Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window (3 page)

Rocky listened attentively at first, ears pointed, but after giving the pass a few licks, he yawned. Totto-chan went on, "The classroom train doesn't move, so I don't think you'll need a ticket to get on that one, but today you'll just have to stay home and wait for me.”

Rocky always used to walk with Totto-chan as far as the gate of the other school and then come back home. Naturally, he was expecting to do the same today.

Totto-chan took the cord with the pass off Rocky's neck and carefully hung it around her own. She called out once more to Mother and Daddy, "Good-bye!"

Then she ran off, without a backward glance, her bag flapping against her back. Rocky bounded along happily beside her.

The way to the station was almost the same as to the old school, so Totto-chan passed dogs and cats she knew, as well as children from her former class.

Should she show them her pass and impress them, Totto-chan wondered? But she didn't want to be late, so she decided not to that day, and hurried on.

When Totto-chan turned right at the station instead of left as usual, poor Rocky stopped and looked around anxiously. Totto-chan was already at the ticket gate, but she went back to Rocky, who stood, looking mystified.

"I’m not going to the other school any more. I'm going to a new one now.”

Totto-chan put her face against Rocky's. His ears were smelly, as usual, but to Totto- chan it was a nice smell.

"Bye-bye," she said and, showing the man her pass, she started climbing up the steep station stairs. Rocky whimpered softly and watched until Totto-chan was out of
sight.

No one had arrived yet when Totto-chan got to the door of the railroad car the headmaster had told her would be her classroom. It was an old-fashioned car, one that still had a door handle on the outside. You took hold of the handle with both
hands and slid the door to the right. Totto-chan's heart was beating fast with excitement as she peeped inside.

"Ooh!"

Studying here would be like going on a perpetual journey. The windows still had baggage racks above them. The only difference was that there was a blackboard at the front of the car, and the lengthwise seats had been replaced by school desks and
chairs all facing forward. The hand straps had gone, too, but everything else had been left just as it was. Totto-chan went in and sat down at someone's desk. The wooden chairs resembled those at the other school, but they were so much more comfortable she could sit on them all day. Totto-chan was so happy and liked the school so much, she made a firm decision to come to school every day and never take any holidays.

Totto-chan looked out of the window. She knew the train was stationary, but--was it because the flowers and trees in the school grounds were swaying slightly in the breeze!--it seemed to be moving.

"I'm so happy!" she finally said out loud. Then she pressed her face against the window and made up a song just as she always did whenever she was happy.

I'm so happy, So happy am I! Why am I happy! Because ...
Just at that moment someone got on. It was a girl. She took her notebook and pencil box out of her schoolbag and put them on her desk. Then she stood on tiptoe and put the bag on the rack. She put her shoe bag up there, too. Totto-chan stopped singing and quickly did the same. After that a boy got on. He stood at the door and threw his bag on the baggage rack as if he were playing basketball. It bounced off and fell on the floor. "Bad shot!" said the boy, taking aim again from the same place. This time it stayed on. "Nice shot!" he shouted followed by "No, bad shot," as he scrambled onto the desk and opened his bag to get out his notebook and pencil box. His failure to do this first evidently made it count as a miss.

Eventually there were nine pupils in the car. They comprised the first grade at Tomoe
Gakuen.

They would all be traveling together on the same train.

Going to school in a railroad car seemed unusual enough, but the seating arrangements turned our to be unusual, too. At the other school each pupil was assigned a specific desk. But here they were allowed to sit anywhere they liked at any time.
After a lot of thought and a good look around, Totto-chan decided to sit next to the girl who had come after her that morning because the girl was wearing a pinafore with a long-eared rabbit on it.

The most unusual thing of all about this school, however, was the lessons themselves.

Schools normally schedule one subject, for example, Japanese, the first period, when you just do Japanese; then, say, arithmetic the second period, when you just do arithmetic. But here it was quite different. At the beginning of the first period, the teacher made a list of all the problems and questions in the subjects to be studied that day. Then she would say, "Now, start with any of these you like."

