Ipponmatsu

Ipponmatsu is a short, tan-skinned man whose black hair sweeps out toward the sides of his head, above a notably red nose. He favors a blue shirt, and the little crest of hair on his forehead is drawn inconsistently, curving upward in some panels and downward in others across his debut chapter.

By default he is the textbook grasping shopkeeper, cynical and unscrupulous, a trait his wife sums up by calling him a cheapskate. He happily sells arms to criminals, tries to swindle inexperienced buyers, and turns surly toward anyone he cannot profit from. Underneath the greed, though, runs a sincere devotion to swords and the art of wielding them. He refused for years to part with the Sandai Kitetsu out of fear its curse would harm whoever bought it, and meeting Zoro rekindled his faith in genuine swordsmen. He bears a sharp grudge against Loguetown's Marines, blaming them for thinning the pirate clientele that kept his shop alive, branding Smoker a monster and dismissing the clumsy Tashigi as a liability despite regularly polishing her blade.

Ipponmatsu took over the Loguetown arms shop long ago, when pirates bound for the Grand Line filled his store, but Smoker's command of the island's Marine base dried up that trade. When Zoro first walked in, the merchant turned polite at the rare customer, then dismissive on learning he carried only 100,000 berries. Spotting the Wado Ichimonji at the swordsman's hip, he tried to talk Zoro into selling it far below its worth, a scheme Tashigi's arrival cut short. His attitude flipped when Zoro put the Sandai Kitetsu's curse to the test, flinging it upward and stretching out his bare arm to see whether it would lop the limb off, only for the blade to swing wide and leave him untouched. Impressed, Ipponmatsu gave Zoro the cursed sword along with Yubashiri, his finest blade and family heirloom, telling his wife he was passing his dream on to the young man.

Two years later he remained a devoted admirer, proudly showing Ipponume the enlarged poster of Zoro he hung on his bathroom wall while cleaning the room. His name is a rare split, with Ippon written in hiragana, evoking the scoring term used in martial arts like kendo, and Matsu in katakana, the word for the Japanese pine, together marking him poetically as a lone pine. The Viz manga, mistaking the hiragana portion for a title, calls him simply Matsu.