The Hair Ribbon
One day at lunch break, after the children had finished eating, Totto-chan was skipping across the Assembly Hall when she met the headmaster. It is perhaps odd
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to say she met the headmaster when he had been with them all through lunch, but she met him because he was coming from the opposite direction.
"Oh, there you are," said the headmaster. "I've been wanting to ask you something."
"What is it?" asked Totto-chan, delighted to think she could give the headmaster some information.
The expression on Totto-chan's face when she heard that couldn't have been a happier one. She had been wearing the bow since the day before. It was something she had found herself. She went up closer so the headmaster could see the ribbon better.
“It was on my aunt's old school uniform," she said proudly. "I noticed it when she was putting it in a drawer and she gave it to me. Auntie said I was very observant.”
"I see," said the headmaster, deep in thought.
Totto-chan was very proud of the ribbon. She told him how she had Bone to see her aunt and was lucky to find her aunt airing some clothes. Among them was the old-fashioned, long, purple pleated skirt she had worn when she was a schoolgirl. As her aunt was putting it away, Totto-chan noticed something pretty on it.
"What's that?"
At Totto-chan's question, her aunt paused. The something pretty turned out to be this ribbon that was attached to the waistband at the back.
"It was supposed to make you look pretty from the back," said Auntie. "In those days everyone wanted to put a piece of handmade lace there or a wide ribbon tied in a big bow.
She noticed how longingly Totto-chan gazed at the bow as she listened, stroking it and feeling it, and said, "I’ll give it to you. I shan't be wearing it again."
She took some scissors and cut the thread attaching it to the skirt and gave it to Totto-chan. That was how she got it. It really was a beautiful ribbon. It was wide and of very good silk, and had roses and all sorts of designs woven into it. Wide and stiff when it was tied, if made a bow as big as Totto-chan's head. Auntie said the fabric was imported.
While she was speaking, Totto-chan jiggled her head occasionally so the headmaster could hear the rustling sound the ribbon made. When he had heard her story, the headmaster looked a little distressed.
"So that's it," he said. "Yesterday Miyo-chan said she wanted a ribbon just like yours, so I went to all the ribbon shops in Jiyugaoka, but they didn't have anything like it. So that's it. It's imported, is it?"
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"Totto-chan, I'd be truly grateful if you'd stop wearing that ribbon to school. You see, Miyo-chan keeps pestering me about it. Would you mind very much?"
Totto-chan thought it over, her arms folded. Then she answered quickly, “All right. I won't wear it here any more."
"Thank you," said the headmaster.
Totto-chan was rather sorry, but the headmaster was in trouble, so she had agreed. Another reason was that the thought of a grown-up man--her beloved headmaster-searching high and low in all the ribbon shops, made her feel sorry for him. That was the way it was at Tomoe. Without realizing it, everyone got in the habit of understanding one another's problems and trying to help, irrespective of age. It became the natural thing to do.
The following morning, when Mother went into Totto-chan's room to clean up after Totto-chan had left for school, she found the ribbon tied around the neck of Totto-chan's favorite teddy bear. She wondered why Totto-chan had suddenly given up wearing the ribbon she had been so thrilled about. Mother thought the gray teddy bear looked slightly embarrassed about being dressed so gaily all of a sudden.
Visiting the Wounded
For the first time in her life Totto-chan visited a hospital for wounded soldiers. She went with about thirty elementary school children from various schools, children she didn't know. It was part of a scheme recently organized nationally for groups of elementary school children. Each school would normally send two or three children, but small schools like Tomoe only sent one, and the group would be in the charge of a teacher from one of the schools. Totto-chan was representing Tomoe.
The teacher in charge was a thin woman who wore glasses. She led the children into a ward where there were about fifteen soldiers in white pajamas, some in bed and others walking about. Totto-chan had worried about what wounded soldiers would look like, but they all smiled and waved their hands and seemed cheerful so she was relieved, although some had bandages on their heads.
The teacher assembled the children in the middle of the ward and addressed the soldiers.
"We've come to visit you," she said, and the children all bowed. The teacher went on, "Since to-day is the fifth of May-boy's Day-we're going to sing 'Carp Streamers.' "
She raised her arms, like a conductor, said to the children, "Now, ready! Three, four," and began to beat time. The children didn't know each other but they all began singing whole heartedly:
Over the sea of rooftops,
Over the sea of clouds ...
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Totto-chan didn't know the song. They didn't teach that sort of song at Tomoe. She sat on the edge of the bed of a man with a kind face who was sitting up, and just listened to them singing, feeling rather awkward. When that song was over, the teacher announced very clearly, "Now we shall sing 'The Doll Festival.' " They sang it beautifully. All except Totto-chan.
Come let us light the lanterns,
Light them one by one...
There was nothing Totto-chan could do but remain silent.
When they had all finished singing, the men clapped. The teacher smiled and said, "Now then, what about 'The pony and the Mare'! All together. Three, four," and started beating time again.
Totto-chan didn't know that one either. When the children had finished singing it, the soldier in the bed Totto-chan was sitting on paned her head and said, "You didn't sing."
Totto-chan felt very apologetic. She had come to visit the soldiers and she couldn't even sing them a single song. So she got up, and, standing a little away from the bed, said bravely, "All right. Now I’ll sing one I know.
Something was about to happen that wasn't according to plan.
"What are you going to sing!" asked the teacher.
But Totto-chan had already taken a deep breath and was starting to sing, so she decided to wait.
Since she was representing Tomoe, Totto-chan thought she had better sing Tomoe's best-known song. After taking that deep breath, she began:
Chew, chew, chew it well,
Everything you eat...
Some of the children laughed. Others asked their neighbors, "What's the song! What's the song!" The teacher started to beat time, but nor knowing quite what to do, was left with arms in midair. Totto-chan was embarrassed, but she sang for all she was worth:
Chew it and chew it and chew it and chew it,
Your rice and fish and meat!
When she finished singing, Totto-chan bowed. When she raised her head, she was astonished to see tears streaming down the face of the soldier. She thought she must have done something bad. And then the soldier, who looked a little older than Daddy, patted her head again, and said, "Thank you! Thank you!"
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He went on patting her head, and he couldn't stop crying. Then the teacher said brightly, as if to try and cheer him up, "Now I think it's time to read out the compositions we've written for the soldiers."
The children took turns reading their compositions aloud. Totto-chan looked at her soldier. His nose and eyes were led, but he smiled. Totto-chan smiled back. And she thought to herself, "I'm so glad the soldier smiled!"
What had brought tears to that soldier's eyes, only the soldier knew. Maybe he had a little girl like Totto-chan. Or maybe he was simply touched by the sweet way she sang that song as best she could. Or maybe because of his experience at the war front, he knew how near they all were to starvation, and the thought of this little girl singing "Chew it well" when there might soon be nothing left to chew may have filled him with sadness. The soldier may also have realized what terrible events would soon engulf these very children.
The children, reading their compositions, may not have sensed it then, but the Pacific War was already well underway.
Health Bark
Showing her train pass on the cord around her neck to the man at the gate--whom she now knew quite well-Totto-chan walked out of the station at Jiyugaoka.
Something very interesting was going on. A young man was sitting cross-legged on a mat behind an enormous pile of what looked like pieces of tree bark. Five or six people stood around looking down at him. Totto-chan decided to join them, since the man was saying, "Now watch me carefully, watch me carefully. When the man saw Totto-chan stop, he said, "The most important thing for you is health. When you get up in the morning and want to know whether you are well or not, this piece of balk will tell you. Ever, morning all you have to do is chew a bit of this bark. If it tastes bitter, it proves you are not well. If it doesn't taste bitter, you know you're all right. You're not ill. This bark that tells you whether you're ill or not only costs twenty sen! Will that gentleman over there care to try a piece!"
He handed the bark to a rather thin man, who timidly bit it with his front teeth. The man tilted his head slightly and considered it.
"It does seem... a tiny bit... uh.., bitter."
The young man leaped up, exclaiming, "Sir, you must be suffering from some disease. You'll have to be careful. But don't worry, it's not very serious yet. You said it just seemed a little bitter. Now what about the lady over there. Would you mind chewing this, please!" A woman with a shopping basket took a larger piece of bark and chewed it vigorously. She announced cheerfully, "Why, that wasn't bitter at all!"
"Congratulations, madam," said the man. "You must be very healthy, indeed." Then he said, raising his voice, “Only twenty sen! Twenty sen! That's all it costs to find out every morning whether you are healthy or not. A real bargain!"
Totto-chan wanted to try a bite of the grayish bark, too, but was too shy to ask.
Instead, she asked, "Will you still be here when school's over?"
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Totto-chan ran off, her bag flapping against her back. She didn't want to be late since there was something she had to do before school began. She had to ask the children something the moment she got to her classroom.
"Can anybody lend me twenty sen?"
But nobody had twenty sen. One of those long packers of caramels only cost ten sen, so it wasn't very much money, really, but nobody had it.
"Shall I ask my parents?" asked Miyo-chan.
