Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window (1981) is an autobiographical children's novel by Japanese author Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and translated by Dorothy Britton in 1984. It is an anecdotal account of Kuroyanagi's experiences at the Tomoe Gakuen, a Tokyo elementary school founded by progressive educator Sosaku Kobayashi.
Summary[]
Totto-chan, whose real name is Tetsuko, has been expelled from the first grade for interacting creatively with whatever passes the classroom window (notably swallows and street musicians). To the relief of her worried mother and musician father, Totto-chan finds a kindred spirit in Headmaster Sosaku Kobayashi of her new school, the Tomoe Gakuen.
The classes are held in abandoned railroad cars. Lessons in the small classes are freeform, comprising a list of questions on different subjects that pupils can investigate in any order they chose. School lunches are balanced ingeniously by the phrase “Something from the ocean and something from the hills”. Productive mornings are followed by afternoon walks to Kuhonbutsu Temple, accompanied by peripatetic lessons on science, history and biology.
The headmaster is a devotee of Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics, and the children dance and exercise according to this principle, coordinating their movements according to the rhythm and tempo of the music played. Pupils are encouraged to attend in their oldest clothes, to facilitate careless play. Totto-chan soon makes friends with, among others, Yasuaki Yamamoto, a boy crippled by polio, and Sakko-chan, a girl distinguished by the rabbit on her pinafore; Miyo-chan, the headmaster’s third daughter; Takahashi, from Osaka, who has “stopped growing”.
Totto-chan is flighty, inquisitive, easily distracted and careless. She is quite prepared to jump into a pile of sand that turns out to be wall plaster, or onto a newspaper covering an open cesspit. Incautiously playing too roughly with her German shepherd Rocky almost costs her an ear. But all through the headmaster, who is involved in all aspects of school leave, reassures her that she is “really a good girl, you know”.
The narrative is anecdotal, comprised of incident after incident. Excavations of the school cesspit; demands for a school song; an all-night vigil for the arrival of a new railway car; communal swimming; camping (inside the Assembly Hall); Yasuaki Yamamoto climbing Totto-chan’s personal tree; a “bravery test”, actually a game with designated child ghosts at the Temple… all these become a complete narrative, but as discursive as the young storyteller’s imagination. Two chicks purchased on the island shrine to Benten in Senzoku Pond quickly die, and are buried in the garden, Totto-chan’s “first experience of loss and separation". But not her last even of her time at school, when Yasuaki Yamamoto dies.
Totto-chan’s first experience of racial prejudice is of a local boy so used to hearing the word "Korean" used disparagingly, that he believes it's a slight. When a bully is told off for pulling Totto-chan’s newly braided pigtails, he is made to apologize, despite it being the norm that boys are favored over girls.
The school sports day is held on the 3rd November, this being the day the meteorological statistics shows to be least likely to rain. The events favor the most disadvantaged pupil; the carp race, in which children must wriggle through long, tubular cloth tunnels or “carp”; the relay race, up the remarkably unergonomic steps to the Assembly Hall; and the Find-A-Mother Race, in which randomly-nominated spectators are to be located by each contestant. Takahashi is undisputed champion. The prizes are vegetables subsequently cooked as celebratory dinners at home.
All this is at a time when Japan is firmly committed to war in the Pacific and on the Chinese mainland. Totto-chan’s father is “disowned”, officially ostracized, for his liberal beliefs and practices. Totto-chan takes part in a programme in which schoolchildren visit wounded soldiers; one of these is reduced to tears by the little girl’s performance of the Tomoe school’s dinner-time song. The school welcomes a student whose family has recently returned from America, and help him with his Japanese; “Americans are devils”, announces the government, but not at Tomoe.
Shortly after Totto-chan announces her ambition to become a teacher at Tomoe herself, the school is razed to the ground by American bombs.
In the epilogue, it is revealed that So-saku Kobayashi is never able to reestablish his remarkable school, despite achieving much in a continuing career as an educator.
Themes[]
- Education through adversity; Totto-chan must overcome her personal shortcomings at a time of increasing political and social tension.
- Moral courage; The liberal nature of the school is criticized, but the headmaster remains true to his vision.
- The role of family and female example; Totto-chan's family is ostracized for its liberal beliefs and actions.
Legacy[]
Since 1983 it has been a textbook for third-year Japanese (elementary) pupils.
Recommendations[]
If you enjoyed Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window, you may also enjoy a novel to which it is often compared, Anne of Green Gables – Anne Shirley, a young orphan brought to work on a Canadian farm, finds her true family in the Cuthberts.