For nearly 300 years, Japan had been hermetically sealed to the outside world. When, in that pivotal year of 1854, the American Admiral Perry took the direct approach that the Dutch had been unwilling to take, the ruling Shogun knew that the dynasty was over. As the shogun began to open up to the outside world, the Sonno Joi movement called for this to be reversed...

His mother abandoned him as a child, so he had no choice but to live outside society. Even so, he grows up determined to reunite with her. Worried that she might be living in misery, he saves his money to help, only to find that she has married into wealth and social position and has no intention of seeing her outcast Yakuza son...