At times like these it was very convenient that Miyo-chan happened to be the daughter of the head-master. Miyo-chan's house adjoined-the Assembly Hall, so it was just as if her mother lived at the school.
"Daddy says he'll lend it to you," she told Totto-chan at lunchtime, "but he wants to know what it's for."
Totto-chan made her way to the office.
"So you want twenty sen," he said, taking off his glasses. "What do you want it for?"
"I want to buy a piece of bark that tells you whether you're sick or whether you’re well," she replied quickly. The headmaster's curiosity was aroused.
"Where are they selling them?"
"In front of the station," she replied, in a great hurry.
"All right," said the headmaster. "Buy one if you want. But let me have a bite, won't you?"
He took a purse out of his jacket pocket and placed twenty sen in Totto-chan's palm.
"Oh, thank you so much!" said Totto-chan. "I'll get the money from Mother and pay you back. She always gives me money for books. If I want to buy anything else I have to ask first, but health bark is something everybody needs so I'm sure she won't mind."
When school was over, Totto-chan hurried to the station, clutching her twenty sen. The man was still there, extolling his product in a loud patter. When he saw the twenty sen in Totto-chan's hand, he broke into a broad grin.
"Good girl! Your mother and father will be pleased."
"So will Rocky," said Totto-chan.
"Who's Rocky?' asked the man, as he picked out a piece of bark for Totto-chan.
"He's our dog. He's a German shepherd."
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The man stopped and thought for a minute, then said, "A dog ... well, I suppose it'll work with a dog, too. After all, if it's bitter he won't like it and that'll mean he's ill."
The man picked out a piece of bark about one inch wide and six inches long.
"Here you are. Bite some every morning and if it's bitter, you're sick. If not, you're as fit as a fiddle!"
Totto-chan went home carefully carrying the precious bark wrapped in newspaper. The first thing she did when she got there was to take a small bite. It was dry and rough, but not bitter. In fact it didn't taste of anything at all.
"Hooray! I'm healthy!"
"Of course you are," said Mother, smiling. "What on earth's the matter?"
Totto-chan explained. Mother tried biting a piece of the bark, too.
“It's not bitter.”
"Then you're healthy, too, Mother!"
Then Totto-chan went over to Rocky and held the bark to his mouth. First Rocky sniffed it. Then he licked it.
"You've got to bite it," said Totto-chan. "Then you'll know whether you're sick or not."
But Rocky made no attempt to bite it. He just scratched the back of his ear with his paw. Totto-chan held the tree bark closer to his mouth.
"Come on, bite it! It would be terrible if you weren't well."
Rocky reluctantly bit a tiny piece off the edge. Then he sniffed it again, but he didn't look as if he particularly disliked it. He just let out a big yawn.
"Hooray! Rocky's healthy, too!"
Next morning, Mother gave Totto-chan twenty sen. She went straight to the headmaster's office and thrust out the tree bark.
For a moment the headmaster looked at it as if to say, "What's this!" Then he saw the twenty sen Totto-chan had brought him, clutched carefully in her hand, and remembered.
"Bite it," said Totto-chan. "If it's bitter, it means you're ill."
The headmaster bit some. Then he turned the bark over and studied it carefully.
"Does- it taste bitter?" asked Totto-chan, concerned, looking at the headmaster's face.
“It hasn't any taste at all."
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"Hooray! The headmaster's healthy! I'm so glad."
That day Totto-chan got everybody in the school to bite a piece of bark. Not a single child found it bitter, which meant they were all healthy. Totto-chan was very glad.
The children all went and told the headmaster they were healthy, and to each child the headmaster replied, "That's good."
The headmaster must have known all along. He was born and bred in the heart of the country in Gumma Prefecture, beside a river from which you could see Mount Haruna. He must have known that the bark would not taste bitter, no matter who chewed it.
But the headmaster thought it was nice for Totto-chan to be so glad to find that everyone was healthy. He was happy that Totto-chan had been brought up to be the kind of person who would have been worried and concerned about anyone who might have said the bark tasted bitter.
Totto-chan even tried pushing the tree bark into the mouth of a stray dog walking near the school. She almost got bitten, but that didn't daunt her.
"You'll know whether you're sick or not," she shouted at the dog. "Come on, bite it! 'Cause if you're healthy, then that's fine."
She succeeded in getting that dog she didn't know to bite a piece. Skipping around the dog she cried,
"Hooray! You're healthy, too!"
The dog bowed its head, as if thanking her, and ran off.
Just as the headmaster guessed, the bark-seller never showed up in Jiyugaoka again.
Even, morning, before she left for school, Totto-chan took the precious piece of bark from her drawer--it now looked as if an energetic beaver had been at it--and chewed some of it, calling out as she left the house, "I'm healthy!"
And, thankfully, Totto-chan was in fact healthy.
The English-speaking Child
A new pupil arrived at Tomoe. He was tall for an elementary school boy, and~ broad. Totto-chan thought he looked more like a seventh grader. His clothes were different, too, more like grown-up ones.
That morning in the school grounds the head-master introduced the new student.
"This is Miyazaki. He was born and brought up in America, so he doesn't speak Japanese very well. That's why he has come to Tomoe, where he will be able to make
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shall we put him in! What about fifth grade, with Ta-chan and the others!"
"That's fine," said Ta-chan - who was good at drawing--in a big-brotherly voice.
The headmaster smiled and went on, "I said he wasn't very good at Japanese, but he's very good at English. Get him to teach you some. He's not used to life in Japan, though, so you'll help him, won't you? And ask him about life in America. He'll be able to tell you all sorts of interesting things. Well, then, I’ll leave him with you."
Miyazaki bowed to his classmates, who were all much smaller than he was. And all the children, not only the children in Ta-chan's class, bowed back.
At lunchtime Miyazaki went over to the head-master's house, and all the others followed him. Then what did he do but start to walk into the house with his shoes on! All the children shouted at him, "You've got to take off your shoes?"
Miyazaki seemed startled. "Oh, excuse me," he said, taking them off.
The children began telling him what to do, all talking at once.
"You have to take your shoes off for rooms with tatami-matted floors and for the Assembly Hall. You can keep them on in the classrooms and in the library.
"When you go to Kuhonbutsu Temple you can keep them on in the courtyard but you have to take them off in the temple."
It was fun learning about the differences between living in Japan and living abroad.
Next day Miyazaki brought a big English picture book to school. They all clustered around him at lunchtime to look at the book. They were amazed. They had never seen such a beautiful picture book More. The picture books they knew were only printed in bright reds, greens, and yellows, but this one had pale flesh-colored pinks. As for the blues, they were lovely shades, mixed with white and gray--colors that didn't exist in crayons. There were lots of colors besides the standard twenty-four in a box of crayons, colors that were not even in Ta-chan's special box of forty-eight. Everyone was impressed. As for the pictures, the first one was of a dog pulling a baby by its diaper. What impressed them was that the baby didn't look as if it was painted but had soft pink skin just like a teal baby. They had never seen a picture book that was so big and printed on such lovely, thick, shiny paper. In her usual sociable way, Totto-chan got as close to Miyazaki and the picture book as she could..
Miyazaki read the English text to them. The English language sounded so smooth that they listened enraptured. Then Miyazaki began to grapple with Japanese.
Miyazaki certainly had brought something new and different to the school.
"Akachan is baby," he began.
They all repeated it after him. “Akachan is baby.”
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"UuukuSHII is beautiful," repeated the others.
Miyazaki then realized his Japanese pronunciation had been wrong. "It's utsukuSHII, is it? Right?"
Miyazaki and the other children soon became good friends. Every day he brought various books to Tomoe and read them to the others at lunchtime.
It was just as if Miyazaki was their English tutor. At the same time Miyazaki's Japanese quickly improved. And he stopped making blunders like sitting in the tokonama, the alcove reserved for hanging-scrolls and ornaments.
Totto-chan and her friends learned lots of things about America. Japan and America were becoming friends at Tomoe. But outside Tomoe, America had become an enemy, and since English had become an enemy language, it was dropped from the curriculum of all the schools.
"Americans are devils," the government announced. But at Tomoe the children kept chanting in chorus, "Utsukushii is beautiful." And the breezes that blew across Tomoe were soft and warm, and the children themselves were beautiful.
Amateur Drama
"We're going to put on a play!"
It was the first play in Tomoe's history. The custom of someone giving a talk at lunchtime was still going on, but imagine performing a play on the little stage with the grand piano the headmaster always played for eurythmics and inviting an audience. None of the children had even seen a play, not even Totto-chan. Apart from Swan Lake, she had never once been to the theater. Nevertheless, they all discussed what sort of program they should put on for their end-of-year performance.
Totto-chan's class decided to do Kanjincho (“The Fund-Raising Charter”). This famous old Kabuki play was not exactly what you would expect to see at Tomoe, but it was in one of their textbooks and Mr. Maruyama would coach them. They decided Aiko Saisho would make a good Benkei, the strong man, since she was big and tall, and Amadera, who could look stern and had a loud voice, should play Togashi, the commander. After talking it over, they all came to the conclusion that Totto-chan should be the noble Yoshitsune, who, in the play, is disguised as a porter. All the others would be strolling monks.
