This isn’t a book review: the story I’m writing about has too many personal parallels for me to consider reviewing it. Instead, I’m going to write about what it was like to read a book about a girl like me.
Towards the end of high school, I came across a children’s book called Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window. It turned out to be an autobiography of sorts, covering the early life of a little girl named Totto-chan who went to a very unconventional elementary school in Tokyo during World War 2.
As someone who was in an unconventional K-12 school at the time, I immediately fell in love with Tomoe Gakuen (Tomoe School). At the same time Totto-chan and her classmates grew to love nature and look at the world in a very different way, I began to unlearn the lessons I’d been taught growing up and began to love and respect nature too.
The book I read was a translation of the original Japanese version, which had the title Madogiwa no Totto-chan (lit. Totto-chan at the window). It was only recently that I found a copy of the English translation again, and read an older, wiser Totto-chan’s thoughts on why she chose that title. She mentioned that the term ‘at the window’ refers to someone who’s on the edge, who is left out. Before Tomoe Gakuen, Totto-chan was expelled from her previous elementary school in the first grade, and in that school, felt very much at the window: alone, misunderstood, and on the edge. At her new school, the principal, a renowned educator named Sosaku Kobayashi, listened to anything she had to say, without casting judgement or condemning her; after all, she was a child of six or seven, and always had the best of intentions. Little Totto-chan saw her classmates enter the school with their differences, handicaps, and worries, doing their best to make the most of each day at Tomoe and she learned from them too, not just her teachers. The end of the book shows us a stronger, more confident Totto-chan who, despite the growing hate in the world, still managed to help preserve some spheres of innocence and joy, and continued to do so in her adult years. As of today, she’s a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, has hosted a popular television talk show, and has even set up a foundation to train deaf actors.
Re-reading Totto-chan’s story in February 2017 made me realize that I, too, was once a girl at the window before I entered a new school, followed by a new university. I was what people considered ‘odd’, but I just had a different way of looking at the world. When I was sixteen, I changed schools, not because I’d been expelled, but because I knew the environment I was studying in was only making my personal situation worse. Tomoe was a school in the midst of nature, made out of old train cars, while my new school was hidden in a valley, more forest than anything else.
A new environment that allowed me to grow and learn more freely was probably my saving grace. I began to love nature too and became more accepting of differences. It’s given me hope that today, even with all the politics and hatred spreading around us, there is still someone out there who can preserve and spread happiness and hope and that I could be that person too.
Totto-chan’s principal, Sosaku Kobayashi, listened to the students without judging, and was an inspiration to staff and pupils alike in the way he treated mistakes and achievements. He understood how people grow and learn, and gave everyone the chance to realize their full potential all year: whether it was sports day, or a field trip, or the way teachers treated their students.
My new teachers were following the same model: punishments don’t always work, especially when the child in question hasn’t done anything wrong, but just been a little curious or made a small mistake. All it did in my last school was stifle creativity and create fear and anxiety among students that lasts even today. But in my new school, that wasn’t the case. I was encouraged by my teachers to try out new things and accept mistakes as something to learn from, not the end of the world. Although I triple-checked everything out of habit in the two years I spent at that school, this habit reduced as the years passed, and I don’t always live in fear of making a mistake and destroying the world.
One day, Totto-chan ran to the new train car which formed the library, just as I ran to the building in which the library was located every day. We explored books and lost ourselves in multiple worlds as the days passed in the unconventional schools we studied in. And once, when I slipped behind a shelf to find a new book, I found one in the section near a window: the English translation of Madogiwa no Totto-chan.
Edited by: Priyanka Shankar