Dragon Ball is a household name, and almost everyone has heard the term Super Saiyan before. Goku’s episodes-long power ups, and his transformation from messy black to spiky yellow hair have become iconic – both inside and out of the anime fandom. Yet, there’s still a detail about Super Saiyans that remains a mystery to many: the meaning and purpose behind the common naming convention “SSJ.”
For Dragon Ball fans, the actual meaning of SSJ as standing for Super Saiyan is nothing new. In fact, it’s pretty obvious based on how people use the term in the fandom. When Goku turns SSJ4 in Dragon Ball GT, everyone understands that he’s turning Super Saiyan Four, much the same as how Gohan’s SSJ2 form during the Cell Saga is clearly referring to his Super Saiyan Two transformation. However, like many terms people use on a daily basis, the actual etymology behind SSJ is complicated. After all, there’s no J in Super Saiyan. SSJ has become like many words and phrases that people use every day and take for granted, but its true meaning is actually pretty important for Dragon Ball fans to understand.
What SSJ Actually Means According To the 70zll0v” title=”origin”>Original Japanese Translation
SSJ is an acronym for “Super Saiya-jin”, a romanization of the original Japanese term for Super Saiyan. There’s more to it than that though. Super Saiyajin is itself a loaded term, filled with puns and joke-meanings that inform alot about the sense of humor that 706z87″ title=”akira”>Akira Toriyama approaches every aspect of his art with.
For example, the “Saiya” in Saiyajin is an anagram of the Japanese word yasai. In Japanese, the word yasai (野菜) translates to “vegetable” and is made up of two word fragments, “ya” and “sai” respectively. Individually, “ya” (野), can be translated to mean field or plain, and can also be used to describe a person who is unsophisticated or separated from civilization. Given that Goku was originally raised in a remote region of the mountains, this term applies to him quite well. The other half of yasai, “sai” (菜), can be translated to mean greens or an edible plant. Interestingly, sai on its own can also be taken to refer to the rapeseed plant specifically. What’s interesting about this is that, when in full bloom, the rapeseed’s bright yellow color looks strikingly similar to that of the Super Saiyan’s spiky yellow hair.
The final part of Saiyajin, “jin”, is just a suffix used in Japanese to denote a person from a specific regional background. Similar to how the suffix “ese” in “Japanese” is meant to indicate a person from Japan, or a person from Vietnam is considered “Vietnamese” in English, Japanese speakers will use the suffix jin to describe a person from America as Amerikajin. So, roughly translated, Saiyajin simply means “vegetable person”. This gives new context to the fact that all Saiyans are named after the English words for vegetables like Kakarot (carrot), Raditz (radish) and Broly (broccoli). Sadly, like many of the puns in Dragon Ball, the original meaning was lost on the English translation. The only reason the vegetable-based names still work in English is because 706z87″ title=”akira”>Akira Toriyama explicitly named them after the English words.
How Saiyajin Was Translated to Saiyan
In Dragon Ball Z, prior to the release of the English dub, the original English subtitles translated 野菜人 (Saiyajin) to Saiyan, despite it not matching the Japanese pronunciation of the word. Later, the Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z solidified the pronunciation as Saiyan, and the rest is history. Despite losing the pun from the original Japanese, Saiyan is still a good translation from Saiyajin all things are considered. The reason Saiyan makes sense as a translation is that it is in-line with the English method of adding “an” to the end of a place in order to denote that an individual belongs to a certain group from that area. Just like how “Martian” refers to someone from Mars, and “Roman” refers to someone Rome, the transliteration of Saiyajin into Saiyan makes sense for English speakers because a Saiyan is just a person of Saiya background.
Despite the fact that the meaning would be lost on English speakers, the decision to keep Saiyajin as Saiyan instead of changing it to another vegetable-related pun takes on further meaning when considering that Planet Vegeta was originally called Planet Plant before the Saiyans moved there. What’s important about this is that the Saiyans (or vegetable people) were actually from Planet Salada originally, but eventually moved to and conquered Planet Plant and renamed it Planet Vegeta. This ancestral Saiyan history underlines the importance of retaining the yasai pun, even if English audiences wouldn’t get it at first. Simply put, the translation from Saiyajin to Saiyan in English makes sense because it still acknowledges the original Japanese anagram of yasai, while also making it a natural grammatical fit for English speakers.
SSJ is Just a Misunderstanding That Happened to Catch On
Despite the change in translation, many in the Western Dragon Ball fandom still maintain the SSJ acronym when talking about Super Saiyan forms in apparent solidarity with the original. Considering how Super Saiyajin is still only two words, the J in SSJ becomes even more cryptic when acknowledging that the Japanese acronym would still just be SS. The definitive reason for this choice of acronym is not known, though some have speculated that English fans started using SSJ to represent Super Saiyajin prior to Funimation’s English dub changing it to Super Saiyan, and subsequent fans just followed suit. Others have suggested that perhaps the J was kept in as an homage to the original Japanese phrase, and still others have claimed that it simply arose as a way to distinguish it from other SS acronyms. Whatever the reason, SSJ is essentially just an inaccurate acronym used in the west to acknowledge the original Japanese pronunciation for Super Saiyan: Super Saiyajin.
Translating terms directly into English from Japanese can often be difficult due to the fact that Japanese word meanings do not always have a parallel word that relates to it them in the English language. This is a phenomenon that occurs in translating any language to any other — not something exclusive to translating Japanese to English. That’s why it made the most sense to keep the word “Saiyan” as close to the Japanese term as possible, because simply calling them “the Tablevege people” would have lacked the nuance of the original term; and doesn’t sound anywhere near as cool. With that in mind, the Western fandom’s use of SSJ should be seen more as a sign of respect for the original term and its Japanese roots than as a simple misrepresentation. 706z87″ title=”akira”>Akira Toriyama is known for molding the series in response to what the fans want anyway, so he likely has no problem with how fans refer to his characters.