Before they could begin rehearsing, the children had to learn their lines. It was nice for Totto-chan and the monks, for they had nothing to say. All that the monks were required to do was stand silently throughout, while Totto-chan, as Yoshitsune, had
to remain kneeling, with her face hidden by a large straw hat. Benkei, in reality Yoshitsune's servant, beats and upbraids his master in a clever attempt to get the part past the Ataka Checkpoint by posing as a band of monks collecting funds to restore a temple. Aiko Saisho, playing Benkei, had a tremendous part. Besides all the verbal thrust and parry with Togashi, the checkpoint commander, there was the exciting bit
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where Benkei has to pretend to read out the Fund-Raising Charter when ordered by the commander to do so. The scroll he "reads" from is blank, and he brilliantly extemporizes an appeal for funds in pompous ecclesiastical language: "Firstly, for the purpose of the reiteration of the temple known as Todaiji ...”
Aiko Saisho practiced her "Firstly" speech every day.
The role of Togashi, too, had lots of dialogue, as he tries to refute Benkei's arguments, and Amadera struggled to memorize it.
Finally rehearsal time came. Togashi and Benkei faced each other, with the monks lined up behind Benkei, and Totto-chan, as Yoshitsune, kneeling, huddled over, in front. But Totto-chan didn't understand what it was all about. So when Benkei had to knock Yoshitsune down with his staff and strike him, Totto-chan reacted violently. She kicked Aiko Saisho in the legs and scratched her. Aiko cried and the monks giggled.
Yoshitsune was supposed to remain still, looking cowed, no matter how-much Benkei beat and hit him. The idea is that while Togashi suspects the truth, he is so impressed by Benkei's ruse and the pain it must cost him to ill-treat his noble master, that he lets them through the checkpoint. To have Yoshitsune resisting would ruin the whole plot. Mr. Maruyama tried to explain this to Totto-chan. But Totto-chan was adamant. She insisted that if Aiko Saisho hit her she would hit back. So they made no progress.
No matter how many times they tried the scene, Totto-chan always put up a fight.
"I'm terribly sorry," said Mr. Maruyama to Totto-chan finally, "but I think we had better ask Tai-chan to play the part of Yoshitsune."
Totto-chan was relieved. She didn't like being the only one who got knocked about.
"Totto-chan, will you please be a monk?" asked Mr. Maruyama. So Totto-chan stood with the other monks, but right at the back.
Mr. Maruyama and the children thought everything would be fine now, but they were wrong. He shouldn't have let Totto-chan have a monk's long staff. Totto-chan got bored with standing still so she started poking the feet of the monk next to her with the staff, and tickling the monk in front under his armpits. She even pretended to conduct with it, which was not only dangerous for those nearby but also ruined the scene between Benkei and Togashi.
So eventually she was deprived of her role as a monk, too.
Tai-chan as Yoshitsune, gritted his teeth manfully as he was knocked over and beaten, and the audience must surely have felt sorry for him. Rehearsals progressed smoothly without Totto-chan.
Left by herself, Totto-chan went out into the school grounds. She took off her shoes and started to improvise a Totto-chan ballet. It was lovely dancing according to her own fancy. Sometimes she was a swan, sometimes the wind, sometimes a grotesque
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Deep in her heart, however, there was a tiny feeling that she would like to be playing Yoshitsune. But had they allowed her to, she would surely have hit and scratched Aiko Saisho.
Thus it was that Totto-chan was not able to take part in the first and last amateur drama at Tomoe.
Chalk
Tomoe children never scrawled on other people's walls or on the road. That was because they had ample opportunity for doing it at school.
During music periods in the Assembly Hall, the headmaster would give each child a piece of white chalk. They could lie or sit anywhere they liked on the floor and wait, chalk in hand. When they were all ready, the headmaster started playing the piano.
As he did so, they would write the rhythms, in musical notation, on the floor. It was lovely writing in chalk on the shiny light brown wood. There were only about ten pupils in Totto-chan's class, so when they were spread around the large Assembly Hall, they had plenty of floor on which to write their notes as large as they wanted without encroaching on anyone else's space. They didn't need lines for their notation, since they just wrote down the rhythm. At Tomoe musical notes had special names the children devised themselves after talking it over with the headmaster. Here they are:
(musical symbol) was called a skip, because it was a good rhythm to skip and jump to.
(musical symbol)was called a flag, because it looked like one.
(musical symbol) was called a double-flag.
(musical symbol) was called a black.
(musical symbol) was called a white
(musical symbol) was called a white-with-a-mole, or a white 'n' dot.
(musical symbol) was called a circle.
This way they learned to know the notes well and it was fun. It was a class they loved.
Writing on the floor with chalk was the head-master's idea. Paper wasn't big enough and there weren't enough blackboards to go around. He thought the Assembly Hall floor would make a nice big blackboard on which the children could note the rhythm with ease no matter how fast the music was, and writing as large as they liked, Above all, they could enjoy the music. And if there was time afterward, they could draw airplanes and dolls and anything they wanted. Sometimes the children would
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At intervals during the music class, the headmaster would come over and inspect each child's rhythms. He would comment, "That's good," or "it wasn't a flag-flag there, it was a skip."
After he had approved or corrected their notation, he played the music over again so they could check what they had done and familiarize themselves with the rhythms. No matter how busy he was, the head-master never let anyone else take these classes for him. And as far as the children were concerned, it wouldn't have been any fun at all without Mr. Kobayashi.
Cleaning up after writing rhythms was quite a job. First you had to wipe the floor with a blackboard eraser, and then everyone joined forces to make the floor spick and span again with mops and rags. It was an enormous task.
In this way Tomoe children learned what trouble cleaning off graffiti could be, so they never scribbled anywhere except on the floor of the Assembly Hall. Moreover, this class took place about twice a week, so the children had their fill of scribbling.
The children at Tomoe became real experts on chalk--which kind was best, how to hold it, how to manipulate it for the best results, how not to break it. Every one of them was a chalk connoisseur.
"Yasuaki-chan's Dead"
It was the first morning of school after the spring vacation. Mr. Kobayashi stood in front of the children assembled on the school grounds, his hands in his pockets as usual. But he didn't say anything for some time. Then he took his hands out of his pockets and looked at the children. He looked as if he had been crying.
"Yasuaki-chan's dead," he said slowly. "We're all going to his funeral today." Then he went on, "You all liked Yasuaki-chan, I know. It's a great shame. I feel terribly sad." He only got that far when his face became bright red and tears welled up in his eyes. The children were stunned and nobody said a word. They were all thinking about Yasuaki-chan. Never had such a sad quietness passed over the grounds of Tomoe before.
"Imagine dying so soon," thought Totto-chan. "I haven't even finished Uncle Tom's Cabin that Yasuaki-chan said I ought to read and lent me before the vacation."
She remembered how crooked his fingers had looked when she and Yasuaki-chan said goodbye before spring vacation and he handed her the book. She recalled the first time she met him, when she had asked, "Why do you walk like that?" and his soft reply, "I had polio" She thought of the sound of his voice and his little smile.
And that summer tree-climbing adventure of just the two of them. She remembered with nostalgia how heavy his body had been, and the way he had trusted her implicitly even though he was older and taller. It was Yasuaki-chan who told her they had something in America called television. Totto-chan loved Yasuaki-chan. They had lunch together, spent their breaks together, and walked to the station
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meant Yasuaki-chan would never come to school any more. It was like those baby
chicks. When they died, no matter how she called to them they never moved again.
Yasuaki-chan's funeral took place at a church on the opposite side of Denenchofu from where he lived.
The children walked there in silence from Jiyugaoka, in single file. Totto-chan didn't look around her as she usually did but kept her eyes on the ground the whole time. She realized she now felt differently from when the headmaster had told them the sad news. Her first reaction was disbelief, and then came sadness. But now all she wanted was to see Yasuaki-chan alive just once more. She wanted to talk to him so much she could hardly bear it.
The church was filled with white lilies. Yasuaki-chan's pretty mother and sister and relatives, all dressed in black, were standing outside the church. When they saw Totto-chan they cried even more, their white handkerchiefs in their hands. It was the first rime Totto-chan had been to a funeral, and she realized how sad it was. Nobody talked, and the organ played soft hymn music. The sun was shining and the church was full of light, but there was no happiness in it anywhere. A man with a black arm-band handed a single white flower to each of the Tomoe children and explained that they were to walk one after the other and place their flower in Yasuaki-chan's coffin.
Yasuaki-chan lay in the coffin with his eyes closed, surrounded by flowers. Although he was dead, he looked as kind and clever as ever. Totto-chan knelt and placed her flower by his hand and gently touched it--the beloved hand she had held so often. His hand was so much whiter than her grubby little hand and his fingers so much longer, like a grown-ups.
"Bye now," she whispered to Yasuaki-chan. "Maybe we'll meet again somewhere when we're much older. And maybe your polio will be cured by then."
