Welcome to New Japan.
The year is 4001 and the country has gotten so massive that it now houses fifty billion
people.
They all need a protector and there’s only one man who’s right for the job and his
name is Rai.
Originally created in 1991, Rai was one of Valiant Comics’ main heroes and much like
the company itself, I think that Rai is incredibly underrated.
In the original continuity, all of New Japan lives inside of a giant robot lizard controlled
by a sentient A.I.
named Grandmother.
You know, because comics.
Its chief protector is Rai who is trained from birth in all forms of combat and weaponry.
However, Rai’s training isn’t the only thing that makes him special.
He’s also endowed with powerful energy that increases his strength, speed, endurance,
and lets him create weapons out of thin air.
While this might sound great, Rai is actually a legacy title that’s passed from father
to son because each Rai must hand off their firstborn to Grandmother.
She in turn trains the child to become the next Rai so that when their father dies or
retires, their power and responsibility is taken over.
This is the story of the forty-first Rai.
Tohru Nakadai refused to become the new Rai when his father was ready to retire, despite
the fact that in his old age, his father was unable to defend New Japan.
Tohru was a proud father and refused to let his newborn son be thrown into servitude though
with some coaxing from Grandmother, Tohru did eventually take up the mantle and was
given the special energy to complete his Rai transformation.
For a while, Rai simply fought against anti-government rebels, which his own wife was a part of,
but it quickly turned out that the rebels were being manipulated by aliens for a full
on invasion.
Thankfully, Grandmother launched the giant robot lizard into space which gave New Japan
an edge against its invaders.
Now, New Japan orbits Earth as an artificial moon and Grandmother decides to leave Japan’s
affairs to its inhabitants.
Yet in a world without Grandmother, do the Japanese still need a Rai?
Essentially, Rai now acts as an independent agent with those who liked living under Grandmother’s
rule viewing him as a traitor, but those who want humans to rule themselves desperately
want to use Rai’s power for their own agenda.
During this civil war, a missile was set to destroy Japan’s atmospheric shields which
would lead to all of its citizens being killed.
Rai did what he could to save the day, but instead, he was only able to limit the damage
to one city.
The public saw this as a deliberate act of Rai and they finally united as one nation…
in anger against their protector’s failure.
In response, Rai exiled himself to Earth where he discovered that it was being threatened
by the powerful Mothergod who nearly destroyed and re-created the ENTIRE UNIVERSE!
Sadly, Rai died trying to stop Mothergod and that’s where our story ends.
That is until 2014 when the Rai series was re-launched and re-worked with a darker, more
cyberpunk tone.
New Japan is now an orbiting space colony above a long destroyed planet Earth.
Unlike Grandmother from the original continuity who was painted in a more sympathetic light,
New Japan is instead ruled by a brutal A.I.
dictator named Father.
He’s pretty much Big Brother.
If that wasn’t already a great setup, technology has evolved so much that humans only have
to die when they chose to.
As such, there hasn’t been a murder in one thousand years.
Until one day, there was and this sets all sorts of crazy events into motion.
Rai is Father’s chief enforcer and any time that one deviates from Father’s plan, he’s
scrapped and a new Rai is born.
That’s right, half techno-organic A.I. and half human, each Rai is the perfect blend
of man and machine.
Yet remember that murder that I mentioned earlier?
That was Rai’s mother and once he learned the truth, he partnered with the resistance
to bring Father down.
Rai was able to unite all factions of the resistance, including anti-government rebels,
synthetic androids, blood sucking pseudo-aliens, and even an older long lost Rai who managed
to escape being destroyed by Father and led a massive attack on the dictator’s force,
but failed.
With the resistance crushed, Rai was ejected to the desolate Earth where he was cut off
from his power source of New Japan.
He became more human, feeling hunger, pain, and new emotions that he never knew he had
for the first time, but not only that, it turns out that Earth was not the wasteland
that he was led to believe.
Rai spent time living among the Earthlings, hoping to build up a force to take down Father,
but when the few remaining members of the resistance tried to destroy their dictator
from the inside, they accidentally sent New Japan crashing down to Earth with Rai too
late to stop it.
Something big is going to happen next because Valiant promises that Rai is going to return
in their massive 4001 A.D.
event, but for now, that’s everything.
The re-launch of Rai is one of my new favorite independent series and if you like cyberpunk,
you’re going to love it too.
If you want to start reading his adventures for yourself though, I’d recommend checking
out the first trade of either Rai series depending on which continuity that you want to get started
on.
But now it’s time for a vote.
Which Valiant Comic would you like me to cover next?
The world’s worst superhero team, Quantum and Woody, or the superhuman assassin, Bloodshot?
Click to cast your vote or tweet me @TrailerDrake.
However, if you want some more Japan goodness then just click that annotation right there
to see our history of the MANGA VERSION of Dragon Ball’s Goku.
The manga version, not the anime version.