Choi Bae Dal is a young man with ambition, brawn and a quiet, solitary intellect; the story begins with a short glimpse of how Bae Dal started in his endless search to be great, going from a young street boxer to joining the Japanese Air Force in 1938 during the end of WWII. At the aviation base, he and other Korean men refuse to participate in a kamikaze mission and is therefor discharged and shunned - but not before getting beaten down by proud General Kato Harada, himself a seventh-level Black Belt and indignant to Bae Dal's self-proclaimed Chosun Martial Arts. With the end of the war, he muses on a liberated, yet devastated Korea, comparing it now to his shattered spirit. Staying in Japan, he scrounges a living with his wartime friend Chun Bae, selling a gambling Pachinko Machine.

Japan is now brimming with American soldiers and Yakuza, and Bae Dal and Chun Bae manage to get on the wrong side of a local Yakuza. Despite his best efforts to fight back, Bae Dal is beaten again and humiliated, and it is at this moment he is reuinted with his family's old friend and his own fighter-idol, Beom Su. As a guard for a circus troupe, Beom Su knows the Yakuza all too well, and fights them off, keeping Bae Dal and Chun Bae under his care......