Born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, as the fourth child in a prosperous and conservative family,[10] whose wealth was derived from the management of wholesale seed nurseries,[11] Kusama has experienced hallucinations and severe obsessive thoughts since childhood, often of a suicidal nature. She claims that as a small child she suffered severe physical abuse by her mother.[12] In 1948, she left home to enter senior class at Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts, where she studied Nihonga painting, a rigorous formal style developed during the Meiji period; she graduated the following year.[10] She hated the rigidities of the master-disciple system where students were supposed to imbibe tradition through the sensei. "When I think of my life in Kyoto," she is quoted as saying, "I feel like vomiting."[13]