Japanese readers grew up watching this. What they took from it wasn’t “Krillin is weak,” but rather “Krillin keeps going even when he knows he can’t win.”
A Japanese blogger writing about Krillin put it simply: the reason he resonates isn’t power, it’s that he keeps showing up. Every arc. Every fight. With everything stacked against him. I find it hard to argue with that.
The last scene
In the final episode of Dragon Ball GT, Goku disappears with Shenron into another dimension.
His last stop before leaving isn’t his family. Not Vegeta. Not Piccolo.
It’s Krillin.
He shows up at Krillin’s house, old and white-haired, and asks if they can spar one more time. Just the two of them. The way they used to, as kids training under Master Roshi.
Japanese fans treat this moment as significant in a way Western fandom doesn’t quite register. It confirms something the series never said out loud: Krillin is Goku’s most essential relationship. Not because Goku loves him in any conventional sense, but because he’s the only one Goku comes back for.
That asymmetry, Krillin feeling everything, Goku feeling something he can’t name, is what Japanese fans have been reading into for thirty years. In that last scene, Goku names it. In the only way he knows how.
What Japanese readers track in this scene isn’t the emotion. It’s the fact of the return. Goku, who forgets birthdays and misses funerals and dies at inconvenient moments and seems constitutionally incapable of putting anyone else first, chooses to spend the final minutes of his existence in this dimension sparring with his childhood friend. Not fighting a strong enemy. Not training. Sparring with Krillin, which is something he’s been able to do since they were twelve years old and which gets harder every year because the gap keeps growing.
The gap doesn’t matter to Goku in this moment. It never really did. Japanese readers who’d watched Krillin carry the weight of that gap for forty-plus years of publication found something true in that. Goku isn’t demonstrating that the gap doesn’t exist. He’s demonstrating that it doesn’t change what Krillin is to him. Those are different things.
I’ve read Japanese fan writing that describes this scene as the most honest moment in Dragon Ball GT, a series that isn’t otherwise particularly honest. The whole episode is essentially a farewell to characters who had been running for decades, and most of those farewells are perfunctory. The Krillin scene isn’t. It takes its time. Goku sits with Krillin in a way he doesn’t sit with anyone else. That’s the whole of what it says, and it’s enough.
Why this reads differently in Japan
Western Dragon Ball fandom came in mostly through Z, through the dub, through the action. The emotional undercurrent of the original manga didn’t always make it across.
Japanese readers had the whole thing. They watched Krillin and Goku grow up together. They saw the friendship form before the power gap made it absurd.
Something Japanese fan writing returns to: Krillin shows you that you can stay close to someone who has left you behind, not because you’re blind to the gap, but because the friendship matters more. Japanese readers who grew up with both characters found something honest in that, and they’ve been talking about it ever since.
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