Even Dragon Ball Fans Don't Know Goku's Real Name (& It's Not Kakarot)
Even Dragon Ball fans may be surprised to know that Goku has another name that isn’t his given Saiyan name, Kakarot. Goku’s legacy as a martial artist and hero all stems from Dragon Ball’s origins as a Journey to the West parody, something that has no doubt shaped even the current Dragon Ball landscape. In fact, Goku’s secret name is intrinsically connected to these origins born from the great Chinese novel.
In Akira Toriyama’s original drafts for Dragon Ball, as revealed in an interview for the Dragon Ball guidebook Daizenshuu 2, he depicted Goku as a full-on monkey boy. His second draft was closer to a boy in sailor clothes that rode atop a flying mech as opposed to the Flying Nimbus cloud. His third and final iteration settled on the middle ground between monkey and boy that fans know today. This final draft was due to his attempt to stay as close as possible to the source material of his adaptation, Journey to the West. This source material would later prove to be the source of his new protagonist’s name, Son Goku, which in and of itself is simply the Japanese translation of the most popular Journey to the West character.
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Son Goku is the Japanese translation of the Chinese name Sun Wukong, written with the characters, 悟空. Goku’s name, in essence, is Sun Wukong. The connection to Sun Wukong doesn’t end there, however, as Goku’s alternate name also has deep connections to his journey as a martial artist. In the original story of Journey to the West, a Buddhist monk by the name of Tang Sangzang is tasked with journeying to India in order to retrieve a set of Buddhist scrolls. Along the way he encounters a set of demons who later become his most
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