So whether you started on Japanese or arithmetic or something else didn't matter at all. Someone who liked composition might be writing something, while behind you someone who liked physics might be boiling something in a flask over an alcohol burner, so that a small explosion was liable to occur in any of the classrooms.

This method of teaching enabled the teachers to observe--as the children progressed to higher grades --what they were interested in as well as their way of thinking and their character. It was an ideal way for teachers to really get to know their pupils.

As for the pupils, they loved being able to start with their favorite subject, and the fact that they had all day to cope with the subjects they disliked meant they could usually manage them somehow. So study was mostly independent, with pupils free to go and consult the teacher whenever necessary. The teacher would come to them, too, if they wanted, and explain any problem until it was thoroughly understood. Then pupils would be given further exercises to work at alone. It was study in the truest sense of the word, and it meant there were no pupils just sitting inattentively while the teacher talked and explained.

The first grade pupils hadn't quite reached the stage of independent study, but even they were allowed to start with any subject they wanted.

Some copied letters of the alphabet, some drew pictures, some read books, and some even did calisthenics. The girl next to Totto-chan already knew all her alphabet and was writing it into her notebook. It was all so unfamiliar that Totto-chan was a bit nervous and unsure what to do.

Just then the boy sitting behind her got up and walked toward the blackboard with his notebook, apparently to consult the teacher. She sat at a desk beside the blackboard and was explaining something to another pupil. Totto-chan stopped looking around the room and, with her chin cupped in her hands, fixed her eyes on his back as he walked. The boy dragged his leg, and his whole body swayed dreadfully. Totto-chan wondered at first if he was doing it on purpose, but she soon realized the boy couldn't help it.

Totto-chan went on watching him as the boy came back to his desk. Their eyes met. The boy smiled. Totto-chan hurriedly smiled back. When he sat down at the desk behind her--it took him longer than other children to sit down--she turned around and asked, "Why do you walk like that?"
He replied quietly, with a gentle voice that sounded intelligent, "I had polio." "Polio?" Totto-chan repeated, never having heard the word before.
"Yes, polio," he whispered. "It's not only my leg, but my hand, too." He held it out. Totto-chan looked at his left hand. His long fingers were bent and looked as if they were stuck together.

“Can't they do anything about it?" she asked, concerned. He didn't reply, and Totto- chan became embarrassed, wishing she hadn't asked. But the boy said brightly, "My name's Yasuaki Yamamoto. What's yours?"

She was so glad to hear him speak in such a cheerful voice that she replied loudly, "I'm Totto-chan."

That's how Yasuaki Yamamoto and Totto-chan became friends.

The sun made it quite hot inside the train. Someone opened a window. The fresh spring breeze blew through the car and tossed the children's hair about with carefree abandon.

In this way Totto-chan's first day at Tomoe began.

Now it was time for "something from the ocean and something from the hills," the lunch hour Totto-chan had looked forward to so eagerly.

The headmaster had adopted the phrase to describe a balanced meal--the kind of food he expected you to bring for lunch in addition to your rice. Instead of the usual
"Train your children to eat everything," and "Please see that they bring a nutritiously
balanced lunch," this headmaster asked parents to include in their children's lunchboxes "something from the ocean and something from the hills."

"Something from the ocean" meant sea food-- things such as fish and tsukuda-ni (tiny crustaceans and the like boiled in soy sauce and sweet sake), while "something from the hills" meant food from the land--like vegetables, beef, pork, and chicken.

Mother was very impressed by this and thought that few headmasters were capable of expressing such an important rule so simply. Oddly enough, just having to choose from two categories made preparing lunch seem simpler. And besides, the headmaster pointed out that one did not have to think too hard or be extravagant to fulfill the two requirements. The land food could be just kinpira gobo (spicy burdock) or an omelette, and the sea food merely flakes of dried bonito. Or simpler still, you could have nori (a kind of seaweed) for "ocean" and a pickled plum for "hills."