Then Totto-chan got up and looked at Yasuaki-chan once more. "Oh yes, I forgot," she said, "Uncle Tom's Cabin. I shan't be able to return it to you now, shall I? I'll keep it for you, until we meet next time."
As she started walking away, she was sure she heard his voice behind her, "Totto-chan, we had a lot of fun together, didn't we? I'II never forget you. Never.”
When Totto-chan reached the entrance, she turned around. I’ll never forget you either," she said.
The spring sunshine shone softly just as it had on the day she first met Yasuaki-chan in the classroom-in-the-train. But unlike that day, her cheeks were wet with tears.
A Spy
The children at Tomoe were sad for a long time, thinking about Yasuaki-chan, particularly so in the morning, when it was time to start class. It took a while for the children to get used to the fact that Yasuaki was not just late, but wasn't ever coming again. Small classes might be nice, but at times like this it made things much harder. Yasuaki-chan's absence was so conspicuous. The only saving grace was the fact that
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Recently Totto-chan had begun to think about what she would like to be when she grew up. When she was younger she thought she wanted to be a street musician or a ballerina, and the day she first arrived at Tomoe she thought it would be nice to be a ticket seller at a station. But now she thought she would like to do some kind of work that was unusual but a little more feminine. It might be rather nice to be a nurse, she thought. But she suddenly remembered that when she had visited the wounded soldiers in the hospital she had noticed nurses doing things like giving injections, and that might be rather difficult. So what should she do! Suddenly she was transported with joy.
"Why, of course! I've already decided what 1 am going to be!"
She went over to Tai-chan, who had just lit his alcohol burner.
"I'm thinking of becoming a spy," she said proudly.
Tai-chan turned away from the flame and looked at Totto-chan's face for some time. Then he gazed out of the window for a while, as if he were thinking it over, before turning to Totto-chan again to say in his intelligent, resonant voice, slowly and simply, so she would understand, "You have to be clever to be a spy. Besides that, you've got to know a lot of languages."
Tai-chan paused a moment for breath. Then he looked straight at her and said bluntly, "In the first place, a lady spy has to be beautiful."
Totto-chan slowly lowered her eyes from Tai-chan's gaze and hung her head. After a pause, Tai-chan said thoughtfully in a low voice, this time without looking at Totto-chan, "And-besides, I don't think a chatterbox could be a spy.”
Totto-chan was dumbfounded. Not because he was against her being a spy. But because everything Tai-chan said was true. They were all things she had suspected. She realized then that in every respect she lacked the talents a spy needed. She knew, of course, that Tai-chan had not said those things out of spite. There was nothing to do but give up the idea. It was just as well she had talked it over with him.
"Goodness me," she thought to herself, "Tai-chan's the same age as I am and yet he knows so much more."
Supposing Tai-chan told her he was thinking of being a physicist. What on earth would she be able to say in reply?
She might say, "Well, you're good at lighting alcohol burners with a match." But that would sound too childish.
"Well, you know that kitsune is 'fox' in English and kutsu are 'shoes,' so I think you could be a physicist." No, that wasn't good enough, either.
In any event, she was quite sure Tai-chan was destined to do something brilliant. So she just said sweetly to Tai-chan, who was watching the bubbles form in his flask,
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Tai-chan mumbled something, scratched his head, and buried himself in the book that lay open before him.
If she couldn't be a spy, then what could she be, wondered Totto-chan, as she stood beside Tai-chan and stared at the flame on his burner.
Daddy's Violin
Before they knew it, the war with all its horrors was beginning to make itself felt in the life of Totto-chan and her family. Every day men and boys from the neighborhood were sent off with waving flags and shouts of "Banzai!" Foodstuffs rapidly disappeared one after the other from the shops. It became harder to comply with the Tomoe lunchtime rule of "something from the ocean and something from the hills." Mother was making do with seaweed and pickled plums, but soon even that became difficult to get. Just about everything was rationed. There were no sweets to be found, no matter how hard you searched.
Totto-chan knew about a vending machine under the stairs at Ookayama, the station before hers, where you could get a packer of caramels if you put money in the slot. There was a very appetizing picture on top of the machine. You could get a small packet for five sen and a big one for ten. But the machine had been empty for a long time now. Nothing would come out no matter how much money you put in or how hard you banged. Totto-chan was more persistent than most.
"Maybe there's still one packet in there some where," she thought. "Maybe it's caught inside."
So every day she got off the train at the stop before hers and tried putting five- and ten-sen coins into the machine. But all she got back was her money. It fell out with a clatter.
About that time, someone told Daddy what most people would have thought welcome news. If he went and played popular wartime music on his violin at something called a munitions factory—where they made weapons and other things used in war—he would be given sugar and rice and other treats. Since Daddy, who had recently been awarded a prestigious musical decoration, was well known as a violinist, the friend told him he would certainly be given a lot of extra presents.
"What do you think?" Mother asked Daddy. "Are you going to do it?"
Concerts were certainly becoming scarce. In the first place, more and more musicians were being called up and the orchestra was short of players. Radio broadcasts were almost entirely given over to programs connected with the war, so there was not much work for Daddy and his colleagues. He ought to have welcomed the opportunity to play anything.
Daddy thought for some time before replying. "I don't want to play that sort of thing on my violin."
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Daddy knew Totto-chan had barely enough to eat and was vainly putting money in the caramel vending machine every day. He also knew that the gifts of food he would receive for playing a few wartime tunes would be very handy for his family. But Daddy valued his music even more. Mother knew that, too, and so she never urged him to do it. "Forgive me, Totsky!" said Daddy, sadly.
Totto-chan was too young to know about art and ideology and work. But she did know that Daddy loved the violin so much he had been something called "disowned," and many of his family and relatives did not speak to him any more. He had had a hard time, but he had refused to give up the violin all the same. So Totto-chan thought it quite right for him not to play something he didn't like. Totto-chan skipped about around Daddy and said cheerfully, "I don't mind. Because I love your violin, too."
But the next day Totto-chan again got off at Ookayama and peered into the hole in the vending machine. It was unlikely that anything would come out, but she still kept hoping.
The Promise
After lunch, when the children put away the chairs and desks that had been arranged in a circle, the Assembly Hall seemed quite spacious.
"Today, I'm going to be the first to climb on the headmaster's back," decided Totto-chan.
That's what she always wanted to do, but if she hesitated for a moment, someone else would have already climbed into his lap as he sat cross-legged in the middle of the Assembly Hall, and at least two others would be scrambling onto his back, clamoring for his attention.
"Hey, stop it, stop it," the headmaster would remonstrate, red in the face with laughter, but once they had occupied his back, the children were determined not to give up their position. So if you were the least bit slow, you'd find the headmaster's back very crowded. But this time Totto-chan made up her mind to be there first and was already waiting in the middle of the Assembly Hall when the headmaster arrived. As he approached, she shouted to him, "Sir, I've got something to tell you.”
"What is it, then?" asked the headmaster delightedly, as he sat down on the floor and started to cross his legs.
Totto-chan wanted to tell him what she had decided after several days' thought. When the headmaster had crossed his legs, Totto-chan suddenly decided against climbing on his back. What she had to say would be more appropriate said face to face. So she sat down very close to him, facing him, and tilted her head a little with a smile that Mother had called her "nice face" ever since she was small. It was her "Sunday best" face. She felt confident when she smiled like that, her mouth slightly open, and she herself believed she was a good girl.
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Totto-chan said sweetly and slowly, in a big-sisterly or motherly way, "I'd like to teach at this school when I grow up. I really would."
Totto-chan expected the headmaster to smile, but instead, he asked in all seriousness, "Promise?"
He really seemed to want her to do it.
Totto-chan nodded her head vigorously and said, "I promise," determining in her heart to become a teacher there without fail.
At that moment she was thinking about the morning when she first came to Tomoe as a first grader and met the headmaster in his office. It seemed a long time ago. He had listened patiently to her for four hours. She thought of the warmth in his voice when he had said to her, after she had finished talking, "Now you're a pupil of this school." She loved Mr. Kobayashi even more than she had then. And she was determined to work for him and do anything she could to help him.
When she had promised, he smiled delightedly—as usual, showing no embarrassment about his missing teeth. Totto-chan held out her little finger. The headmaster did the same. His little finger looked strong--you could put your faith in it. Totto-chan and the headmaster then made a pledge in the time-honored Japanese way by linking little fingers. The headmaster was smiling. Totto-chan smiled, too, reassured. She was going to be a teacher at Tomoe! What a wonderful thought.
"When I'm a teacher ... ," she mused. And these were the things that Totto-chan imagined: not too much study; lots of Sports Days, field kitchens, camping, and walks!
The headmaster was delighted. It was hard to imagine Totto-chan grown-up, but he was sure she could be a Tomoe teacher. He thought the Tomoe children would all make good teachers since they were likely to remember what it was like being a child.
