Father said, "Don't become an artist." -- around 1968 of Yukito's room

It passed almost one year after I was born that my parents closed their store, fled by night and moved to Sakasai, at the edge of Kashiwa-shi, Chiba. They said there was an epidemic of swine cholera, which let them give up running their butcher.
Therefore, I don't have any memories of the Tokyo days.
Sakasai is now a recognized new residential area, but in those days houses and streetlights were very few there, so my parents, grown up in Tokyo, became uneasy, worrying "Whether could we make a living in such a place anyway?"

I was an introvert infant and even before I began speaking, I reportedly kept drawing strange stuff quietly when there were some paper and something to draw.
In order to help out with our family budget, my mother was doing the side job to assemble umbrellas and ballpoints.
So there were a lot of ballpoints in our house. And the back of calendars and fliers were canvas for me in my infant days.

Quite later, I have retraced those days and tried to analyze the impulse to draw.
Why and what did I try to describe, not being ordered by others, with no vanity, and without knowing almost anything of the world?
It is impossible to know what I thought then, but the only thing I remember is the exciting expectation while facing a sheet of pure white paper and the satisfaction similar to a feeling of conquest while drawing one line on it.
I guess the deed of drawing is probably one of human's most primitive and instinctive actions just like dancing. It might have derived from actions like dogs' marking behavior (peeing), claiming, "This belongs to me, and it's my territory here."
And the human being, gifted with ability to think, might come to want the proof of "I am here, I've lived here" in the action of drawing.

When I came of kindergarten age, I thought about death a lot.
"If I die now, what will leave as the proof that a man named Yukito Kishiro lived?" I wondered.
"Even my favorite toys have a lot of copies everywhere. However, the drawing I drew by myself is only one in this world. Drawings will remain," I thought.
However, if I drew messy drawings with confusing lines, they, even though satisfactory for me, wouldn't be understood by anyone and might be thrown away. I must draw drawings that not only satisfy myself but also have valuable to others.
If I draw really marvelous drawings, it may remain forever.
I didn't think like that articulately, but it is certain that I almost unconsciously came to get the idea and pursued concrete drawings.

It was fortunate for me that my parents did not interfere in my impulse to draw but left it alone.
Probably, "to be a master of art" and "to learn a trade" suited their sense of values.
However, they had apparently worried my future and said on occasions, "Don't become an artist." The reason was "You can't make a living." They also said "Even if you'd be famous after dying, that would be useless."
That was a quite old image of artists.