A lone H in Japanese words is a holdover from phonetic mistranslations that were common in the 1980s and 90s.
What it means is that the written Japanese for Goku translates (in Hepburn) to “Go Ku U.”
The last U means the speaker holds the end of Ku a little longer. This is different from a full-width dash ー meant to extend any sound that came before it, it’s an actual separate character that can be written as う in Hiragana (phonetic Japanese characters) but won’t always be seen when reading Kanji.
In the past, the presence of the U sound after another sound was often miswritten in Roman letters as H because that’s what it sounds like to a lot of people.
Example: Touzai used to be written Tohzai because to the western world, the latter is what it sounds like.
But these “extensions” of a sound can also be written with an accent dash over the previous vowel when written in Roman characters to make the word more readable.
Tokyo is actually suppose to be written Toukyou (To U Kyo U), if you look at the Hiragana spelling of the Kanji. So as a compromise, you can write Tōkyō to properly represent all the sounds presented in the original Japanese word.
(I am far from a Japanese teacher, but this is what I’ve learned over the years.)
You learn something new every day. Thank you for the detailed explanation. :)
kinda looks like the H is different from the other letters on his nametag if you zoom in
… Goku needs a spacesuit? O.o
This specific instance was when he was flying to Namek right after beating Vegeta for the first time at the beginning of DBZ. Where he needed to go outside the ship while it was in transit. He’d never been to space and had no reason to think he’d be fine without a suit
By the beginning of Dragon Ball Super he does go into space to fight Beerus, but he’s not there for long. It seems he can go in space for a bit, but needs to come back to breathe. This also tracks because he’s had to learn to control his breathing in multiple different ways
I mehn: he can fly, teleport and is basically a god, isn’t he? Doesn’t seem out of place for him not needing a spacesuit.
Who are you talking about, Goku or Batman? :P
Yes
Whoa, a Shortpacked reference! Haven’t thought of that comic in quite awhile
My guess would be that this scene takes place before he achieved Super Saiyan and thus became essentially a demigod.
Because… iirc… he is shown to… essentially not actually really need to breathe, or at least be able to survive in the vacuum of space for a superhuman amount of time, at the end of the Freiza saga / start of the Android saga.
EDIT:
Sorry, but if you haven’t seen DBZ, uh, spoilers technically I guess on this like 25 yo anime, but that’s when he first becomes Super Saiyan.
I… can’t actually remember the pictured scene happening… in DBZ?
Maybe it was in an episode that somehow didn’t make it over to Toonami, or I think more likely, its from Dragon Ball, basically the prequel… which I have yet to actually see all of, lol.
I watched Z Kai recently, i don’t think i remember any scene showing he can survive the vacuum of space. In fact he’s shown rushing toward a frieza spade pod to survive. However they did show Bardock fighting Frieza Force in space at the beginning. That scene in op image doesn’t seems to be in z kai though, probably in DB
Not as bad as seeing “Zolo” in the wild
