Our story begins with a train ride and a little girl. Totto-chan is a first-grade girl on her way to a new school. She's a lively, inquisitive child who talks a mile a minute. She doesn't know it, but she was recently expelled from her last school for being too disruptive. She and her mother are on their way to a new school, where her mother anxiously hopes she will be able to continue her education.
Tomoe Gakuen isn't a typical school. It's made up of a collection of old train cars in the forest, and it has about fifty students all together. Instead of a gate of stone or concrete pillars, Tomoe's students pass through a gate made of living trees. Instead of a stern-faced headmaster following a rigid rubric of Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmatic, Tomoe's principal is a jolly older man who lets children's natural inquisitiveness lead them to new discoveries. Students learn without realizing that they're learning, and the staff's role is to support the students' exploration rather than drill facts and figures into their heads.
Tomoe sounds like a dream school in some suburban paradise, but it was actually an experimental elementary school that the author, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi (Totto-chan), attended in the years leading up to World War II in Japan. Many of the students at Tomoe were children that wouldn't fit into the normal schools of the time for one reason or another. At a time when Japan promoted worship of the Emperor as a divine figure, encouraged cultural uniformity, and shunned the physically handicapped, the headmaster of Tomoe is a revolutionary figure who teaches children to embrace differences in culture, religion, and language, and who cared deeply for his physically handicapped students. Although World War II doesn't leave Tomoe untouched, the school stands as an oasis of idyllic calm amidst a raging sea of war and intolerance for the time that it existed. And, when the school was destroyed in a bombing during the war, Mr. Kobayashi watched his dream project burn and cheerfully planned to create a new and better school after the war.
The short chapters follow Totto-chan from first grade through about third grade. They tend to be rather calm and sometimes funny stories, but sometimes an element of drama slips in. Sprinkled amongst lighthearted chapters where children take walks to the local shrine on sunny afternoons or have a camp-out at the school to watch a new train car get added to the school grounds are somber moments where Totto-chan learns about mortality or when students have to say goodbye to a staff member being sent off to war. Totto-chan's family and school life is somewhat insulated from the harsher realities of WWII, so aside from the air raids and events in a few other chapters, Totto-chan and her fellow elementary students are relatively untouched by the war. I got the feeling that the headmaster was deliberately trying to protect his students from that reality for as long as he could and inoculating them against it through his unusual teaching methods.
I truly enjoyed this book. It was hard not to smile when I read about Totto-chan and her various adventures. In some ways, it resembles the popular slice-of-life manga Yotsuba&, but the humor is more subdued. Other episodes reminded me of Anne Shirley's adventures in Anne of Green Gables. In fact, I have a feeling that Totto-chan, Yotsuba, and Anne would probably get along like a house on fire.
I'd recommend this book for audiences of all ages. It'd be a perfectly appropriate story to read to children, especially if you are trying to instill the same values in them that Mr. Kobayashi was in his students. Adults will find Totto-chan familiar in her mischief and innocent exploration, and I think they'll enjoy watching her grow over the course of the book. Anyone considering a career in teaching would certainly benefit from reading about Tomoe and its effects on the students, even if modern education may not allow for a complete recreation of the school's methods.
A note on the title: "the little girl at the window" refers to a Japanese saying about people who don't fit in. They tend to stand apart, like people who tend to lurk on the edges of the room (by the windows, for instance), and don't belong to main mass in the middle. I find this kind of interesting, since a common anime trope is to have the main character's desk by the window, and they're usually the focus of a lot of unusual activities.
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