Term · Dragon Ball
Saiyan
A warrior race with one very good trick: nearly dying makes them permanently stronger.
In Otakana the clue reads: Warrior race whose hair turns gold
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Dragon Ball
- Letters
- 6 · Easy
Saiyans are a small, aggressive species who sold their services as planet clearers and were destroyed by their own employer for being too good at it. They look human apart from the tail, which turns them into a building-sized ape under a full moon, and they recover from injuries with more power than they had before. That single rule is the engine of Dragon Ball's escalation. Every beating a Saiyan survives is an upgrade.
The Super Saiyan form arrived in 1991 and became one of the most recognisable images in animation: hair standing up and turning gold, eyes going green, a light around the body. Inside the story it is a legend the survivors half believe. Outside it, the golden transformation set the template for the power-up sequence that shonen anime has been reusing ever since.
The Japanese is Saiya-jin, and Saiya is yasai, vegetable, with the syllables switched. Every member of the race is named after produce, from carrots to broccoli, which sits oddly beside a species whose entire history is conquest and which is exactly why Toriyama did it.
Spelling SAIYAN
SAIYAN is six letters, and English invented the ending. The Japanese word is Saiya-jin, where jin means person, so a literal romanisation gives SAIYAJIN. Translators swapped in an English suffix instead, the way Roman becomes Romans. Watch the vowel run at the front: S, then A and I together, then the Y doing consonant duty before the last two letters.