There at Tomoe, the headmaster and one of his pupils were making a solemn promise about something that lay ten years or more in the future, when everyone was saying it was only a matter of time before American airplanes loaded with bombs appeared in the skies over Japan.
Rocky Disappears
Lots of soldiers had died, food had become scarce, everyone was living in fear--but summer came as usual. And the sun shone on the nations that were winning as well as on the nations that weren't.
Totto-chan had just returned to Tokyo from her uncle's house in Kamakura.
There was no camping now at Tomoe and no more lovely visits to hot spring resorts. It seemed as if the children would never be able to enjoy a summer vacation as happy
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as that one. Totto-chan always spent the summer with her cousins at their house in Kamakura, but this year it had been different. An older boy, a relative who used to tell them scary ghost stories, had been called up and had gone to the war. So there were no more ghost stories. And her uncle who used to tell them such interesting tales about his life in America--they never knew whether they were true or not--was at the front. His name was Shuji Taguchi, and he was a top-ranking cameraman.
After serving as bureau chief of Nihon News in New York and as Far East representative of American Metro-News, he was better known as Shu Taguchi. He was Daddy's elder brother, though Daddy had taken his mother's family name in order to perpetuate it. Otherwise Daddy's surname would have been Taguchi, too. Films Uncle Shuji had shot, such as "The Battle of Rabaul," were being shown at movie theaters, but all he sent from the front were his films, so Totto-chan's aunt and cousins were worried about him. War photographers always showed the troops in dangerous positions, so they had to be ahead of the troops to show them advancing. That was whet Totto-chan's grown-up relatives had been saying.
Even the beach at Kamakura somehow seemed forlorn that summer. Yat-chan was funny, though, in spite of it all. He was Uncle Shuji's eldest son. Yat-chan was about a year younger than Totto-chan. The children all slept together under one large mosquito net, and before he went to sleep, Yat-chan used to shout "Long Live the Emperor!" then fall like a soldier who had been shot and pretend to be dead. He would do it over and over again. The funny thing was that whenever he did this, he invariably walked in his sleep and fell off the porch causing a great fuss.
Totto-chan's mother had stayed in Tokyo with Daddy, who had work to do. Now that summer vacation was over, Totto-chan had been brought back to Tokyo by the sister of the boy who used to tell ghost stories.
As usual on arriving at home, the first thing Totto-chan did was look for Rocky. But he was nowhere to be found. He wasn't in the house and he wasn't in the garden. Nor was he in the greenhouse where Daddy grew orchids. Totto-chan was worried, since Rocky normally came out to meet her long before she even reached the house. Totto-chan went out of the house and down the road, calling his name, but there was no sign of those beloved eyes, ears, or tail. Totto-chan thought he might have gone back while she was out looking for him, so she hurriedly ran home to see. But he wasn't there.
"Where's Rocky?" she asked Mother.
Mother must have known Totto-chan was running everywhere looking for Rocky, but she didn't say a word.
"Where's Rocky?" Totto-chan asked again, pulling Mother's skirt.
Mother seemed to find it difficult to reply. "He disappeared," she said.
Totto-chan refused to believe it. How could he have disappeared? "When?" she asked, looking Mother in the face.
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Mother seemed at a loss for words. "just after you left for Kamakura," she began, sadly. Then she hurriedly continued, "We looked for him. We went everywhere. And we asked everybody. But we couldn't find him. I've been wondering how to tell you. I'm terribly sorry. Then the truth dawned on Totto-chan. Rocky must have died. "Mother doesn't want me to be sad," she thought, "but Rocky's dead."
It was quite clear to Totto-chan. Up till now, no matter how long Totto-chan was gone, Rocky never went far from the house. He always knew she would come back. "Rocky would never go off like that without telling me," she thought to herself. It was a strong conviction.
But Totto-chan did not discuss it with Mother. She knew how Mother must feel. "I wonder where he went," was all she said, keeping her eyes lowered.
It was all she could do to say that much, and then she ran upstairs to her room. Without Rocky, the house didn't seem like their house at all. When she got to her room, she tried hard not to cry and thought about it once more. She wondered whether she had done anything mean to Rocky—anything that would make him want to leave.
"Never tease animals," Mr. Kobayashi always told the children at Tomoe. "it's cruel to betray animals when they trust you. Don't make a dog beg and then not give it anything. The dog won't trust you any more and might develop a bad nature."
Totto-chan always obeyed these rules. She had never deceived Rocky. She had done nothing wrong that she could think of.
Just then Totto-chan noticed something clinging to the leg of her teddy bear on the floor. She had managed not to cry until then, but when she saw it she burst into tears. It was a little tuft of Rocky's light brown hair. It must have come off when the two of them had rolled about on the floor, playing, the morning she left for Kamakura. With those few little German shepherd hairs clutched in her hand, she cried and cried. Her tears and her sobbing just wouldn't stop.
First Yasuaki-chan and now Rocky. Totto-chan had lost another friend.
The Tea Party
Ryo-chan, the janitor at Tomoe, whom all the children liked so much, was finally called up. He was a grown-up, but they all called him by his childish nickname. Ryo-chan was a sort of guardian angel who always came to the rescue and helped when anyone was in trouble. Ryo-chan could do anything. He never said much, and only smiled, but he always knew just what to do. When Totto-chan fell into the cesspool, it was Ryo-chan who came to her rescue straight away, and washed her off without so much as a grumble.
"Let's give Ryo-chan a rousing, send-off tea party," said the headmaster.
"A tea party?"
Green tea is drunk many times during the day in Japan, but it is not associated with entertaining--except ceremonial powdered tea, a different beverage altogether. A "tea
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party" would be something new at Tomoe. But the children liked the idea. They loved doing things they'd never done before. The children didn't know it, but the headmaster had invented a new weld, sawakai (tea party), instead of the usual sobetsukai (farewell party), on purpose. A farewell party sounded too sad, and the older children would understand that it might really be farewell if Ryo-chan got killed and didn't come back. But nobody had ever been to a tea parry before, so they were all excited.
After school, Mr. Kobayashi had the children arrange the desks in a circle in the Assembly Hall just as at lunchtime. When they were all sitting in a circle, he gave each one a single thin strip of roasted dried squid to have with their green tea. Even that was a great luxury in those wartime days. Then he sat down next to Ryo-chan and placed a glass before him with a little sake in it. It was a ration obtainable only for those leaving for the front.
"This is the first tea party at Tomoe," said the headmaster. "Let’s all have a good time. If there's anything you'd like to say to Ryo-chan, do so. You can say things to each other, too, not just to Ryo-chan. One by one, standing in the middle."
It was not only the first time they had ever eaten dried squid at Tomoe, but the first time Ryo-chan had sat down with them, and the first time they had seen Ryo-chan sipping sake.
One after the other the children stood up, facing Ryo-chan, and spoke to him. The first children just told him to take care of himself and not get sick. Then Migita, who was in Totto-chan's class, said, "Next time I go home to the country I'll bring you all back some funeral dumplings."
Everyone laughed. It was well over a year since Migita first told them about the dumplings he had once had at a funeral and how good they were. Whenever the opportunity arose, he promised to bring them some, but he never did it.
When the headmaster heard Migita mention funeral dumplings, it gave him quite a start. Normally it would have been considered bad luck to mention funeral dumplings at such a time. But Migita said it so innocently, just wanting to share with his friends something that tasted so good, that the head-master laughed with the others. Ryo-chan laughed heartily, too. After all, Migita had been telling him for ages that he would bring him some.
Then Oe got up and promised Ryo-chan that he was going to become the best horticulturist in Japan.
Oe was the son of the proprietor of an enormous nursery garden in Todoroki. Keiko Aoki got up next and said nothing. She just giggled shyly, as usual, and bowed, and went back to her seat. Whereupon Totto-chan rushed forward and said for her, "The chickens at Keiko-chan's can fly! I saw them the other day!"
Then Amadera spoke. "If you find any injured cats or dogs," he said, "bring them to me and I’ll fix them up.
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Takahashi was so small he crawled under his desk to get to the center of the circle and was there as quick as a wink. He said in a cheerful voice, "Thank you Ryo-chan. Thank you forever thing. For all sorts of things."
Aiko Saisho stood up next. She said, "Ryo-chan, thank you for bandaging me up that time I fell down. I’ll never forget." Aiko Saisho's great-uncle was the famous Admiral Togo of the Russo-Japanes War, and Atsuko Saisho, another relative of hers, was a celebrated poetess at Emperor Meiji's court. But Aiko never mentioned them.
Miyo-chan, the headmaster's daughter, knew Ryo-chan the best. Her eyes were full of tears. "Take care of yourself, won't you, Ryo-chan. Let's write to each other.
Totto-chan had so many things she wanted to say she didn't know where to begin. So she just said, "Even though you're gone, Ryo-chan, we'll have a tea party every day.”
The headmaster laughed, and so did Ryo-chan. All the children laughed, too, even Totto-chan herself.
