Kōki was born on the island of Sakhalin (Karafuto Prefecture) to a Japanese mother Kiyo Naya and an ethnic Ukrainian father Markiyan Boryshko who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. However, he is regarded as having come from Teshikaga, Hokkaidō, where he moved to as a child after the Soviet Union took control of Sakhalin in 1945. While on a sumo tour to the Soviet Union in 1965 he tried to locate his father, but without success. Taihō was the first of three great "yokozuna" who all hailed from Hokkaidō, the most northerly of the main islands of Japan and who among them dominated sumo during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The others were Kitanoumi and Chiyonofuji.