Tatsu Yamashiro

Katana

Tatsu Yamashiro

## Biography

### Early Life

Tatsu and Eiko Toro were born to Kana and Masako Toro. Kana was a loyal accountant in the Yakuza for their boss, Ichiro Yamashiro. Kana often traveled to the United States, specifically to Gotham City for work, and occasionally brought his family along to expose them to the larger world. On one such trip, Eiko and Tatsu were brought along. They were in Gotham on April 26th, 1981, when Kana began to suspect they were being trailed and drove off in a panic, resulting in a high speed police chase, which ended when a runaway fire truck ran the police car off the road.

Rioters began swarming the street, breaking the windows on the family’s limousine and grabbing Kana and Masako, killing them in front of their daughters. Luckily for them, Akahara, the oyabun of Gotham’s Yakuza Branch stumbled upon the scene and saved their lives. He decided to take the girls in and raise them as his own.

They moved back to Japan, where he began training them in combat, fueling their grief and anger over their parents’ demise into easily manipulated hatred. Six short years later, Adrian Veidt’s attack destroyed Tokyo, blinding Eiko and fueling Tatsu’s rage.

Upon discovering that the 11/2 attack had killed Ichiro Yamashiro’s wife, Akahara was asked to move to Tokyo and move up the ladder as a further advisor. When Tatsu and Eiko moved into the Yamashiro compound, Tatsu instantly caught the eyes of Ichiro’s son, Maseo.

The twin girls were raised alongside Ichiro’s twin boys. Tatsu and Maseo developed a playful attraction, as did Maseo’s brother, Takeo. Tatsu would often manipulate this, making the boys fight for her attention for her own amusement. In their teenage years, Maseo won Tatsu over, and the two planned to get married, putting Tatsu in the upper echelon of the Yakuza family.

### Katana

Following their high school graduation, Tatsu, Maseo, Eiko, and Takeo were all contracted out to the League of Assassins, where they helped sabotage a Queen Consolidated oil rig. Tatsu took up the alias of Katana for this mission. After the success of their mission, the quartet became the leading enforcers for the Yamashiros.

In secret, Tatsu longed for a quiet life to step away from her crime ridden days, and wanted nothing more than to be a mother. Maseo began to share her desire, and he made a deal with his father. Ichiro allowed the two to leave the fold and move to America, only if Maseo returned to help run the family with his brother when Ichiro died. Maseo agreed.

Tatsu and Maseo took the deal and bid goodbye to the only family they’d ever known and moved to Metropolis. Tatsu decided to go to college and started studying law, while Maseo was employed with Checkmate. Tatsu soon learned she was pregnant with twin girls.

In 1997, she gave birth to Reiko and Yuri. Tatsu suffered heavily from postpartum depression. She dropped out of school and spent her days on the verge of panic attacks, fearing when Takeo would eventually contact them and bring them back to Japan. She plead with Maseo to help her change their identities and drop off the grid so they could raise their family in peace, but Maseo felt he couldn’t betray his father’s trust.

And then the day came in 2000, when Takeo showed up on their doorstep to inform Maseo that Ichiro had died, and now the Yakuza needed the two of them to lead, and so they moved back to Tokyo. However, once there, Tatsu refused to return to being their enforcer, and caused problems at every turn. In private, she threatened to go to the police with her information, which was unfortunately overheard by a chambermaid.

That night, she awoke to find Takeo with an already blood-stained soultaker blade. She grabbed her own weapon from under her bed and fought back, waking Maseo. At the last second, Maseo pushed her out of the way of the blade. In a fit of rage, she stabbed Takeo in the eye. As he lay on the ground she spotted a trail of blood leading to her daughters’ room, where they both lay slain.

Before she could finish the job on Takeo, his bodyguards stormed the room. Tatsu grabbed the blade from his hand and leapt from the window into the night and fled. She fled the country and took refuge in the pirate nation of Coryana, where the power broker known as the Samaritan employed her as part of his personal squadron the Many Arms of Death.

An encounter with Batman’s Outsiders team persuaded her to leave the nation, instead traveling to the United States, where she became a member of the Justice League and part of Batman’s black-ops team. While in the states, she found she was never able to escape from the reach of Takeo, who had survived their encounter - and frequently dispatched her sister, the assassin codenamed Tsukuri, after her.

Eventually, Tatsu bested her sister in combat and got her locked up in Belle Reve, which furthered the Yakuza’s agenda against her - to the point where Takeo put out a hit on her to most of the supervillain community, forcing her to abandon her home in Star City and step away from super-heroics for a bit.

Under a forged identity, she began working at Bowhunter Security, but refused to put on her costume and hit the streets, to the point where she burned her costume just to prove a point. However, following the death of Jason Todd, she felt the same fire of vengeance she felt when her daughters were killed, and decided it was time to return.

Wielding a brand new outfit, she took back to the streets, and joined Dick Grayson’s pseudo-Outsiders team in tracking down the Joker. She very nearly killed the clown upon finding him, but Dick stopped her from finishing the job.

While the Justice League was left in a shutdown, Tatsu did not let that stop her, and she became one of Star City’s greatest defenders - so much so that Black Canary extended her a personal invite to Barbara Gordon’s Birds of Prey team. She took that job, but when the Justice League came back, Nightwing offered her a far more lucrative position as the co-leader of the Outsiders.

Since then, she’s been helping the team, although another encounter with her sister and brother-in-law led her to scale operations back once again, instead co-signing on Nightwing’s new choice of leader in Grace Choi. While still definitely a member of the team, Tatsu has started to slow down in field work, focusing on mentoring a new generation of heroes to eventually take her place - including offering combat training to Lian Harper.

## Trivia

* Katana (and by extension her sister, husband, and brother-in-law) were never formerly members of the League of Assassins, rather they had partnered with the League for the mutual gain of both the League and the Yamashiro Family.