For the better part of three decades, co-creator of Tenchi Muyo!, Masaki Kajishima, has held fast to the claim that Tenchi Muyo! was “all in his head since high school.” However, for Comiket 100, interesting information has come out shedding light on what the origins of this juggernaut franchise actually are.
For the forthcoming Comiket, Kajishima will be releasing a redone version of his doujin The Night Before the Carnival: Heisei Edition 1, which released at Comiket 54 on August 16th, 1998. Released with brand new commentary, this new doujin is called The Night Before the Carnival: Original Edition 22.08.
Across both doujins, we are introduced to characters “Masaki” (featured in red, said to be the daughter of the first emperor of Jurai), a blue haired character named “Lashara Moon” (A name reused in Photon: The Idiot Adventures), a character named “Lyon”, and probably the most recognizable character named “Koro-chan” (a Ryo-Ohki lookalike who is half cute cuddly character and half dragon, it’s name being used as cute creatures in Photon, as well as Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar). The character can also transform much as Ryo-Ohki would, and can use an ability called “Ghost” which lets him permeate matter (aka phase through walls). Sound familiar?
Also of note, is that there is a young beast female character who is referred to as “Humanoid Ryo-san”. It is also implied that a female beast character can quickly mature and mate, a concept that Kajishima has apparently been wanting to do for a long time…
“The story centers on the common inheritance-related troubles of aristocratic daughters who are running away from pursuers aiming to assassinate them. The protagonists are caught in the middle of the action, and as they run for their lives, they become completely savage.”
As mentioned in the doujin, these images were being made 10 years prior to the doujin’s original 1998 release, with the Lashara piece showing a date of June 16th, 1989, true to the “Heisei” part of its name.
All of this demonstrates that Kajishima has had early concepts for ideas later expressed in Tenchi Muyo! for a long time. But despite Kajishima’s claims to the contrary, this new information of his actually corroborates what Hayashi said in an interview from 1994, that Tenchi Muyo! was nothing more than “idle discussion” between himself and Kajishima in ’90, and gives us an interesting view into some of the ideas Kajishima cannibalized from this to use later in Tenchi and beyond.
One year after these concepts were drawn, a job working on AIC’s Iczer-3, and merging his ideas with Hayashi’s and others’, and Tenchi Muyo! as we know it was born.
