My good friend Tatsumi Orimoto, now one of Japan's best-known artists, has made his mother a central subject in his work for the last several years. This, he once explained to me, is because she always supported him in his creative efforts -- efforts that are, in a word, unorthodox: in one, he famously ties baguettes to his head and travels the world as "Bread Man."
Orimoto's father, however, was another story -- critical from the moment his son applied to art university and dismissive of the whole idea of a life in art.
Last week I met an emerging Japanese artist, Yoshiro Takasaki, whose father had been supportive of a creative pursuit that was also rather unorthodox.