Totto-Chan, the Little Girl at the Window (7 page)

Just then, a boy with a white cloth over his head came through the gate crying, accompanied by a teacher. He was one of the ghosts and had been crouching in the graveyard the whole time, but nobody had come and he got more and more scared and finally went outside and was found crying in the road by the patrolling teacher who brought him back. While they were all trying to cheer the boy up, a second
ghost came back crying with another boy who was also crying. The one who was the ghost had also been hiding in the graveyard and when he heard someone running toward it, he leaped out to try and scare him and they collided head-on. Hurt, and frightened to death, the two of them came running back together. It was so funny, and with the great relief that came after being so scared, the children laughed their heads off. The ghosts laughed and cried at the same time. Soon one of Totto-chan's classmates, whose surname was Migita, arrived back. He was wearing a ghost's hood made of newspaper and he was furious because nobody had come into the graveyard.

"I've been waiting there all this time," he complained, scratching the mosquito bites on his arms and less.

"A ghost's been bitten by mosquitoes," someone said, and everyone began laughing again.
"Well; I'd better go and bring back the rest of the ghosts," said Mr. Maruyama, the fifth grade home-room teacher, setting off. He rounded up ghosts he found standing bewildered under street lights, and ghosts who had been so frightened they had gone home. He brought them all back to the school.

After that night Tomoe students weren't frightened of ghosts any more. For, after all, even ghosts themselves get frightened, don't they?

Totto-chan walked sedately. Rocky walked sedately, too, looking up at Totto-chan from time to time. That could only mean one thing: they were on their way to peek in at Daddy's rehearsal hall. Normally, Totto-chan would be running as fast as she could, or walking this way and that looking for something he had dropped, or going across other people's gardens, one after the other, ducking under their fences.

Daddy's rehearsal hall was about a five-minute walk from their house. He was the concertmaster of an orchestra, and being a concertmaster meant he played the violin. Once when she was taken to a concert, what had intrigued Totto-chan was that after the people had all finished clapping, the perspiring conductor turned toward the audience, got down from his podium, and shook hands with Daddy who had been playing the violin, Then Daddy stood up, and all the rest of the orchestra stood up, tool

"Why did they shake hands?" Totto-chan had whispered.

"The conductor wants to thank the orchestra for having played so well, so he shook hands with Daddy as the representative of the orchestra as a way of saying thank you," explained Mother.

The reason Totto-chan liked going to the rehearsal hall was that, unlike school, where there were mostly children, here they were all grown-ups, and they played all sorts of instruments. Besides, the conductor, Mr. Rosenstock, spoke such funny Japanese.

Josef Rosenstock, Daddy had told her, was a very famous conductor in Europe, but a man called Hitler was starting to do terrible things there, so Mr. Rosenstock had to escape and come all the way to Japan in order to continue to make music. Daddy said he greatly admired Mr. Rosenstock. Totto-chan didn't understand the world situation, but just at that time Hitler had started persecuting Jews. If it hadn't been for that, Rosenstock would never have come to Japan, and the orchestra that composer Koscak Yamada had founded would probably never have made such progress in the short time it did, through the efforts of this conductor of international standing. Rosenstock demanded of the orchestra the same level of performance he would have expected from a first-class orchestra in Europe. That's why Rosenstock always wept at the end of rehearsals.

"I try so hard and you don't respond."

Hideo Saito, the cellist, who used to conduct while Rosenstock was resting, spoke the best German and would reply for them all, "We are doing the best we can. Our technique is still not good enough. I assure you our failure is not deliberate."

The intricacies of the situation escaped her, but sometimes Mr. Rosenstock would get so red in the face it seemed as if steam should be coming out of his head, and he began shouting in German. At times like that, Totto-chan would retire from her favorite window where she had been watching--chin in hands--and would crouch on the ground with Rocky, hardly daring to breathe, and wait for the music to begin again.

But normally Mr. Rosenstock was very nice and his Japanese was quite amusing. "Very good, Kuroyanagi-san," he would say with a funny accent when they had
played well. Or, "Wonderful!"

