Totto-chan: The Little Girl At The Window
(Tetsuko Kuroyanagi; Dorothy Britton)
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi writes about her childhood in a unique school in Japan.
Totto-chan is a hyperactive girl who is expelled from school in first grade for unruly behaviour. She joins a new school Tomoe Gakuen. This is a special school which has railway train cars as its classrooms.
Totto-chan is interviewed by the headmaster Sosaku Kobayashi before starting school. She launches into a long conversation which the headmaster listens patiently to for four hours.
The new school is a great place to study. The children can study anything they want, so that at any time different children are studying different subjects in the same class. They go for daily nature walks and plant their own vegetables in the garden.
At lunch time, the headmaster walks around to check that they have brought, in their lunchbox, "something from the mountain and something from the sea". They sing a little song daily before lunch to remind themselves to chew their food slowly and enjoy their food.
On Sports Day, the winners of the races bring home a cabbage or basket of potatoes instead of trophies as prizes so that their mothers can cook it for dinner. One of Totto-chan's classmates has very short legs. The headmaster specially designs the race such that the students have to climb many short steps, so that the disadvantaged pupil can win, and would not feel different from the other students. The headmaster encourages all the students to express themselves and tries to ensure that no child feels out of place and different from the others.
It is a story about a delightful school written in a simplistic way in the eyes of a child.
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