Just as the day before, when Totto-chan had watched so enviously, the headmaster came and looked in all the lunchboxes.
"Have you something from the ocean and something from the hills?" he asked, checking each one. It was so exciting to discover what each had brought from the ocean and from the hills.

Sometimes a mother had been too busy and her child had only something from the hills, or only something from the ocean. But never mind. As the headmaster made his round of inspection, his wife followed him, wearing a cook's white apron and holding a pan in each hand. If the headmaster stopped in front of a pupil saying, "Ocean," she would dole out a couple of boiled chikuwa (fish rolls) from the "Ocean" saucepan,
and if the headmaster said, "Hills," out would come some chunks of soy-simmered potato from the "Hills" saucepan.

No one would have dreamed of saying, "I don't like fish rolls," any more than thinking what a fine lunch so-and-so has or what a miserable lunch poor so-and-so always brings. The children's only concern was whether they had satisfied the two requirements - the ocean and the hills--and if so their joy was complete and they were all in good spirits.

Beginning to understand what "something from the ocean and something from the hills" was all about, Totto-chan had doubts whether the lunch her mother had so hastily prepared that morning would be approved. But when she opened the lunchbox, she found such a marvelous lunch inside, it was all she could do to stop herself shouting, "Oh, goody, goody!"

Totto-chan's lunch contained bright yellow scrambled eggs, green peas, brown denbu, and pink naked cod roe. It was as colorful as a newer garden.

"How very pretty," said the headmaster.

Totto-chan was thrilled. "Mother's a very good cook," she said.

"She is, is she?" said the headmaster. Then he pointed to the denbu. "All right. What's this! Is it from the ocean or the hills?"

Totto-chan looked at it, wondering which was right. It was the color of earth, so maybe it was from the hills. But she couldn't be sure.

"I don't know," she said.

The headmaster then addressed the whole school, "Where does denbu come from, the ocean or the hills?"

After a pause, while they thought about it, some shouted, "Hills," and others shouted, "Ocean," but no one seemed to know for certain.

"All right. I’ll tell you," said the headmaster. “Denbu is from the ocean.” "Why?" asked a fat boy.
Standing in the middle of the circle of desks, the headmaster explained, “Denbu is made by scraping the flesh of cooked fish off the bones, lightly roasting and crushing it into fine pieces, which are then dried and flavored.”
"Oh!" said the children, impressed. Then someone asked if they could see Totto- chan's denbu.

"Certainly," said the headmaster, and the whole school trooped over to look at Totto- chan's denbu. There must have been children who knew what denbu was but whose interest had been aroused, as well as those who wanted to see if Totto-chan's denbu was any different from the kind they had at home. So many children sniffed at Totto- chan's denbu that she was afraid the bits might get blown away.

Totto-chan was a little nervous that first day at lunch, but it was fun. It was fascinating wondering what was sea food and what was land food, and she learned that denbu was made of fish, and Mother had remembered to include something from the ocean and something from the hills, so all in all everything had been all right, she thought contentedly.

And the next thing that made Totto-chan happy was that when she started to eat the lunch Mother had made, it was delicious.

Normally one starts a meal by saying, "Iradokimasu" (I gratefully partake), but another thing that was different at Tomoe Gakuen was that first of all everybody sang a song. The headmaster was a musician and he had made up a special "Song to Sing before Lunch." Actually, he just made up the words and set them to the tune of the well-known round "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." The words the headmaster made up went like this:

Chew, chew, chew it well, Everything you eat;
Chew it and chew it and chew it and chew it, Your rice and fish and meat!

It wasn't until they had finished singing this song that the children all said
"ltadakimasu."

The words fitted the tune of "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" so well that even years later many of the pupils firmly believed it had always been a song you sang before eating.

The headmaster may have made up the song because he had lost some of his teeth, but he was always telling the children to ear slowly and take plenty of time over meals while enjoying pleasant conversation, so it is more likely he made up this song to remind them of that.