But Totto-chan's words came true the very next day. Whenever there was time the children would form a group and play "tea party." Instead of dried squid, they would suck things like tree bark, and they sipped glasses of water instead of tea, sometimes pretending it was sake. Someone would say, “I’ll bring you some funeral dumplings," and they'd all laugh. Then they'd talk and tell each other their thoughts. Even though there wasn't anything to eat, the "tea parties" were fun.
The "tea party" was a wonderful farewell gift that Ryo-chan left the children. And although none of them had the faintest idea then, it was in fact the last game they were to play at Tomoe before the children parted and went their separate ways.
Ryo-chan went off on the Toyoko train. His departure coincided with the arrival of the American airplanes. They finally appeared in the skies above Tokyo and began dropping bombs every day.
Sayonara, Sayonara!
Tomoe burned down. It happened at night. Miyo-chan, her sister Misa-chan, and their mother—who all lived in the house adjoining the school--fled to the Tomoe farm by the pond at Kuhonbutsu Temple and were safe.
Lots of incendiary bombs dropped by the B29 bombers fell on the railroad cars that served as schoolrooms.
The school that had been the headmaster's dream was enveloped in flames. Instead of the sounds he loved so much of children laughing and children singing, the school was collapsing with a fearful noise. The fire, impossible to quench, burned it down to the ground. Fires blared up all over Jiyugaoka.
In the midst of it all, the headmaster stood in the road and watched Tomoe burn. He was dressed, as usual, in his rather shabby black three-piece suit. He stood with both hands in his jacket pockets.
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"What kind of school shall we build next?" he asked his university-student son Tomoe, who stood beside him. Tomoe listened to him dumbfounded.
Mr. Kobayashi's love for children and his passion for teaching were stronger than the flames now enveloping the school. The headmaster was cheerful.
Totto-chan was lying down in a crowded evacuation train, squeezed in amongst adults. The train was headed northeast. As she looked out of the window at the darkness outside, she thought of the headmaster's parting words, "We'll meet again!" and the words he used to say to her time and time again, "You're really a good girl, you know." She didn't want to forget those words. Safe in the thought that soon she would see Mr. Kobayashi again, she fell asleep.
The train rumbled along in the darkness with its load of anxious passengers.
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To write about the school called Tomoe and Sosaku Kobayashi, the man who founded and ran it are the things I have most wanted to do for a long time.
I have invented none of the episodes. They are all events that really happened and, thankfully, I have been able to remember quite a few of them. Besides wanting to write them down, I have been anxious to make amends for a broken pledge. As I have described in one of the chapters, as a child I made a solemn promise to Mr. Kobayashi that I would teach at Tomoe when I grew up. However, it was a promise I was not able to fulfill. Instead I have tried to reveal, to as many people as possible, what sort of man Mr. Kobayashi was, his great love for children, and how he set about educating them.
Mr. Kobayashi died in 1963. If he were alive today there would be much more he could have told me. Even as I write I realize how many episodes that just seem happy childhood memories to me were, in fact, activities carefully thought out by him to achieve certain results. "So that's what Mr. Kobayashi must have had in mind," I find myself thinking. Or, "Fancy him even thinking about that." With each discovery I make, I am amazed-and deeply moved and grateful.
In my own case, I find it impossible to assess how much I have been sustained by the way he used to keep saying to me, "You're really a good girl, you know." Had I not entered Tomoe and had I never met Mr. Kobayashi, I would probably have been labeled "a bad girl," becoming complex-ridden and confused.
Tomoe was destroyed by fire in the Tokyo air raids in 1945. Mr. Kobayashi had built the school with his own money, so reestablishing it took time. After the war, he started a kindergarten on the old site, while helping to establish what is now the Child Education Department of Kunitachi College of Music. He also taught eurythmics there and assisted in the establishment of Kunitachi Elementary School. He died, at the age of sixty-nine, before he could set up his ideal school once more.
Tomoe Gakuen was in southwest Tokyo, a three-minute walk from Jiyugaoka Station on the Toyoko Line. The site is now occupied by the Peacock super-market and parking lot. I went there the other day out of sheer nostalgia, although I knew nothing was left of the school or its grounds. I drove slowly past the parking lot, where the railroad-car classrooms and playground used to be. The man in charge of the packing lot saw my car and called out, "You can't come in, you can't come in. We're full!"
"I don't want to park," I felt like saying, “I’m just evoking memories.” But he would not have understood, so I went on. But a great sadness came over me and tears rolled down my cheeks as I sped away.
I am sure all over the world there are fine educators - people with high ideals and a great love for children--who dream of setting up ideal schools. And I know how difficult it must be to realize this dream. It took Mr. Kobayashi years and years of study before starting Tomoe in 1937 and it burned down in 1945, so its existence was very brief.
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I like to believe that the period I was there when Mr. Kobayashi's enthusiasm was at its height and his schemes in full flower. But when I think how many children could have-come under his care had there been no war, I am saddened at the waste.
I have tried to describe Mr. Kobayashi's educational methods in this book. He believed all children are born with an innate good nature, which can be easily damaged by their environment and the wrong adult influences. His aim was to uncover their "good nature" and develop it, so that the children would grow into people with individuality.
Mr. Kobayashi valued naturalness and wanted to let children's characters develop as naturally as possible. He loved nature, too. His younger daughter, Miyo-chan, told me her father used to take her for walks when she was small, saying, “Let's go and look for the rhythms in nature."
He would lead her to a large tree and show her how the leaves and branches swayed in the breeze; he would point out the relationship between the leaves, the branches, and the trunk; and how the swaying of the leaves differed according to whether the wind was strong or weak. They would stand still and observe things like that, and if there was no wind, they would wait patiently, with upturned faces, for the slightest zephyr. They observed not only the wind, but rivers, too. They used to go to the nearby Tama River and watch the water flowing. They never tired of doing things like that, she told me.
Readers may wonder how the authorities in war time Japan allowed such an unconventional elementary school to exist, where studies were carried out in such an atmosphere of freedom. Mr. Kobayashi hated publicity, and even before the war did not allow photographs of the school or any publicity about its unconventionality. That may have been one reason this small school of under fifty pupils escaped notice and managed to continue. Another was that Mr. Kobayashi was highly regarded at the Ministry of Education as an educator of children.
Every November third--the day of those wonderful Sports Days of fond memory--the pupils of Tomoe, regardless of when they graduated, get together in a room in Kuhonbutsu Temple for a happy reunion. Although we are all in our forties now-- many of us are nearing fifty--and have grown children of our own, we still call each other by our nicknames just as in the old days. These reunions are one of the many happy legacies Mr. Kobayashi left us.
It is true that I was expelled from my first elementary school. I do not remember much about that school--my mother told me about the street musicians and the desk. I found it hard to believe I had been expelled. Could I really have been as naughty as all that! However, five years ago I took part in a morning television show in which I was introduced to someone who had known me at that time. She turned out to be the homeroom teacher of the class next to mine. I was dumbfounded at what she told me.
"You were in the room right next to mine," she said, "and when I had to go to the faculty room during class, I usually found you standing in the corridor for some misdemeanor. As I went past, you always stopped me and asked me why you'd been made to stand out there, and what you had done wrong. 'Don't you like street musicians!' you asked me once. I never knew how to deal with you, so finally, even
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if I wanted to go to the faculty room I would peep out first, and if you were in the corridor I avoided going. Your homeroom teacher often talked about you to me in the faculty room. ‘I wonder why she's like that,' she would say. That's why, in later years, when you started appearing on television, I recognized your name immediately. It was a long time ago, but I remember you distinctly when you were in first grade."
Was I made to stand outside in the corridor? I hadn't remembered that and was surprised. It was this youthful-looking, gray-haired teacher with a kindly face, who had taken the trouble to come to an early morning television show, who finally convinced me that I really had been expelled.
And here I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my mother for not having told me about it until after my twentieth birthday.
"Do you know why you changed elementary schools?" she asked me one day. When I said no, she went on, quite nonchalantly, "It was because you were expelled."
She might have said at the time, "What's going to become of you? You've already been expelled from one school. If they expel you from the next, where will you go?"
If Mother had spoken to me like that, how wretched and nervous I would have felt as I entered the gate of Tomoe Gakuen on my first day there. That gate with roots and those railroad-car classrooms would not have seemed nearly so delightful to me. How lucky I was to have a mother like mine.
With the war on, only a few photographs were taken at Tomoe. Among them the graduation photographs are the nicest. The graduating class usually had its photograph taken on the steps in front of the Assembly Hall, but when the graduates started lining up with shouts of, "Come on, get in the picture!" other children would want to get in it, too, so it is impossible now to tell which class was graduating. We have animated discussions on the subject at our reunions. Mr. Kobayashi never used to say anything on these picture-taking occasions. Perhaps he thought it was better to have a lively photograph of everyone in the school than a formal graduation picture. Looking at them now, these pictures are very representative of Tomoe.
There is much more I could have written about Tomoe. But I shall be content if I have made people realize how even a little girl like Totto-chan, given the right kind of adult influence, can become a person who is able to get along with others.
