Early each morning, Fumiko Daido likes to go out into her garden to tend her plants. In western Tokyo, near Mount Takao, at the back of her garden she has an arrangement of bamboos merging into the hillside, and in front a gazebo focusing on an opposite hill. Fumiko does not grow prize blooms with bright colors and huge blossoms. She said, "Wildflowers are precious to me because they keep their own character. In their natural state they are like people -- no two are alike."

Teacher of English and coordinator of exchange programs at Tama Art University, Fumiko is also a painter who specializes in watercolor pictures of flowers. She said: "Watercolor captures the fleeting quality of these unobtrusive, unpretentious blossoms. As it is a medium that cannot be revised, it expresses what I feel about the flowers at the moment I paint them. In every leaf there is a message, an appeal, a cry, just as there is in every human being. When I paint them, I try to capture this appeal."

Fumiko's family on her father's side came from a town near Wajima, "at the end of the trade route with China." Her mother's family came from Nagasaki, "which even under the Tokugawa was the meeting place of Europe, China and Japan. We have mementos of a Dutch ancestor," she said. Her father was a European-style impressionist painter in oils. "His subject was old Japan: temples in a rice field, a lane in Nara, blossoms around a farmhouse. He found his own synthesis, as everyone must."