I hope i worded this question correctly but anyway... The popular manga (japanese comic) started in 1985 presents a young aspiring martial artist called Goku. Early on we're presented with the concept of ki (somewhat-but-not-quite borrowed from the Chinese concept of Chi) which with character are allowed to use impossible attacks like shooting beams of energy from their hands.
The most well known of these energy attacks is the Kame Hame Ha, a generally blue beam of energy released from the hands after a certain set of movements is done while chanting the name of the attack.
Recently while doing some research on the history of the song Aloha'Oe i came across the name of the very first king of Hawaii, that being King Kamehameha The First.
My question would be if anyone who knows about him more than I do knows if the browed name has some meaning behind it, or if the author merely grabbed the name because it had "kame" in it (kame means turtle in japanese, and the creator of the technique in-universe is known as the Kame Senin, or Turtle Hermit/Sage)
What a great question for this wonderful Goku Day!
Fortunately for us, Akira Toriyama has spoken directly about this before. In 2009, a set of databooks for the franchise were released, called the Dragon Ball: Super Exciting Guide. The first volume contains an interview with Toriyama where he says (as translated by Julian Grybowski):
Incidentally, for the name “Kamehameha”, I was wondering whether there was a decent name along the lines of “something-something-Ha”, when my wife said as a joke, “Kamehameha would be fine, wouldn’t it?” so I used it as-is. Of course, it’s taken from King Kamehameha of Hawaii.
As for whether the name has any deeper meaning, there are claims by some fans that the name translates as 'Turtle Destruction Wave' or similar, but these are unsubstantiated. In particular, in Japanese the name of the attack is written かめはめ波. That last character, 波, is the kanji for 'wave' and is read as 'ha'. But, the kanji for turtle, 亀 (kame), is not used in the attack's name, unlike with Master Roshi's title, 亀仙人 (Kame-Sennin), nor is 破滅 (hametsu, destruction) used for the 'hame' in the middle. Instead, 'kamehame' is written in hiragana, one of the phonetic scripts of Japanese, and the name as a whole can be understood simply as 'Kamehame Wave' rather than something more meaningful. Which is not to say that the attack's name isn't meant to evoke Roshi's name, but it's certainly not as clear cut as is sometimes claimed.