Totto-chan had never been inside the rehearsal hall. She liked to peek in at the window and listen to the music. So when they stopped for a break and the musicians came outside to have a smoke, Daddy often found her there.

"Oh, there you are, Totsky!" he would say.

If Mr. Rosenstock spotted her he'd say, “Good morning" or "Good day" in his funny accent, and although she was big now, he would pick her up as he did when she was little and put his cheek against hers. It embarrassed her a bit, but she liked Mr. Rosenstock. He wore glasses with thin silver rims and had a large nose and was not very tall. But he had a fine handsome face that you could immediately recognize as an artist's.

Totto-chan liked the rehearsal hall. It was rather Western in style, and a bit dilapidated.

The wind that blew from Senzoku Pond carried the sound of the music far beyond the rehearsal hall. Sometimes the call of the goldfish (kingyo) vendor would blend with the music:

kin-gyo ee kin-gyo

Summer vacation came to an end, and the day of the trip to the hot spring resort finally arrived. It was considered by the students to be Tomoe's main event. Not many things surprised Mother, but when Totto-chan came home from school one day and asked, "May I go on the hot spring trip with the others?" she was flabbergasted. She had heard of old people visiting hot springs in groups but not first graders. But after she read the headmaster's letter carefully, she thought it was an excellent idea and was filled with admiration for his plan. The trip was to be a "Seaside School" at a place called Toi on the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka. There was a hot spring right in the sea, where the children could both swim and take hot baths. The trip would last three days and two nights. The father of one of the Tomoe students had a vacation home there, where all fifty of the Tomoe students from first through sixth grades could stay. Mother, of course, agreed.

The Tomoe students assembled at the school on the appointed day before setting off.

"Now then," said the headmaster when they were all together. "We're traveling by train and by ship, and I don't want any of you to get lost. Do you understand! All right, off we go!"

That was the only instruction he gave, yet when they got on the Toyoko train at Jiyugaoka, the children were amazingly well behaved. Nobody ran up and down the cars, and the only talking was done quietly among those sitting next to each other.

The Tomoe pupils had never once been told they should get in line and walk properly and keep quiet on the train and not drop litter on the floor when they ate their food. Their daily school life had somehow instilled into them that they mustn't push people smaller or weaker than themselves; that unruly behavior was something to be ashamed of; that whenever they came across litter they should pick it up; and that they should try not to do anything that annoyed or disturbed others. Strangest of all was that Totto-chan, who only a few months before had been upsetting her whole school by talking to street musicians out of the window in the middle of class, stayed at her desk and did her lessons properly from the very day she started at Tomoe. If any of the teachers from the other school could have seen her now, sitting properly with the others in the train, they would have said, "It must be someone else!"

At Numazu they embarked on a ship that was just like what they had all dreamed about. It wasn't a big ship, but they were all so excited that they inspected every corner of the deck, feeling this or hanging from that. When it finally sailed, the children waved to the townsfolk on the pier. They hadn't gone far before it started to rain, however, and they had to go inside. Soon the sea became very rough. Totto- chan began to feel ill, as did some others. But just then, one of the older boys got up and stood amidships, pretending to be a stabilizer. When the ship rolled he would run to one side, saying "Oops!" Then he would run the other way with another "Oops!" It was so funny the children couldn't help laughing even though they felt so seasick, and they were still laughing when the ship arrived at Toi. The curious thing was that after they disembarked, the poor "Oops" boy began to feel sick just when everyone else had recovered and was feeling fine!

Toi Spa was in a quiet, beautiful village on the sea surrounded by wooded hills. After a short rest the teachers took the children down to the sea. It wasn't like the
swimming pool at school so they wore their swimsuits.

