‘Totto-chan’: Book Review
A child’s viewpoint
When I retired from ‘active’ service, I conveyed to my friends that I didn’t want the usual ‘going-away’ presents that are traditionally given as ‘send-off’ gifts. I didn’t want gold, silver or jewellery, or ornate ‘show-pieces’, clothes, or electronic goods. I wanted books, I told them. I received 78 brand-new books when I left.
‘Totto-chan was one of them.
In 1981 was published a book that sold 4.5 million copies.
In its first year.
This was ‘Totto-chan The Little Girl at the Window’, written by Japanese television personality and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. Published originally as Madogiwa no Totto-chan, in 1981, it became an instant bestseller in Japan. The book, considered the author’s childhood memoir describes the unconventional education that Kuroyanagi received at Tomoe Gakuen, a Tokyo elementary school, founded by educator Sosaku Kobayashi during World War II.
So much for the facts.
The book is written from the point of view of a little six year old girl, Totto chan, who has been expelled from a regular, conventional school with its attendant insistence on ‘discipline’, because the child loves standing at the window, talking to strangers, inviting street musicians into the school premise, to sing for the students, and generally being the joyful self that every little six year old baby can be.
Perturbed, her mother seeks, and finds an unconventional school.
The ‘gates’ of the new school consisted of two short trees, that were growing. And the classrooms were six abandoned railroad cars. And when Totto-chan and her mother met the headmaster, the child asked the man, ‘spiritedly,’ “What are you, a schoolmaster, or a stationmaster?”
The child’s mother was embarrassed, but the headmaster offered the child a chair and told the mother she could go home. For the next four hours, the man listened to the child talk, without interrupting, and at the end of it, when she had no more left to say, he told her, “Well, now you are a pupil of this school.”
So begins a story so delightfully euphoric, you smile with alternate delight and tenderness. The headmaster, Sosaku Kobayashi, didn’t care a whit about the rules and regulations of conventional schools. At mealtimes, all the little benches and chairs were gathered together in a big circle and the headmaster insisted that every lunch box should contain ‘something from the mountains and something from the seas’, a way of saying that their lunches should contain both seafood, and vegetables or poultry etc.
If I begin quoting passages and remarks from the book, I might end up transcribing the whole book, and that would, spoil the book for a prospective reader.
This is a book about a child and children: and about the adults who can remember what it was like to be a child. When the children need to be taught the intricacies of farming, the headmaster gets in a farmer to teach them; they are taken to a place where each child is given a small patch of land, and the farmer, their teacher for the day, teaches them about weeding and hoeing, planting and harvesting. The children diligently take care of their ‘crops’ even after the lesson and remember forever the connection between what they eat and the earth they live on.
The book is elegant in its simplicity, like the Japanese themselves. There are no ‘alarums and excursions’, no ‘Hogwartish’ school of magic, no philosophical metaphors about life and learning like Baron de Saint Exupery’s ‘The Little Prince’ , no monsters, no fairies. But every line tugs at your heart. Every word calls up a childish memory. If you have a child in your home, growing up in front of your eyes, you can see her reflection in the words and deeds of Totto-chan.
Read the book to recall your childhood. Read the book to savour the sharpness of good writing. Read the book to teach your children, and yourself, that there was life even before the mobile and ‘Alexa’ and ‘Netflix’ came on the scene. Read the book to remember that a child needs time and space to be a child; and that rushing her from one tuition class to the next, one ‘music-lesson’, or ‘sports-coaching’ class to the next, doesn’t constitute childhood.
Read the book to remind yourself that the essence of life is joy.
