Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window (19 page)

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.
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
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."
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 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 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.