I learned honor from an after-school cartoon
“Why is the Japanese prime minister doing moves from Dragon Ball Z on stage with Emmanuel Macron?”
My good friends in their 40s (roughly ten years older) asked me this recently.
I launched into an explanation about the iconic cultural relevance of Dragon Ball Z (DBZ), the show that basically reprogrammed an entire generation of western children with eastern values. I told them how DBZ’s valued at over $80B+, bigger than some countries’ entire budgets. I monologued on how DBZ lessons transcends class, race, language and culture barriers. Picking up speed, sweating, ranting, I lectured about how it was part of Japan’s genius economic development strategy called “cool Japan” - a multi-billion dollar, decades-spanning psyop by the Japanese government to make their cultural works globally relevant and marketable.
They looked at me like I was an insane person.
“Isn’t it just a cartoon?”
How dare you sir.
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As a 10 year old watching the DBZ story play out in 30 minute segments after the painful drudgery of school, DBZ taught me about the pursuit of mastery, the moral purity of bettering yourself, the value of teamwork, and the importance of seeing the people around you as your teachers.
This is why DBZ is the most powerful piece of media for a generation navigating an insane world. This is the message behind the millennial instinct to do your best, try to save the world, and always be improving yourself.
So, dear friends who missed out, I’m going to tell you just a bit about the DBZ story. Don’t worry, I won’t make you watch a cartoon.
Just enough to illustrate the impact.
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So we’ll start here: THE Dragon Balls
DBZ revolves around these things called Dragon Balls. Gather them up and a dragon-genie will grant you any wish.
The bad guys of DBZ are obsessed with the dragon balls to get immortal life. DBZ good guys mostly don’t care about the dragon balls unless they’re trying to revive their friends who died in battle.
And the heroes die in battle a lot.
Pictured above: Iconic good-guy dying scene with its own line of toys that have made more money than most of your friends last 3 startups put together.
Literally every good-guy dies in glorious honorable battle AT LEAST 3 times and has to be revived.
So everyone wants the dragon balls.
This is the first lesson DBZ teaches you as a kid:
Good guys are busy bettering themselves through training and hard work. Bad guys are looking for shortcuts to power.
This guy is our main character, Goku. You have seen him but you don’t know why everyone loves him so much.
Goku is the strongest guy on earth. He’s like superman but instead of having a boner for justice he just loves fighting strong opponents so goddamn much.
He’s an idiot savant for kicking ass. He has a wife and kid or something, but they’re not his main concern.
Note: It takes about 600 more episodes before they actually go fishing.
He is mainly concerned with training every minute of every day to get stronger.
One day, strong aliens start showing up on earth, basically wanting to kill all humans and sell the planet to the highest galactic bidder.
Goku is like “yo, I don’t love the killing all humans thing, but can we get a sparring match in some time??”
This is the second major lesson DBZ teaches you as a kid:
Always improve your craft. Don’t get distracted by the petty concerns of life. Your main goal should be to be the fucking best at your thing.
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Goku basically immediately dies fighting one of these alien guys.
But the alien uploads the equivalent of a fucking zoom transcript to galactic youtube and now every badass alien in the universe knows about the wish-balls and b-lines for Earth.
So the good guy team gets one year before some sociopaths are going to show up and kill everyone and take the wish-balls.
There’s a lot of muscles in DBZ.
So the good guy team gets to TRAINING. For like, 100 episodes, they are meditating under waterfalls, bulking on alien creatine, beating the shit out of each other to get real strong. Rocky running up stairs montage level shit.
Also, one of them is Goku’s semi-abandoned 3 years old son, because it’s never too early to get SWOLE in DBZ.
This is actually the easy part of the 3-year olds training montage.
Goku, being dead, obviously meets up with God who tells him: “Get to training, my guy.” and sends him to find the afterlife equivalent of Mr. Miagi who can train him to be more badass.
Btw God in DBZ is basically a bureaucrat
This is the third lesson DBZ teaches you as a kid:
There is always someone better than you. No matter how good you get, there’s always more potential you can reach. Always seek out new masters who can take you to the next level.
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So new scary aliens show up on Earth. The first thing they do after touching down is level a city by basically sneezing. Our heroes are clearly fucked.
Satellite imagery of the sneeze aftermath.
Even with a year of notice, Goku forgets to set a fucking alarm and shows up extremely late to the fight.
By the time he gets revived and shows up to the party, half his weak-ass friends are dead and the other half are missing limbs. It’s a shitshow.
Heroic moment of character growth I don’t have time to explain.
Anyways, Goku has gotten WAY stronger, and he puts up a good fight that basically ends in a draw.
But the nearly-dead-weak-ass friends pull themselves up from being crumpled heaps of broken bones and together they drop a literal bomb of wholesomeness on the strongest alien.
Bad guy realizing hes been fucked by teamwork making the dreamwork
This is the fourth lesson that DBZ teaches you as a kid:
No matter how good you are alone, you need a badass team around you.
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Finally, before landing the final blow on the sociopath bad-guy trying to escape, Goku begs his buddy to let the bad guy go.
“Bro, wtf are you talking about.”
Goku gives a whole speech about how much he loved fighting this bad guy, and how dope it is that someone so strong exists to push him to the next level, and about how he really wants to square-off with him again.
“Fuck, fine man, your call, you did most of the work to beat him anyways.” and they let him go.
This is the fifth lesson DBZ teaches you as a kid:
Your enemies can be your best teachers. There is honor even in defeat.
Forget the insane details of aliens and wish-balls and all that for a moment.
As kids, DBZ instilled an ethic of honor and self-improvement that makes every startup handbook and self-help guru look pathetic in comparison.
I’ve rewatched DBZ maybe 20 times. Every time I learn something new from it. These are lessons that remain relevant through every stage of life.
No other piece of media comes even close to delivering these messages with so much impact.
Now, please don’t ever say “it’s just a cartoon” again.