Fake Akira Toriyama Interviews

You’re having a wonderful conversation, and then *BOOM* — you’re hit by a fellow fan with what appears to be a quote from original Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama that completely, thoroughly, and conveniently “debunks” everything you just theorized.

Obviously there are a couple routes you can take. For starters, you can ask what the source of the quote is. Does this quote come from an interview? In which book? What year did it come out? Who translated the interview?

This should invariably be the point where “fake interviews” fall apart, but it has become increasingly frustrating as terrible AI services scrub misinformation perpetuated by fans (along with hallucinating their own, entirely new misinformation), search engines prop up these bad AI scrubs (or feature snippets from less-than-reputable sources), and different generations of fans fall in and out of familiarity with things like how to use search engines (… or websites in general!).

Are you screen-shotting the top of a Google search to snap back at someone on social media? That’s not “evidence”… and that might just be a quote from a random person on a random message board!

While it is impossible to catalogue every single last “fake interview” that fans have concocted over the years, we can at least share a few of the most notable ones that still make the rounds… sometimes even multiple decades later, and on an entirely new group of unsuspecting fans.

Super Otaku Magazine — The Usual Strength Debates

The (fake, non-existent) “Super Otaku Magazine” is purported to have an interview with Akira Toriyama conducted by a one (equally fake, non-existent) “Nirazaki Tihashiberi” — the kind of name that someone only vaguely familiar with the structure of Japanese syllables would smash together. In this (fake, non-existent) interview, this fake version of Toriyama goes on to detail and seemingly put a bow on one of the omnipresent “strength debates”: that of Goku vs. Gotenks.

The earliest record of this fake interview appearing on our own forums is in 2006, but we can track it back even earlier to 2005 in a forum thread on Pojo.com.

The interview hilariously uses spellings like “Doragonboru” and “Gotenkusu” (along with a wealth of other typos and poor formatting)… which may (should?) have been a clue from the original creator not to take this text seriously. Instead, it flies over the heads of naive fans first encountering this “interview” in the depths of their favorite sub-communities.

This magazine does not exist, this person does not exist, this interview does not exist, and none of this text is real.

Shonen Jump — “Canon” Supplement

Rather than fabricating a lengthy interview from scratch, another tactic fans use to mislead their peers is to slip their agenda in the middle of other, actually-real interview questions.

A “classic” example of this is what’s generally labeled as an interview from, “…an old Shonen Jump issue with Toriyama”. Is this (supposedly) from an original Japanese issue of Weekly Shonen Jump? Or is it from an issue of Viz’s (now long-since-defunct) Shonen Jump print magazine? Folks can rarely answer this question… because it’s a mix of real and fake.

As early as at least 2007, the website Pojo.com put up the text of this “interview” as if it were real.

Many of the questions in this “fake” interview actually are real, and come from the debut issue of Viz’s (aforementioned, now long-since-defunct) Shonen Jump print magazine, which indeed featured an interview with Akira Toriyama — this issue was released in November 2002, with a cover date for January 2003.

However, there is a completely fake Q&A slipped into the mix, one meant to “clear up” any question about canonocity between the original manga and its televised adaptation:

Akira Toriyama has never gone into this kind of depth about canonicity. This single, particular Q&A is not real, though it is mixed in with other, real items from a real magazine.

Akira Toriyama Super Interview — More Strength Debates

As with the above example, this “fake interview” takes the form of using real material to surround and frame a fake question. To give it the illusion of even more authority, the image that gets passed around is actually an edited screenshot of a real interview from right here from our own “Translations Archive” on Kanzenshuu — note the formatting, coloring, etc.

This image dates back to at least 2020, where its legitimacy is questioned in a GameFAQs forum post (which may or may not even be the original source of this image).

The “current debate” item is the one in question: this entire section is completely fabricated from nothing. The surrounding questions are indeed real, and come from the “Akira Toriyama Super Interview” published within 2013’s Dragon Ball Chōgashū: Super Art Collection. One need only compare the image against our own actual translation page to see the discrepancy, but when screenshots are shared devoid of any context (and especially without a corresponding link), imaginations and tempers run wild… particularly on social media.

This item was the subject of a popular learning exercise we shared on Twitter back in early 2024:

BONUS: The RPG Rule Books

Though not necessarily always attributed to Akira Toriyama himself (though it occasionally is!), this item is most often stated as being “from the Daizenshuu”. The text is generally used as “proof” to define things like the size of the universe in the Dragon Ball franchise, and to determine other inner-workings of the cosmos.

The page in question actually comes from an early-2000s pen/paper/action-figure RPG book series licensed by FUNimation, written by Mike Pondsmith, and released by ANimechaniX/Talsorian.

It should be strange to have an entire page perfectly formatted and printed in English, despite the fact that none of the kind of content from the Daizenshuu that would cover this ever saw an official English-language release… but fans generally don’t know that, and everything (whether it’s a photo or a screencap) is just a nebulous “scan”, totally devoid of context.

This item comes up so often on social media that we included it as a key entry in our ongoing “NOT A DAIZENSHUU” series of posts from 2022, intended to help demystify the wider variety of books and sources fans often do not have the full context to understand:

Much of the information in these RPG rule books is sourced from the series itself, but plenty more is stated and described as specifically being for and benefiting the actual gameplay, rather than being any kind of definitive statement about the franchise. Later books even include notes about what they got “wrong” in previous ones!

BONUS: Missing the Point of Which “Staff”

This item is another one that is completely real, generally not even altered in the slightest (other than perhaps some underlining)… but is widely misunderstood, despite the fact that its title states its exact source.

This is a quote Akira Toriyama provided for the official website of Super Dragon Ball Z in 2005, a fighting game made for arcades that later made its way to the PlayStation 2 — indeed, this screenshot is taken directly from our respective translation here on Kanzenshuu.

Toriyama is talking here about the staff that produced this video game — the staff at Crafts & Meister, Japanese game developer headed by Noritaka Funamizu. Despite the fact that every screenshot people share states this right up top, it’s often attributed as being some kind of “approval” or “sign-off” from Toriyama about the anime adaptation or supplemental guidebook entries.

Toriyama is just saying that the developers of this specific video game, Super Dragon Ball Z, know a lot and did a great job. It has nothing more to do with anything beyond that.

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