In 2001 Kojima went on a whim with his young son to see Crayon…

Kojima regarded the primary family form as a unit of four: his parents, his brother two years older, and himself. After moving from Tokyo toward Kansai, his parents built a house in 1970 in a new development in Hyogo, distant from grandparents and other relatives; Kojima’s father presented that house as where they were starting and from which their children could also begin. They did not have the typical suburban dog because Kojima’s mother had asthma.

Having little contact with large real-life families, Kojima looked for models through television. As a child he was struck by the constant affection and kisses of the married couple in Bewitched and wanted a family like theirs; after losing his father, he admired Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie—loving, dignified, hardworking, and protective even in poverty—and moved from wishing for a father like that to wanting to become that kind of father.

Kojima went with his teenage son, a Hanshin Tigers fan, to a Giants–Tigers game; Kojima drank beer and his son drank orange juice, and although Kojima was not interested in baseball he used the pauses in the game to ask about and listen to his son’s life, considering those conversations their version of a father–son game of catch.

Kojima recalled that when his son was small they did all kinds of activities and trips together, but that abruptly ended when his son started junior high and preferred to be with his friends. Since Kojima's own father died when he was thirteen and he had no experience of going through adolescence with a father, he said he did not know what closeness or distance to adopt with his son; he sought guidance by rereading Early Autumn.

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.”