To write about the school called Tomoe and Sosaku Kobayashi, the man who founded and ran it, is one of the things I have most wanted to do for a long time.
I have invented none of the episodes. They are all events that really happened and, thankfully, I have been able to remember quite a few of them. Besides wanting to write them down, I have been anxious to make amends for a broken pledge. As I have described in one of the chapters, as a child I made a solemn promise to Mr. Kobayashi that I would teach at Tomoe when I grew up. However, it was a promise I was not able to fulfill. Instead I have tried to reveal, to as many people as possible, what sort of man Mr. Kobayashi was, his great love for children, and how he set about educating them.
Mr. Kobayashi died in 1963. If he were alive today there would be much more he could have told me. Even as I write I realize how many episodes that just seem happy childhood memories to me were, in fact, activities carefully thought out by him to achieve certain results. “So that’s what Mr. Kobayashi must have had in mind,” I find myself thinking. Or, “Fancy him even thinking about that.” With each discovery I make, I am amazed—and deeply moved and grateful.
In my own case, I find it impossible to assess how much I have been sustained by the way he used to keep saying to me, “You’re really a good girl, you know.” Had I not entered Tomoe and had I never met Mr. Kobayashi, I would probably have been labeled “a bad girl,” becoming complex-ridden and confused.
Tomoe was destroyed by fire in the Tokyo air raids in 1945. Mr. Kobayashi had built the school with his own money, so reestablishing it took time. After the war, he started a kindergarten on the old site, while helping to establish what is now the Child Education Department of Kunitachi College of Music. He also taught eurythmics there and assisted in the establishment of Kunitachi Elementary School. He died, at the age of sixty-nine, before he could set up his ideal school once more.
Tomoe Gakuen was in southwest Tokyo, a three-minute walk from Jiyugaoka Station on the Toyoko Line. The site is now occupied by the Peacock supermarket and parking lot. I went there the other day out of sheer nostalgia, although I knew nothing was left of the school or its grounds. I drove slowly past the parking lot, where the railroad-car classrooms and playground used to be. The man in charge of the parking lot saw my car and called out, “You can’t come in, you can’t come in. We’re full!”
“I don’t want to park,” I felt like saying, “I’m just evoking memories.” But he would not have understood, so I went on. But a great sadness came over me and tears rolled down my cheeks as I sped away.
I am sure all over the world there are fine educators—people with high ideals and a great love for children—who dream of setting up ideal schools. And I know how difficult it must be to realize this dream. It took Mr. Kobayashi years and years of study before starting Tomoe in 1937 and it burned down in 1945, so its existence was very brief.
I like to believe that the period I was there was when Mr. Kobayashi’s enthusiasm was at its height and his schemes in full flower. But when I think how many children could have come under his care had there been no war, I am saddened at the waste.
I have tried to describe Mr. Kobayashi’s educational methods in this book. He believed all children are born with an innate good nature, which can be easily damaged by their environment and the wrong adult influences. His aim was to uncover their “good nature” and develop it, so that the children would grow into people with individuality.
Mr. Kobayashi valued naturalness and wanted to let children’s characters develop as naturally as possible. He loved nature, too. His younger daughter, Miyo-chan, told me her father used to take her for walks when she was small, saying, “Let’s go and look for the rhythms in nature.”
He would lead her to a large tree and show her how the leaves and branches swayed in the breeze; he would point out the relationship between the leaves, the branches, and the trunk; and how the swaying of the leaves differed according to whether the wind was strong or weak. They would stand still and observe things like that, and if there was no wind, they would wait patiently, with upturned faces, for the slightest zephyr. They observed not only the wind, but rivers, too. They used to go to the nearby Tama River and watch the water flowing. They never tired of doing things like that, she told me.
Readers may wonder how the authorities in wartime Japan allowed such an unconventional elementary school to exist, where studies were carried out in such an atmosphere of freedom. Mr. Kobayashi hated publicity, and even before the war did not allow photographs of the school or any publicity about its unconventionality. That may have been one reason this small school of under fifty pupils escaped notice and managed to continue. Another was that Mr. Kobayashi was highly regarded at the Ministry of Education as an educator of children.
Every November third—the day of those wonderful Sports Days of fond memory—the pupils of Tomoe, regardless of when they graduated, get together in a room in Kuhonbutsu Temple for a happy reunion. Although we are all in our forties now—many of us are nearing fifty—and have grown children of our own, we still call each other by our nicknames just as in the old days. These reunions are one of the many happy legacies Mr. Kobayashi left us.
It is true that I was expelled from my first elementary school. I do not remember much about that school—my mother told me about the street musicians and the desk. I found it hard to believe I had been expelled. Could I really have been as naughty as all that? However, five years ago I took part in a morning television show in which I was introduced to someone who had known me at that time. She turned out to be the homeroom teacher of the class next to mine. I was dumbfounded at what she told me.
“You were in the room right next to mine,” she said, “and when I had to go to the faculty room during class, I usually found you standing in the corridor for some misdemeanor. As I went past, you always stopped me and asked me why you’d been made to stand out there, and what you had done wrong. ‘Don’t you like street musicians?’ you asked me once. I never knew how to deal with you, so finally, even if I wanted to go to the faculty room I would peep out first, and if you were in the corridor I avoided going. Your homeroom teacher often talked about you to me in the faculty room. ‘I wonder why she’s like that,’ she would say. That’s why, in later years, when you started appearing on television, I recognized your name immediately. It was a long time ago, but I remember you distinctly when you were in first grade.”
Was I made to stand outside in the corridor? I hadn’t remembered that and was surprised. It was this youthful-looking, gray-haired teacher with a kindly face, who had taken the trouble to come to an early morning television show, who finally convinced me that I really had been expelled.
And here I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my mother for not having told me about it until after my twentieth birthday.
“Do you know why you changed elementary schools?” she asked me one day. When I said no, she went on, quite nonchalantly, “It was because you were expelled.”
She might have said at the time, “What’s going to become of you? You’ve already been expelled from one school. If they expel you from the next, where will you go?”