The origins of the Anything-Goes School (Musabetsu Kakuto Ryu) are lost in a mist of contradictory legends. The best guess is that it was created sometime in the later Muromachi period, likely in the early sixteenth century, by the warrior whose name is most often mentioned as the founder of the school, Tendo Yoshimori. It was commonly said (most often by the school's opponents) that Tendo had the aid of a demon in creating the school. At least some credence may be given to this, considering the curse that has been associated with the school since its earliest days, though the details of the curse were known to a very few.
Each master says takes one, and only one, student at a time. This student is not necessarily from the Tendo family, but it is noteworthy that as a rule no more than two or three generations go by before the school passes back to a Tendo. The student, always a boy or young man who has shown signs of great talent, undergoes extremely arduous training, eventually finding within himself a source of power rooted in some aspect of his nature, generally one that outside observers would consider a character flaw. He is able to draw increasing power from this source, at the cost of exaggerating the flaw in his nature. The training becomes more and more difficult, until eventually the master attempts to kill the student. If the master succeeds, the pattern will eventually be repeated, until at last one of his students will kill the master, to become the new master of the school in turn. The new master will try to resist the compulsion to take a student, knowing that it will lead to his death, for as long as possible, but will eventually give in. Some masters have drawn power from their lechery, or their drunkenness, or their anger, and in at least one grim case Ashikaga Sanetoki drew power from causing pain and suffering in others. Had he not been forced by the curse to train a student, who succeeded in killing him when Ashikaga was only 48, the name of the Anything-Goes School might be in even worse repute than its current standing.
Maeda Happosai was born in 1888, to a samurai family impoverished by the changes of the Meiji restoration. Both of his parents died while he was still very young, and he lived for a time as a beggar and petty thief. In 1896 the then master of the Anything-Goes School, Tendo Ryuzo, took him in and trained him as his successor. Happosai eventually found that the source of his own power lay in his lusty and lecherous nature. This nature was exaggerated and amplified by the curse. Happosai was a stellar student and showed signs of surpassing his master at a younger age than had ever occurred before. In a noteworthy incident in 1906, he saved a Chinese student studying in Tokyo named Shen Lao from a gang of thugs who relished harassing foreign students, easily defeating them all single-handedly. The curse drove his master Ryuzo to greater and greater extremes of cruelty, until Happosai finally killed him in 1910. He fled Japan after this, ending up in China, where he sought some means to eliminate or at least to moderate the effects of the curse. He encountered the Chinese Amazons in 1911, and began an on-again, off-again courtship of the then-18-year-old Ke Lun. Their relationship was an extremely rocky one, not least because of the difficulties he had controlling his behavior, and she finally rejected him. An angry Happosai stole a number of the Amazon tribal treasures and fled the area in 1913. Ke Lun volunteered to hunt him down, partly because she was intrigued by Happosai's tales of the outside world. While searching, she encountered Shen Lao in 1914 and married him, finally returning to the village the following year.
Shen Lao was born in the year 1886 in Kwangtung province near the city of Canton in southern China. He came to Japan in 1905 to study with Dr. Sun Yat-sen and joined his T'ung-meng Hui, the "China Revolutionary League." While there, he befriended Happosai and taught him Chinese and English. When the Republic of China was created, he traveled with Dr. Sun to China and assumed a post as a high-level economist with the government. He continued in this position after Dr. Sun was forced to hand over the government to Yuan Shih-k'ai, commander-in-chief of the imperial army, but eventually came into conflict with him. After the rebellion led against Yuan by Dr. Sun in 1913 failed, and Sun fled to Japan, Shen escaped from the assassins sent after him, and eventually encountered Ke Lun. The two fell in love, and Ke Lun killed his pursuers and took him back to the village in the belief that he would be safe there. He was, at least from the government, and the two had a daughter, Lin Yao, in 1917. Eventually Lao succeeded in reconciling Ke Lun and Happosai, though Happosai remained in possession of the stolen treasures, and officially a fugitive from Amazon justice.
Shen Lao had never given up his belief in Dr. Sun's "Three People's Principles", and eventually ran afoul of the village council. He died in 1934, poisoned by the tribal elders, and Ke Lun left the village to deliver some ancient scrolls to Lao's younger brother, Eng-hee. While traveling, she encountered Happosai and the Shadow in Tibet the following year.
The crime fighter known as the Shadow was, in reality, a former American aviator known as Kent Allard who had achieved a certain degree of fame during World War I as the Dark Eagle. After the war, he wandered the world in an aimless fashion until he decided to wage a war of a different sort. In 1925, Kent Allard's plane "crashed" in the jungles of Guatemala and he was presumed lost. Actually, he took refuge with the Xinca Indians, whom he had met during his travels. He stayed with them some months, before returning to America in the guise of millionaire globetrotter Lamont Cranston. Cranston agreed to let the Shadow borrow his identity when needed, as he spent most of his time traveling in distant corners of the Earth. The Shadow built up a cadre of loyal agents to aid him in his fight against crime: Burbank, the contact man; Harry Vincent, man-about-town and former gambler, and the Shadow's senior active agent; Moe Shrevnitz, cabby; Clyde Burke, newspaper reporter; and Cliff Marsland, denizen of the underworld. Only two people knew the real identity of the Shadow: criminologist Slade Farrow, and the mysterious Japanese woman Yukana Takizawa. The Shadow had chosen to confide in Farrow, but was astounded at his first meeting with Miss Takizawa in 1930 to realize that she knew everything about him and his mission. Eventually he came to trust her after realizing something of her true nature.
