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The fact that manga like Dragon Ball has faced censorship in the US isn’t surprising, but what can be shocking is how few complaints it can take to cause a mass panic among retailers. In fact, it only took one parent complaining about Goku’s Dragon Balls to get Toys ‘R’ Us to pull the entire manga off the shelves.

During a recent interview, Dallas Middaugh, who has been in the anime and manga business for more than 20 years now, shared a story about how the depiction of Goku’s penis in the first chapter of Dragon Ball caused one parent to complain, which led to Toys ‘R’ Us destroying a whole batch of manga.

“At Toys ‘R’ Us, they actually had Dragon Ball comics, but they would package them in little three-packs so they could charge $6, $7, or $8 for them,” Middaugh explains. “The comics were returned because there was a single person – one parent – who opened those comics and, if you remember, the first couple of chapters of Dragon Ball, that’s where they find Goku living in the forest, and he doesn’t wear clothes, so you can see his genitalia.”

“It’s not even remotely sexual,” Middaugh stresses, which is true. We’ve read those chapters, and Goku’s nudity is barely even played for laughs; he’s just a naked kid. Kids get naked all the time. “It’s nothing other than a naked child. There’s nothing offensive about it in any way… One parent complained, and every single book was destroyed. Every single book was returned and pulped.”

There are plenty of things that probably should upset parents when their kids are reading Dragon Ball. There is a lot of violence throughout (though that hasn’t stopped me from sharing it with my son), yet that never got any complaints from parents during Middaugh’s time. “Going forward from that point, that was when Viz, at the time, had to start censoring Dragon Ball for anything that they felt might be sexually explicit. Dragon Ball returned to Toys ‘R’ Us, same way. This time, no sex. No nudity. It literally has a scene where one character reaches into another character’s chest and rips out his still-beating heart. Not one complaint. We do not care about violence in this country. Only nudity.”

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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