I am quite sure that if there were schools now like Tomoe, there would be less of the violence we hear so much of today and fewer school dropouts. At Tomoe nobody wanted to go home when school was over. And in the morning we could hardly wait to get there. It was that kind of school.
Sosaku Kobayashi, the man who had the inspiration and vision to set up this wonderful school, was born on June 18, 1893, in the country northwest of Tokyo. Nature and music were his passions, and as a child he would stand on the bank of the river near his home, with Mount Haruna in the distance, and pretend the gushing waters were an orchestra, which he would "conduct."
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He was the youngest son of six children in a rather poor farming family and had to work as an assistant school teacher after an elementary education. To obtain the necessary certificate to do it, however, was quite a feat for a boy that age, and it showed exceptional talent. Soon he got a position at an elementary school in Tokyo, and he combined teaching with music studies, which finally enabled him to carry out his cherished ambition and enter the Music Education Department of Japan's foremost
conservatory of music--now the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. On graduation, he became music instructor at Seikei Elementary School, founded by Haruji Nakamura, a wonderful man who believed a child's elementary education was of the utmost importance. He kept classes small and advocated a sufficiently free curriculum to bring out the child's individuality and promote self-respect. Study was done in the mornings. Afternoons were devoted to walks, plant collecting, sketching, singing, and listening to discourses by the headmaster. Mr. Kobayashi was greatly influenced by his methods and later instituted a similar kind of curriculum at Tomoe.
While teaching music there, Mr. Kobayashi wrote a children's operetta for the students to perform. The operetta impressed the industrialist Baron Iwasaki, whose family founded the giant business enterprise Mitsubishi. Baron Iwasaki was a patron of the arts--helping Koscak Yamada, doyen of Japanese composers, as well as giving financial support to the school. The baron offered to send Mr. Kobayashi to Europe to study educational methods.
Mr. Kobayashi spent two years in Europe, from 1922 to 1924, visiting schools and studying eurythmics with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Paris. On his return, he established Seijo Kindergarten with another man. Mr. Kobayashi used to tell the kindergarten teachers not to try and fit the children into preconceived molds. "Leave them to nature," he would say. "Don't cramp their ambitions. Their dreams are bigger than yours." There had never been a kindergarten like it in Japan.
In 1930, Mr. Kobayashi set off for Europe for a further year of study with Dalcroze, traveling around and making observations, and decided to start his own school on returning to Japan.
Besides starting Tomoe Gakuen in 1937, he also established the Japan Eurythmics Association. Most people remember him as the man who introduced eurythmics to Japan and for his work in connection with Kunitachi College of Music after the war. There are very few of us left who directly experienced his methods of teaching, and it is a tragedy that he died before he was able to establish another school like Tomoe. Even as it burned, he was already envisaging a better school. "What kind of school shall we build next!" he asked, in high spirits, undaunted by the commotion around him.
When I began writing this book, I was amazed to find that the producer of "Tetsuko's Room," my daily television interview program--a producer I had worked with for years-- had been doing research on Mr. Kobayashi for a decade. He had never met the educator, but his interest was aroused by a woman who once played the piano for children's eurythmics classes. "Children don't walk like that, you know, Mr. Kobayashi had said, correcting her tempo, when she first began. Here was a man who was so attuned to children that he knew how they breathed and how they
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moved. I am hoping Karuhiko Sano, my producer, will write his book soon to tell the world a great deal more about this remarkable man.
Twenty years ago an enterprising young Kodansha editor noticed an essay I had written about Tomoe in a women's magazine. He came to see me, armed with a great many pads of paper, asking me to expand the material into a book. I guiltily used the paper for something else, and the young man became a director before his idea materialized. But it was he, Katsuhisa Kato, who gave me the idea-and the confidence--to do it. Not having written much then, a whole book seemed daunting. In the end, I was induced to write a chapter at a time as a series of articles for Kodansha's Young Woman magazine, which I did from February 1979 to December 1980.
Every month I would visit the Chihiro Iwasaki Museum of Picture Books in Shimo-shakuji, Nerimaku, Tokyo, to select an illustration. Chihiro Iwasaki was a genius at depicting children, and I doubt if any artist anywhere in the world could draw children in as lively a way as she. She captured them in their myriad moods and attitudes and could differentiate between a baby of six months and one of nine. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have been able to use her drawings for my book. It is quite uncanny how well they fit my narrative. She died in 1974, but people constantly ask me whether I started writing my book while she was still alive, which shows how true to life her paintings are and the tremendous variety of ways in which she depicted children.
Chihiro Iwasaki left nearly seven thousand pictures, and I was privileged to see a great many of her original paintings through the kindness of her son, who is assistant curator of the museum, and his wife. I extend my gratitude to the artist's husband for per- mission to reproduce her work. I am also grateful to playwright Tadasu Iizawa, curator of the museum, of which I am now a trustee, who kept urging me to start writing when I procrastinated
Miyo-chan and all my Tomoe friends were naturally a tremendous help. Heartfelt thanks, too, to my editor of the Japanese edition, Keiko Iwamoto, who kept saying, "We must make this a really splendid book!"
I got the idea for the Japanese title from an expression popular a few years ago that referred to people being “over by the window”, meaning they were on the hinge or out in the cold. Although I used to stand at the window out of choice, hoping to see the street musicians, I truly felt “over by the window” at that first school--alienated and very much out in the cold. The title has these overtones, as well as one more--the window of happiness that finally opened for me at Tomoe.
Tomoe is no longer. But if it lives for a little while in your imagination as you read this book, nothing could give me greater joy.
Many things have happened during the year that has elapsed between the publication of this book in Japanese and its appearance in English. First of all, the book became an unexpected best seller. Little Totto-chan made Japanese publishing history by selling 4,500,000 copies in a single year. Next, I was amazed to find it being read as an educational textbook. I had hoped it would be instructive for schoolteachers and young mothers to know that there was once a headmaster like Mr. Kobayashi. But I
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never imagined the book would have the impact it did. Perhaps it is an indication of how deeply people throughout Japan are concerned about the state of education today.
To children it is a storybook. The many replies from readers polled indicate that in spite of all the difficult words in it, children from the age of seven are reading my book with the aid of a dictionary. I can't tell you how happy this makes me. A Japanese literature scholar, aged one hundred and three, wrote, “I enjoyed it immensely." But far more remarkable is the fact that young children are actually reading it looking up the difficult words when comics and picture books are all the rage and youngsters are said to be no longer interested in the written word;
After the book appeared, I was deluged with requests from film, television, theater, and film animation companies for permission to produce my story in their various mediums. But since so many people had read the book and already formed their own mental images, I felt it would be difficult to improve on their imagination no matter how brilliant the director, so I turned them all down.
But I did agree to an orchestral interpretation because music gives free rein to fantasy. I asked Akihiro Komori--well known for his beautiful music--to undertake the composition. The symphonic tale Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, for which I did the narration, was a brilliant success, filling the hall alternately with laughter and tears. A record has been made of it.
The book has now also become official teaching material. With the approval of the Ministry of Education, the chapter "The Farming Teacher" will be used in third grade Japanese language studies starting next year, and the chapter "Shabby Old School" in fourth grade ethics and manners classes. Many teachers are already using the book in their own way. In art classes, for instance, I hear teachers are reading children one of the chapters and then having them draw pictures of what impressed them most.
I have been able to realize my long-cherished dream of founding Japan's first professional theater of the deaf, thanks to royalties from the book—for which I received the Non-Fiction Prize as well as three other awards. For services to society, I recently had the honor of being invited, together with many distinguished guests, including Nobel Prizewinner for Chemistry Ken'ichi Fukui, to the emperor's spring garden party, where I was privileged to have a very pleasant conversation with His Majesty. And last year, I received a commendation from the prime minister to commemorate the International Year of Disabled Persons. The book I wanted to write so much brought all these happy events to pass.
Finally, 1 would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dorothy Britton for translating my book into English. I am very fortunate to have found such a splendid translator. The fact that she is both a musician and a poet has enabled her to put my text into English that has both rhythm and sensitivity and is a delight to read.
Yes, one thing more. 1 would also like to thank Broadway composer Harold Rome and his author wife, Florence. I had only completed the first chapter when they began urging me to publish my story in English.
TETSUKO KUROYANAGI, Tokyo, 1982
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What are they doing now, those friends of mine who "traveled" together with me on the same classroom "train?"
Akira Takahashi
Takahashi, who won all the prizes on Sports Day, never grew any taller, bur entered, with flying colors, a high school famous in Japan for its rugby team. He went on to Meiji University and a degree in electronic engineering.
He is now personnel manager of a large electronics company near Lake Hamana in central Japan. He is responsible for harmony in the work force and he listens to complaints and troubles and settles dispute. Having suffered much himself, he can readily understand other people's problems, and his sunny disposition and attractive personality must be a great help, too. As a technical specialist, he also trains the younger men in the use of the large machines with integrated circuitry.
