Grandpa Gohan is the gentle martial artist who found, raised, and named the infant Kakarot after the baby crash-landed on Earth in a Saiyan space pod, unknowingly setting in motion the entire Dragon Ball saga. A devoted student of Master Roshi alongside the Ox-King, Grandpa Gohan was a kind-hearted hermit who lived alone in the wilderness — until a feral baby with a tail fell from the sky.Grandpa Gohan is the gentle martial artist who found, raised, and named the infant Kakarot after the baby crash-landed on Earth in a Saiyan space pod, unknowingly setting in motion the entire Dragon Ball saga. A devoted student of Master Roshi alongside the Ox-King, Grandpa Gohan was a kind-hearted hermit who lived alone in the wilderness — until a feral baby with a tail fell from the sky. He adopted the child, named him Son Goku, and spent the next few years raising him with unconditional love, teaching him basic martial arts, and attempting (with limited success) to tame the boy's wild Saiyan instincts. His death, which the young Goku never understood, came during a full moon when the child's latent Saiyan biology triggered an uncontrolled Great Ape transformation: Goku, as a rampaging Oozaru, unknowingly crushed his own grandfather to death. Goku's first encounter with this truth occurred during the Emperor Pilaf Saga when he glimpsed Grandpa Gohan's spirit, and the full story was revealed by Master Roshi years later. In the afterlife, Grandpa Gohan became the attendant to Baba Uranai (Fortuneteller Baba), serving as her champion fighter. His posthumous reunion with Goku during the Fortuneteller Baba Saga — a joyful, tearful battle where grandfather recognized grandson despite his monstrous Great Ape form — is one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the original Dragon Ball. Grandpa Gohan gifted Goku the Four-Star Dragon Ball, his most treasured possession and the last memento of his adoptive grandfather, which Goku would keep on his person for the rest of his life as a symbol of family love. The irony that Goku's biological grandfather sent him to conquer Earth while his adoptive grandfather raised him to protect it defines the nurture-over-nature theme at the core of the Dragon Ball franchise. Grandpa Gohan represents the quiet, transformative power of love: a single old man in the wilderness, raising an alien baby, changed the fate of the entire cosmos.... Read more
