At the Kamen Rider 40th Anniversary Exhibition, Kojima photographed…

Kojima interpreted the handover between Kamen Rider 1 and 2 as a linking of mind and soul that frees the hero from fighting alone, mirroring how readers and characters are connected from parent to child. He finished the exhibit by taking his son’s hand and stepping out toward the future with him as they compared the differently colored batons Kamen Rider had entrusted to their respective generations.

Kojima noted that in the manga Kamen Rider does not use the mask to hide a secret identity but to conceal the scars of his cyborg surgery, scars that reappear with rage or sorrow. He interpreted the hero as an artificial monster who faces total isolation and who draws from that solitude the purpose to fight when no one else can defend peace and nature.

Kojima spent thirty-five years wondering what his father had been trying to tell him with his look before dying. Reading Hoshiyadori no Koe made him understand that he had not lost his father completely: he carried his father’s voice inside him and heard it as an instruction to look after others. He connected that revelation to a future moment when he himself would pass his memes to his children and they would understand his look.

In 2001 Kojima went on a whim with his young son to see Crayon Shin-Chan: The Fierceness That Invites the Storm! The Adult Empire Strikes Back and became hooked on the Nohara family from Shin Chan, whose ability to band together in a crisis struck him as a new model of Japanese family. After the birth of his second son his own family grew from three to four, but he admitted he was still not the ideal father: he might have reached the level of the workaholic Hiroshi, while Charles Ingalls remained beyond his reach; he wanted his children to be inspired by their real-life family rather than by television idols.

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”