I went to Hamamatsu to see Takahashi and his wife--a kindly woman who understands him perfectly and has heard so much about Tomoe she says it is almost as if she had gone there herself. She assured me Takahashi has no complexes whatever about his dwarfism. I am quite sure she is right. Complexes would have made life very difficult for him at the prestigious high school and university he attended, and would hardly enable him to work as he does in a personnel department.
Describing his first day at Tomoe, Takahashi said he immediately felt at ease when he saw there were others with physical handicaps. From that moment he suffered no qualms and enjoyed each day so much he never even once wanted to stay home. He told me he was embarrassed at first about swimming naked in the pool, but as he took off his clothes one by one, so he shed his shyness and sense of shame bit by bit. He even got so he did not mind standing up in front of the others to make his lunchtime speeches.
He told me how Mr. Kobayashi had encouraged him to jump over vaulting-horses higher than he was, always assuring him he could do it, although he suspects now that Mr. Kobayashi probably helped him over them--but not until the very last moment, letting him think he had done it all by himself. Mr. Kobayashi gave him confidence and enabled him to know the indescribable joy of successful achievement. Whenever he tried to hide in the background, the headmaster invariably brought him forward so he had to develop a positive attitude to life willy-nilly. He still remembers the elation he felt at winning all those prizes. Bright-eyed and sensible as ever, he reminisced happily about Tomoe.
A good home environment must have contributed, too, to Takahashi's developing into such a fine person. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Kobayashi dealt with us all in a very far-sighted way. Like his constantly saying me, "You're really a good girl, you know," the encouraging way he kept saying to Takahashi, "You can do it!" was a decisive factor in shaping his life.
As I was leaving Hamamatsu, Takahashi told me something I had completely forgotten. He said he was often teased and bullied by children from other schools on
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his way to Tomoe and would arrive there crestfallen, whereupon I would quickly ask him what children had done it and was out of the gate in a flash. After a while I would come running back and assure him it was all right now and wouldn't happen again.
"You made me so happy then," he said when we parted. I had forgotten. Thank you, Takahashi, for remembering.
Miyo-chan (Miyo Kaneko)
Mr. Kobayashi's third daughter, Miyo-chan, graduated from the Education Department of Kunitachi College of Music and now teaches music at the elementary school attached to the college. Like her father, she loves teaching young children. From the time she was about three years old, Mr. Kobayashi had observed Miyo-chan walking and moving her body in time to music, as well as learning to talk, and this helped him greatly in his teaching of children.
Sakko Matsuyama (now Mrs. Sairo)
Sakko-chan, the girl with the large eyes who was wearing a pinafore with a rabbit on it the day I started at Tomoe, entered a school that was in those days very difficult for girls to get into--now known as Mita High School. She went on to the English Department of Tokyo Woman's Christian University, became an English instructor with the YWCA, and is still there. She makes good use of her Tomoe experience at their summer camps.
She married a man she met while climbing Mount Hotaka in the Japan Alps. They named their son Yasutaka-the last part commemorating the name of the mountain on which they met.
Taiji Yamanouchi
Tai-chan, who said he wouldn't marry me, became one of Japan's leading physicists. He lives in America, an example of the "brain drain." He graduated in physics from the Science Department of Tokyo University of Education. After his M.Sc., he went to America on a Fulbright exchange scholarship and got his doctorate five years later at the University of Rochester. He remained there, doing research in experimental high-energy physics. At present he is at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, the world's largest, where he is assistant director. It is a research laboratory comprising the cleverest people from fifty-three universities in America, and is a giant organization with 145 physicists and 1,400 technical staff, so you can see what a genius Tai-chan is. The laboratory attracted world attention five years ago when it succeeded in producing a high-energy beam of 500 billion electron volts.
Recently, Tai-chan, in collaboration with a professor from Columbia University, discovered something called upsilon. I am sure Tai-chan will receive the Nobel Prize one day.
Tai-chan married a talented girl who graduated with honors in mathematics from the University of Rochester. With such brains, Tai-chan would probably have gone far
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no matter what elementary school he attended. But I think the Tomoe system of letting children work on subjects in any order they wanted probably helped to develop his talent. I cannot remember him doing anything during class but working with his alcohol burner and his flasks and test tubes or reading terribly difficult-looking books on science and physics.
Kunio Oe
Oe, the boy who pulled my braids, is now Japan's foremost authority on Far Eastern orchids, whose bulbs can cost tens of thousands of dollars. His is a very specialized field, and Oe is in great demand and constantly travels all over Japan. It was with difficulty that I managed to get hold of him by telephone in between trips and have the following brief conversation:
"Where did you go to school after Tomoe?"
"I didn't go anywhere."
"You didn't go anywhere else? Tomoe was your only school?"
"That's right."
"Good heavens! Didn't you even go to secondary school?"
"Oh yes, I did spend a few months at Oita Secondary School when I was evacuated to Kyushu."
"But isn't finishing secondary school compulsory?"
"That's right. But I didn't."
"My! How happy-go-lucky he is," I thought. Before the war, Oe's father owned an enormous nursery garden that encompassed most of the area called Todoroki in southwest Tokyo, but it was all destroyed in the bombing. Oe's placid nature was evident in the rest of our conversation as he changed the subject.
"Do you know what's the most fragrant flower? To my mind it's the Chinese spring orchid (Cymbidium virescens). No perfume can match it."
"Are they expensive?"
"Some are and some aren't."
“What do they look like?"
"Well, they're not a bit showy. They're rather subdued. But that's their charm."
He hadn't changed a bit since he was at Tomoe.
Listening to Oe's relaxed voice I thought, "It doesn't bother him one bit, the fact that he never even graduated from secondary school! He just does his own thing and really believes in himself." I couldn't help being impressed.
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Amadera, who loved animals, wanted to be a vet when he grew up and have a farm. Unfortunately, his father died suddenly, and he had to drastically alter the course of his life, leaving Nihon University School of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry to take a job at Keio Hospital. At present he is at the Central Hospital of the Self-Defense Force in a responsible position connected with clinical examination.
Aiko Saisho (now Mrs. Tanaka)
Aiko Saisho, whose great-uncle was Admiral Togo, transferred to Tomoe from the elementary school attached to Aoyama Gakuin. I used to think of her in those days as a very sedate and proper young lady. She probably seemed that way because she had lost her father--a major in the Third Guards Regiment --who was killed during the Manchurian Incident.
After graduating from Kamakura Girls' High School, Aiko married an architect. Now that both her sons are grown and in business, she spends much of her leisure writing poetry.
"So you're carrying on the tradition of your famous aunt who was a poetess laureate at Emperor Meiji's court?" I said.
"Oh, no!" she replied, with an embarrassed laugh.
"You're as modest as you were at Tomoe," I said, "and as ladylike." To which she ventured by way of reply, "You know, my figure's the same now as when I played Benkei!"
Her voice made me think what a warm, happy household hers must be.
Keiko Aoki (now Mrs. Kuwabara)
Keiko-chan, who had the chickens that could fly, is now married to a teacher at Keio University's elementary school. She has a married daughter.
Yoichi Migita
Migita, the boy who kept promising to bring those funeral dumplings, took a degree in horticulture, but he had always liked drawing so he went back to college and graduated from Musashino College of Fine Arts. Now he runs his own graphic design company.
Ryo-chan
Ryo-chan, the janitor, who went off to war, came home safe and sound. He never fails to attend the Tomoe reunions every November third.
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About The Book
This engaging series of childhood recollections tells about an ideal school in Tokyo during World War II that combined learning with fun, freedom, and love. This unusual school had old railroad cars for classrooms, and it was run by an extraordinary man--its founder and headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi --who was a firm believer in freedom of expression and activity.
In real life, the Totto-chan of the book has become one of Japan's most popular television personalities - Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. She attributes her success in life to this wonderful school and its headmaster.
The charm of this account has won the hearts of millions of people of all ages and made this book a runaway best seller in Japan, with sales hitting the 4.5 million mark in its first year.
THE TRANSLATOR
Dorothy Britton poet, writer, and composer--was born in Japan and educated in the U.S. and England. A pupil of Darius Milhaud, she is well known for her popular Capitol Records album Japanese Sketches in which Tetsuko Kuroyanagi's father is violin soloist. She is the author of the English libretto of the Japanese opera Yuzuru and of A Haiku Journey, a distinguished translation of the poet Basho's Narrow Road to a Far Province.
THE AUTHOR
Tokyo-born Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, voted Japan's most popular TV personality for five years running, studied opera singing at Tokyo College of Music but became an actress, soon winning a prestigious award for her radio and TV work. She spent
1972 in New York, studying acting and writing From New York with Love. Since 1975 she has hosted “Tetsuko's Room,” Japan's first daily TV talk show, recently awarded the highest TV prize. This and her other regular TV shows all have top viewer ratings. Devoted to welfare, she twice brought America's National Theater of the Deaf to Japan, acting with them in sign language. The Totto-chan Foundation, financed by her book royalties, professionally trains deaf actors--with whom she often appears. Author of Panda and I, she is also a conservationist with a long-time interest in the Giant Panda, and is a director of the World Wildlife Fund Japan.
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