The hot spring in the sea was most unusual. It was not enclosed so there was no line to set off the hot spring from the rest of the sea. If you crouched down where you were told was the hot spring, the hot water came up to your neck and it felt lovely, just like being in a hot bath. If you wanted to go into the sea from the hot spring, all you had to do was move about fifteen feet sideways, and the water gradually got cooler. The further you went, the colder it got, and you knew you were in the sea. So, after you had been swimming about in the sea and began to feel cold, all you had to do was to hurry back to the hot spring and have a hot bath right up to your neck! I was just like at home. And it looked so funny. While the bathing-capped children were swimming about normally in the regular sea, the ones in the hot spring part were relaxing in a circle chatting just as if they were in a bath. Anyone watching would have thought, "Why even youngsters act just like old people when they get in a hot spring bath."
In those days the seashore was so deserted it was like being on their own private beach, and the children enjoyed this unusual hot spring sea-bathing to the utmost. When they got back to the house in the evening after staying in the water so long, their fingers were a mass of wrinkles.

Each night, once they were tucked into their quilts, the children took turns telling ghost stories. Totto-chan and the other first graders got so frightened they cried. But in spite of their tears, they would ask, "And then what happened?"

Unlike camping inside the school and the Bravery Test, the three-day stay at Toi Spa was a real-life experience. For example, they were sent in turns to buy vegetables and fish for dinner, and when strangers asked them what school they went to and where they were from, they had to answer politely. Some of the children nearly got lost in the woods. Others swam so far they couldn't get back and had everyone worried. Others cut their feet on broken glass on the beach. In each case everyone had to do their best to help.

But mostly it was all fun. There was a forest full of cicadas and a shop where you could buy popsicles. And they met a man on the beach who was building a big wooden boat all by himself. It was already boat-shaped, and the first thing each morning they ran down to the beach to see how much more he had done. The man gave Totto-chan a very long and curly wood shaving.

"How about a souvenir photograph?" asked the headmaster on the day they were to leave. They had never had a photograph taken of them all together and the children were excited at the idea. But no sooner was the teacher ready with her camera than someone had gone to the toilet; then someone else had his gym shoes on the wrong feet and had to change them around. When the teacher finally said, "Is everyone ready?" one or two of the children were lying on the ground, having become tired of holding their poses so long. The whole process took a very long time.

But that photograph, with the sea in the background and each child posing according to his or her fancy, became a treasured possession of each of them. One look at it and memories would flood back -- the boat trip, the hot spring, the ghost stories, and the "Oops" boy. Totto-chan never forgot that first happy summer vacation.

Those were the days when you could still find crayfish in the pond near their house in Tokyo, and the garbage man's cart was pulled by a great big ox.

After summer vacation was over, the second semester began, for in Japan the school year starts in April. In addition to the children in her own class, Totto-chan had made friends with all the older boys and girls, thanks to the various gatherings during summer vacation. And she grew to like Tomoe Gakuen even more.

Besides the fact that classes at Tomoe were different from those at ordinary schools, a great deal more time was devoted to music. There were all sorts of music lessons, which included a daily period of eurythmics--a special kind of rhythmic education devised by a Swiss music teacher and composer, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. His studies first became known about 1904. His system was rapidly adopted all over Europe and
America and training and research institutes sprang up everywhere. Here is the story of how Dalcroze's eurhythmics came to be adopted at Tomoe.

Before starting Tomoe Gakuen, the headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi, went to Europe to see how children were being educated abroad. He visited a great many elementary schools and talked to educators. In Paris, he met Dalcroze, a fine composer as well as an educator.

Dalcroze had spent a long rime wondering how children could be taught to hear and feel music in their minds lather than just with their ears; how to make them feel music as a thing of movement rather than a dull, lifeless subject; how to awaken a child's sensitivity.

Eventually, after watching the way children jumped and skipped and romped about, he hit on the idea of creating rhythmic exercises, which he called eurythmics.

Kobayashi attended the Dalcroze school in Paris for over a year and learned this system thoroughly. Many Japanese have been influenced by Dalcroze --the composer Koscak Yamada; the originator o modern dance in Japan, Baku Ishii; the Kabuki actor