Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window
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Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window is a book written by Japanese television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi about her childhood at Tomoe, an alternative elementary school founded by educator Sosaku Kobayashi. Tomoe was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945.
Publishing History
Totto-chan was originally published in Japan as a series of articles in Kodansha's Young Woman magazine appearing from February 1979 through December 1980. The articles were then collected into a book, which made Japanese publishing history by selling 4,500,000 in a single year. The book has the ISBN 4-7700-1010-9 .
A translated English edition was published in America in 1982. That book has the ISBN 0-87011-537-5 .
There is also a bilingual collection of the "best of" some of the stories, ISBN 4770021275 .
Related Works
Kuroyanagi founded the Totto-chan Foundation, which professionally trains deaf actors to bring live theater to the deaf community.
In 2000, Kuroyanagi published her book Totto-Chan's Children: A Goodwill Journey to the Children of the World, about her travels around the world on her humanitarian mission.
An orchestral interpretation of the work was written by Japanese composer Akihiro Komori, which was released as a record.