Emperor Pilaf and the Dragon Ball Menko Tradition, Explained

Vintage Dragon Ball Menko Card Featuring Emperor Pilaf

What Is a Menko Card?

Menko are thick-cardboard game pieces with deep roots in Japanese tradition. By the postwar era they had become a staple of dagashiya — small neighborhood candy shops — sold cheaply and played by slamming cards onto the ground to flip an opponent’s piece through air pressure and impact. The winner kept the flipped card. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the format merged with Japan’s anime boom, and franchises like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Kamen Rider appeared on round, rectangular, and square menko cards distributed across Japan. The circular format on this card is one of the classic shapes.

Standard menko markers appear here. A hand gesture printed in the lower right shows the open-palm sign — the “paper” in rock-paper-scissors — which menko cards used to determine game outcomes. A red circle in the upper right bears what appears to be a maker’s or series mark, though the exact company behind it has not been confirmed. A long number sequence in the upper left is consistent with a product or series control number.

Dragon Ball’s First Villain: Emperor Pilaf

Dragon Ball was created by Akira Toriyama (Bird Studio) and serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995. The anime, produced by Toei Doga and broadcast on Fuji TV, ran from February 1986 to April 1989, followed immediately by Dragon Ball Z, which continued through January 1996. This card’s copyright line names Bird Studio, Shueisha, Fuji TV, and Toei Doga — the studio name used before a 1998 rebrand to Toei Animation — which places manufacture before that year.

Emperor Pilaf is Dragon Ball’s first major antagonist: a would-be world conqueror of comically modest ambition, served by his subordinates Shu, a sword-bearing canine samurai, and Mai. As with many Toriyama characters, Pilaf is named after a food — pilaf, the rice-based dish — and the theme carries through to his costume, which displays the word chahan (fried rice) on the tunic, a detail visible in the card’s illustration. Pilaf appears from the very first chapter and episode of the series, tying him directly to Dragon Ball’s origin. He also resurfaces in later installments, including Dragon Ball Super, in a rejuvenated form — a measure of his lasting place across the franchise’s decades-long run.

The Appeal for Collectors Outside Japan

Dragon Ball has been translated and broadcast globally, with dedicated audiences across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Pilaf belongs to the original anime’s broadcast window, and collectors focused on that early period find merchandise tied to the franchise’s founding villains particularly connected to where the story began.

Menko were an almost entirely domestic Japanese product. Unlike trading cards or figures that reached international markets, menko circulated within Japan’s dagashiya and local toy shops and rarely traveled beyond them. A round Dragon Ball menko produced before 1998 — confirmed by the Toei Doga copyright — featuring the series’ original villain in a costume inscribed with a second food name, is the kind of object shaped by a specific moment in Japanese popular culture: one that stayed close to home even as the franchise it depicts became a worldwide phenomenon.