As the world tottered on the brink of war, suspicions were raised in Washington, DC, about the masked vigilante operating out of New York City. High-ranking bureaucrats were rendered extremely nervous at the thought of so potent a force for either good or ill completely beyond their control. Some, including the FBI's Hoover, suggested bringing the Shadow to justice and exposing him. Others objected strongly to this, though often, it is to be feared, primarily because of the possible public reaction to the move. Eventually a compromise was reached: force the Shadow to agree to join with Richard Benson, the so-called Avenger, in the organization known as Justice, Inc. It was fondly imagined by those in favor of the move that this would give them at least some control over the mysterious crime fighter.
Richard Henry Benson was born in 1909. He made a fortune while still a young man as an explorer and adventurer before deciding to settle down by marrying his childhood sweetheart Alicia and becoming a businessman. He was as successful at this as at anything else he had tried his hand at, until the fateful day in May of 1938 when his wife and young daughter disappeared while on a plane flight with him from Buffalo, New York to Montreal. The mystery was compounded by the fact that everyone he talked to insisted he had boarded the aircraft alone. The tremendous shock turned his hair snow white and caused his facial muscles to become permanently paralyzed. After a month-long stay in a sanitarium, Benson emerged a greatly changed man, both physically and mentally. He threw himself into a quest to learn the truth, enlisting the aid of Fergus MacMurdie, a dour Scotsman and able chemist who had lost his own wife and son to the forces of crime, and Smitty, the giant whose placid, moon-shaped face concealed the agile mind of a brilliant electrical engineer. Eventually they learned that Benson had run afoul of a gang of kidnappers. Although Benson succeeded in bringing them to justice, nothing could bring back his murdered wife and child, and he decided to form a group he called Justice, Inc., with the intention of devoting his life to combating crime and trying to spare others the tragic losses that he had suffered. In 1939, despite some misgivings, he agreed to work together with the Shadow. At its peak, after Banzai Masado and Sandra Willoughby joined in 1943, Justice, Inc. was the most effective crime-fighting organization in the world.
In 1935, two scientists, Hikita Toichi and Banzai Masado began their investigations into the possibilities of contacting other worlds. The two visited the United States two years later on the invitation of Texas millionaire Edward McKay Willoughby, where the 19-year-old Banzai first met his future wife, Sandra Willoughby, Edward's 16-year-old daughter. Hikita and Banzai dissolved their partnership for a time, Banzai returning to Japan while Hikita stayed behind in the United States, eventually teaming with Dr. Emilio Lizardo at Princeton, where in 1938 they achieved their first disastrous success in creating the Overthruster, a device to penetrate dimensional barriers. Lizardo went mad, while, unbeknownst to Hikita, a large number of Lectroids from the tenth planet were freed from imprisonment in the so-called Eighth Dimension. Meanwhile, Sandra Willoughby followed her beloved Masado to Japan in 1940, and the two eventually fled Japan together in late November of the following year.
They met Justice, Inc. in 1943, as has been told, and joined forces with them. The association was a short-lived one, however, as most of the members of Justice, Inc. were killed in China in 1947. Four members were known to have survived, while the whereabouts of the fifth, Kent Allard, were listed officially as unknown. He had fallen off a cliff while struggling with Shiwan Khan. Khan's body was found at the base of the cliff, but the only sign of Allard was the torn cape Khan clutched. It was surmised that Allard's body had fallen into the sacred river Alph, which ran close by the cliff before diving underground.
The recently-married Banzais were among the survivors, but faced another tragedy when their infant son Bronco was kidnapped in 1950, apparently at the command of Hanoi Xan, their great enemy, and never seen again. They eventually recovered from their loss, and had another son, Buckaroo, born in 1960. Their happiness was short-lived, as Masado and Sandra both died, along with driver George Campbell, when their experimental Jet Car exploded in 1965. Buckaroo devoted himself to carrying on their work, in all its different phases, leading to the founding of the famous Banzai Institute in 1982.
In 1995, as had been foretold in the ancient scrolls handed down in the Shen family, the ancient sorcerer Lo Pan made his bid for world conquest. Egg Shen enlisted the aid of an American truck driver named Jack Burton, and Lo Pan was defeated and destroyed. These events are chronicled in the documentary, "Big Trouble in Little China."
Finally, in 1997, Ranma Saotome fell into a cursed spring, Tenchi Masaki released the pirate Ryoko from her 700-year imprisonment, and Usagi Tsukino first transformed into Sailor Moon. The most important of the many disparate elements that Pluto would weave together were now in place.