Dokuyama decided to quit his job and become an artist after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and its nuclear fallout destroyed his hometown in Fukushima Prefecture. He saw a lot of artworks emerging about the disaster in the Tōhoku region, but felt that there weren't many artist voices actually from Fukushima contributing to the narrative. Dokuyama has stated that he had wanted to be an artist since college, and in the aftermath of the 2011 disaster felt that he needed to shed his life as a "company slave" in which the dreams and lives of workers were tamed for the sake of corporate and societal structures. He "sens[ed] that everything that had been taught to him was a lie," and decided to start over completely under the new name Dokuyama Bontaro. He was given the artist name by his artist friend Kazama Sachiko, with the characters for Dokuyama (毒山) meaning 'poison mountain' in an homage to his birthplace and Bontarō (凡太朗) referring to Bontarō Saikawa, the pen name of the anarchist and manga artist Katsura Mochizuki.