Kin'emon

Kin'emon looks every bit the antique-Japan samurai, sporting a black topknot above a matching goatee. Standing 295 cm tall, he edges past Brook and carries a heavily muscled frame, and his eyes sit unevenly, the right one opening wider than the left. He dresses in a gi divided down the center, striped black and white on one half and plain orange on the other, with twin katana sheathed in matching flame-decorated scabbards riding at his left side and simple geta on his feet. The Kouzuki Family crest is inked across his back. More than twenty-five years earlier his hair was blond and worn loose, only forming the bound topknot after he embraced the way of the samurai.

The present-day Kin'emon lives by an antiquated warrior's code, favoring stiff, archaic speech and holding to bushido so firmly that he would sooner die than endure a shameful, deathless dismemberment. Beneath that polish lies the memory of a wild youth spent gambling, stealing from his friend Tsurujo, and treating his own death lightly, until Oden's influence redirected him. Pride makes him obstinate, brushing off hunger, cold, and injury until a brush with freezing forced him to ask for aid.

He is intensely loyal and indebted himself to Sanji over a rescue, though he also voices crude views about how women ought to behave and a lechery he cannot quite suppress, traits that keep Nami at war with him. Pirates earn his distrust and dragons his hatred, both rooted in Kaidou, and he regards Devil Fruits, even the one he ate, as mere sorcery alien to Wano.

Kin'emon entered the world fifty-six years before the present, and a younger version of him roamed the Flower Capital as a brawler whose toughness drew respect even from the yakuza chief Hyougoro. The Mountain God Incident proved his turning point: when Oden took responsibility for the creature's rampage and saved Tsurujo in the process, Kin'emon pledged himself to the Kouzuki cause, and guidance from Yasuie reshaped him into a true samurai who would eventually command the Nine Red Scabbards. Oden's execution and Kouzuki Toki's power threw him two decades into the future, leaving him to gather allies against Shogun Orochi and the Emperor Kaidou. He set sail with Momonosuke, Kanjuro, and Raizo, but the group was scattered, and he ended up on Punk Hazard, where Law's Ope Ope no Mi carved him into separate pieces, a mishap that nonetheless earned him the Straw Hats and Heart Pirates as comrades. Masquerading as Momonosuke's father, he passed through Dressrosa and Zou and grew into one of the crew's foremost supporters.

In battle he fights with the paired blades Sukesan and Kakusan through his own Foxfire Style, which lets him summon and slice flame and even cleave one of Kaidou's strongest fire breaths, and he can copy Oden's signature two-sword method. His Fuku Fuku no Mi counts as a Paramecia fruit, turning small items set on someone's head into clothing or disguises, a tool he uses for sneaking past foes and weathering harsh climates rather than for direct combat. Skilled with both Armament and Observation Haki and a sharp if fortune-reliant strategist, he engineered much of the alliance's uprising; his own misreading of Yasuie's secret message accidentally unmasked the spy Kanjuro and sent the enemy charging at the wrong target. With the war won, he reunited with Tsurujo and took up a post as a great elder serving the shogunate in the Flower Capital.