Although sprouting, as a functional trait to respond forest disturbances, has been acknowledged, the quantitative data was lacking across disturbance and vegetation types, especially in temperate forests. The damaged areas by the largest recorded East Coast Fire of April 2000 in South Korea, showed strikingly rapid recovery, particularly by woody species that had dominated prefire. Therefore, we proposed two hypotheses: first, this early, quick regeneration was attributed to the sprouting ability of species that existed before the fire. Second, if the first assumption were true, then a fire would not affect the species composition afterward. To test these, we extensively investigated and traced regeneration strategies for all plants within 117 burned and 40 unburned stands in the regions where Pinus densiflora was the dominant species. Regardless of whether stand coverage was high or low, the proportions were constant among the three strategies, i.e., basal sprouting (73.0%), clonal sprouting (22.5%), and seed germination (4.5%). Overall, vegetative coverage due to sprouting accounted for 95.5% of the total. Woody species contributed the most to fast restoration and were regenerated in proportion to prefire tree size. Among all 233 taxa, 81.1% was able to resprout by basal and clonal sprouting. Multivariate analysis supported our hypothesis that the floristic composition, in terms of absence or presence, did not differ between pre- and postfire stands. Biodiversity indices showed a slight increase due to the significant rise in species evenness. Finally, sprouting ability was lacking for Pinus densiflora, the most dominant tree before the fire, it appears that the succession from pine-dominated forest to deciduous forest was accelerated postfire by the release of deciduous species that were previously suppressed in the understory, e.g., Ouercus mongolica, Q. variabilis, Fraxinus sieboldiana, and Lespedeza cyrtobotrya. Indeed, these results suggest that sprouting is prevalent and plays decisive roles. It is highly likely that the species have adapted to a frequent, severe fire regime in the past.