Ever since gifted conductor Natsume’s wife and daughter left him five years ago, he has isolated himself from the music scene. Then one day, he decides to return to Japan for the first time in decades to conduct a small town orchestra and return to his estranged daughter, Hibiki, who loathes him and his music. Now he must try to thaw a relationship with his daughter frozen in time for five years, and learn to be a father.

Trading company employee, Tetsuya, lives alone with his only daughter, but is busy preparing to remarry a Vietnamese woman named Lien. One day, the president of a Vietnamese trading company promises Tetsuya a contract if he will help solve a mystery. But there is a time limit that, if not met, will cause the dissolution of a big project in Vietnam his company has been working on for years. Tetsuya pours his energy into cracking the mystery, but the key to solving it lies in Japan. A hundred years ago, under harsh colonial rule by the French, a Vietnamese hero fighting for independence took an incredible risk to find passage to Japan, where he forged a strong bond with a nameless Japanese doctor. Now, a century later, a long-hidden truth is re-vealed in this epic story about love and friendship between Vietnam and Japan.

It is the Showa 30s - the mid-1950s to mid-1960s - and a full decade has passed since Japan’s devastating defeat in World War II. The people are hard at work rebuilding their tattered lives and country seeking to regain their confidence in the process. Meanwhile, and the victor nations from the war are all eager to explore the planet’s last frontier - Antarctica; with teams of scientists from the U.S. Soviet Union and other countries racing to divvy up the vast frozen continent of Antarctica. Japan is the only Asian nation eager to declare a desire to take part, despite global skepticism about what Japan as could possibly contribute in its current state. As a result, Japan is allotted a virtually “inaccessible region” of Antarctica to study, where temperatures plunge to minus 50 degrees centigrade and blizzard winds whip up to 100 meters an hour. Nobody expects them contingent to succeed.
“Now is precisely the time when we must show the world our true mettle and determination,” says the Japanese Antarctic exploration team. “We have to prove that we can stand on our own two feet.”
The mission soon becomes synonymous with Japan’s return to the global community. But the unforgiving continent is not about to yield its pristine, never-before-touched-by-man territory easily. With such seemingly insurmountable challenges, the wintering team draws inspiration, hope and motivation from none other than its 19 Karafuto dogs. This is a story about one young scientist who risks his life in Antarctica for his loved ones, his country’s honor and for his “comrades in arms”, the dogs with whom he forges true bonds of kinship and shared destiny.