If Mother had spoken to me like that, how wretched and nervous I would have felt as I entered the gate of Tomoe Gakuen on my first day there. That gate with roots and those railroad-car classrooms would not have seemed nearly so delightful to me. How lucky I was to have a mother like mine.
With the war on, only a few photographs were taken at Tomoe. Among them the graduation photographs are the nicest. The graduating class usually had its photograph taken on the steps in front of the Assembly Hall, but when the graduates started lining up with shouts of, “Come on, get in the picture!” other children would want to get in it, too, so it is impossible now to tell which class was graduating. We have animated discussions on the subject at our reunions. Mr. Kobayashi never used to say anything on these picture-taking occasions. Perhaps he thought it was better to have a lively photograph of everyone in the school than a formal graduation picture. Looking at them now, these pictures are very representative of Tomoe.
There is much more I could have written about Tomoe. But I shall be content if I have made people realize how even a little girl like Totto-chan, given the right kind of adult influence, can become a person who is able to get along with others.
I am quite sure that if there were schools now like Tomoe, there would be less of the violence we hear so much of today and fewer school dropouts. At Tomoe nobody wanted to go home when school was over. And in the morning we could hardly wait to get there. It was that kind of school.
Sosaku Kobayashi, the man who had the inspiration and vision to set up this wonderful school, was born on June 18, 1893, in the country northwest of Tokyo. Nature and music were his passions, and as a child he would stand on the bank of the river near his home, with Mount Haruna in the distance, and pretend the gushing waters were an orchestra, which he would “conduct.”
He was the youngest son of six children in a rather poor farming family and had to work as an assistant schoolteacher after an elementary education. To obtain the necessary certificate to do it, however, was quite a feat for a boy that age, and it showed exceptional talent. Soon he got a position at an elementary school in Tokyo, and he combined teaching with music studies, which finally enabled him to carry out his cherished ambition and enter the Music Education Department of Japan’s foremost conservatory of music—now the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. On graduation, he became music instructor at Seikei Elementary School, founded by Haruji Nakamura, a wonderful man who believed a child’s elementary education was of the utmost importance. He kept classes small and advocated a sufficiently free curriculum to bring out the child’s individuality and promote self-respect. Study was done in the mornings. Afternoons were devoted to walks, plant collecting, sketching, singing, and listening to discourses by the headmaster. Mr. Kobayashi was greatly influenced by his methods and later instituted a similar kind of curriculum at Tomoe.
While teaching music there, Mr. Kobayashi wrote a children’s operetta for the students to perform. The operetta impressed the industrialist Baron Iwa-saki, whose family founded the giant business enterprise Mitsubishi. Baron Iwasaki was a patron of the arts—helping Kosçak Yamada, doyen of Japanese composers, as well as giving financial support to the school. The baron offered to send Mr. Kobayashi to Europe to study educational methods.
Mr. Kobayashi spent two years in Europe, from 1922 to 1924, visiting schools and studying eurythmies with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Paris. On his return, he established Seijo Kindergarten with another man. Mr. Kobayashi used to tell the kindergarten teachers not to try and fit the children into preconceived molds. “Leave them to nature,” he would say. “Don’t cramp their ambitions. Their dreams are bigger than yours.” There had never been a kindergarten like it in Japan.
In 1930, Mr. Kobayashi set off for Europe for a further year of study with Dalcroze, traveling around and making observations, and decided to start his own school on returning to Japan.
Besides starting Tomoe Gakuen in 1937, he also established the Japan Eurythmics Association. Most people remember him as the man who introduced eurythmies to Japan and for his work in connection with Kunitachi College of Music after the war. There are very few of us left who directly experienced his methods of teaching, and it is a tragedy that he died before he was able to establish another school like Tomoe. Even as it burned, he was already envisaging a better school. “What kind of school shall we build next?” he asked, in high spirits, undaunted by the commotion around him.
When I began writing this book, I was amazed to find that the producer of “Tetsuko’s Room,” my daily television interview program—a producer I had worked with for years—had been doing research on Mr. Kobayashi for a decade. He had never met the educator, but his interest was aroused by a woman who once played the piano for children’s eurythmics classes. “Children don’t walk like that, you know,” Mr. Kobayashi had said, correcting her tempo, when she first began. Here was a man who was so attuned to children that he knew how they breathed and how they moved. I am hoping Kazuhiko Sano, my producer, will write his book soon to tell the world a great deal more about this remarkable man.
Twenty years ago an enterprising young Kodansha editor noticed an essay I had written about Tomoe in a women’s magazine. He came to see me, armed with a great many pads of paper, asking me to expand the material into a book. I guiltily used the paper for something else, and the young man became a director before his idea materialized. But it was he, Katsuhisa Kato, who gave me the idea—and the confidence—to do it. Not having written much then, a whole book seemed daunting. In the end, I was induced to write a chapter at a time as a series of articles for Kodansha’s Young Woman magazine, which I did from February 1979 to December 1980.
Every month I would visit the Chihiro Iwasaki Museum of Picture Books in Shimo-shakuji, Nerima-ku, Tokyo, to select an illustration. Chihiro Iwasaki was a genius at depicting children, and I doubt if any artist anywhere in the world could draw children in as lively a way as she. She captured them in their myriad moods and attitudes and could differentiate between a baby of six months and one of nine. I cannot tell you how happy I am to have been able to use her drawings for my book. It is quite uncanny how well they fit my narrative. She died in 1974, but people constantly ask me whether I started writing my book while she was still alive, which shows how true to life her paintings are and the tremendous variety of ways in which she depicted children.
Chihiro Iwasaki left nearly seven thousand pictures, and I was privileged to see a great many of her original paintings through the kindness of her son, who is assistant curator of the museum, and his wife. I extend my gratitude to the artist’s husband for permission to reproduce her work. I am also grateful to playwright Tadasu Iizawa, curator of the museum, of which I am now a trustee, who kept urging me to start writing when I procrastinated.
Miyo-chan and all my Tomoe friends were naturally a tremendous help. Heartfelt thanks, too, to my editor of the Japanese edition, Keiko Iwamoto, who kept saying, “We must make this a really splendid book!”
I got the idea for the Japanese title from an expression popular a few years ago that referred to people being “over by the window,” meaning they were on the fringe or out in the cold. Although I used to stand at the window out of choice, hoping to see the street musicians, I truly felt “over by the window” at that first school—alienated and very much out in the cold. The title has these overtones, as well as one more—the window of happiness that finally opened for me at Tomoe.
Tomoe is no longer. But if it lives for a little while in your imagination as you read this book, nothing could give me greater joy.