Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
By Brian Zhang, Intern 2026
The memorable stories we tell ourselves and others are comprised of more than the plotline of a dauntless odyssey across the seas, of a secluded heroine destined to overcome her circumstances, of a carefully crafted melodrama over the scienter of a convicted criminal, and of other multivariate tales. Rather, the memorable stories that cling to our selves long after their production dates speak to those intangible yet constant traits of the human condition: empathy, self-realization, sacrifice, and other deeply felt emotions. Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, whose self-biographical books you may have read, or whose childhood you may have seen in the animated biopic Totto-Chan, reminds us that a life can be viewed as a series of precious stories and moments, and oh, what a movie that can be.
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, also known as Totto-chan as a child, was born in Tokyo on August 9th, 1933, and her ballad begins in a household built around music. Her father Moritsuna (1908-1983), a violinist and concertmaster for the prewar forerunner of the NHK Symphony Orchestra, met her mother Cho (1910-2006) at Toyo Conservatory of Music during the year-end performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. The year before she began school, Kuroyanagi contracted tuberculosis coxitis and was warned she might need to use crutches throughout her life. Bedridden with long hospital stays, Kuroyanagi read books to pass the time. She later said that her love for reading traces back to these extended hospitalizations, since those books were able to show her worlds she did not know and feelings she had never had felt. Each night her father also read her novels such as the Italian Cuore. He tried his best, but because she thought he was not particularly a good reader, she decided that “when she got older, she would become a wonderful storyteller so she could read bedtime stories to her own children.”
As innocent as Kuroyanagi may sound from these depictions, in fact, she was quite the troublemaker at her first school. Almost certainly around 1939, after her teachers complained over her raucous behavior, Kuroyanagi was expelled from her elementary school, though she was unaware of it at the time. This expulsion led to her highly formative years at Tomoe Gakuen near Jiyugaoka Station, an experimental school founded by Sosaku Kobayashi who believed that wrong environments and adverse adult influences damaged a child’s immanent good nature. Kuroyanagi recalls her time at the school as the most thrilling period in her life and the education she acquired there as indispensable to who she is today. The classes were fairly small, conducted in six disused railroad cars, and housed fewer than fifty pupils. Many colorful episodes of her childhood occurred at this school, a full account of which you may read in her first Totto-Chan book. Five notable stories serve to show the full extent of young Kuroyanagi’s soul (and Kobayashi’s kindness):
(1) Kuroyanagi had a habit of peering down the toilet after using it, and in those days, toilets really meant cesspools with no flush. She unfortunately dropped her purse, a lovely red, yellow, and green taffeta with a little silver Scotch terrier on the flap, down the hole, and instead of crying or resigning herself, she found a long-handled wooden ladle from the janitor’s shed in order to excavate and recover her belonging. Kobayashi walked past during the operation, witnessed her odorous mission, and asked what she was doing. Kuroyanagi briefed him on the situation, and Kobayashi simply replied by asking her to put the excavated material back after she was finished. Kuroyanagi never found her purse that day, but this story of being allowed to be trusted and heard stayed with her forever.
The other episodes require less explication. (2) Kuroyanagi hauled a classmate disabled with polio up her favorite tree, where they talked about the newly invented television in America. (3) After watching deaf children sign to each other at Jiyugaoka Station, she promised herself that someday she would also be able to use sign language. (4) She vividly remembers her father refusing to play wartime songs at a munitions factory in exchange for food: “I don’t want to play that sort of thing on my violin.” (5) She vowed with pinky-promises to teach at Tomoe Gakuen in the future.
That last promise never came to fruition; Tomoe burned in a night air raid in 1945. Partly to make amends for that broken promise, Kuroyanagi decided to write the first Totto-Chan.
Kuroyanagi and her family crashed into the dire wartime staccato, which her second Totto-Chan recalls. Hunger struck first. A day’s meal initially consisted of fifteen soybeans roasted in a pot and later turned into noodles boiled with seaside kelp as the war dragged on. Guilt also struck. Kuroyanagi recounts accepting a dried-squid treat in exchange for cheering and waving a flag to send off soldiers, even skipping class in order to do so. By cheering only to get squid, she laments her betrayal to the soldiers, many of whom died believing they were protecting children like her, and feels “war responsibility” and regret over it. The family began disintegrating in 1944 as well: her sister Mari was born that April, but one of her brothers died of sepsis in May. Her father was forced into conscription in late autumn and placed into the First Infantry Regiment marching into North China. Air raids in 1945 added fear to hunger, and before she knew it, she found herself on a train alone to northeastern Japan. She was separated from her mother at Ueno Station but found her a day later at Shiriuchi (now Hachinohe) in Aomori. They settled in Suwanotaira, in the Sannohe district, with help from a farmer named Numahata, whom the family had met on a train before the Pacific War.
These episodes and more can be read in greater detail in Kuroyanagi’s second Totto-Chan memoir, including the stories of their survival, livelihoods, daily happenings, and worries. These stories include her life in a converted apple hut, bartering for fish at Hachinohe port to cure Kuroyanagi’s boils, drawing pictures in order to win friends, almost getting run over by an unscheduled train, and more. She returned to Tokyo in 1946, more than a year after their resettlement into Aomori, attended St. Hilda's School, a missionary girls’ school, and later entered Toyo Conservatory to pursue becoming an opera singer. The film Tosca had persuaded her to do so, but as graduation neared, a puppet production of The Snow Queen gave her the resolve to “become a mother who reads splendid bedtime stories!” That same day she opened the newspaper and saw NHK's call for television performers.
Kuroyanagi went on to have a very successful career as one of NHK’s first television actresses despite hardships in her career early on. Her break came through the children's radio drama Yanbo, Ninbo, Tonbo, which ran from April 1954 to March 1957. The show’s playwright Tadasu Iizawa told her she had been cast for the very way she spoke–“stay just the way you are”–redolent of Kobayashi's refrain at Tomoe. She eventually left NHK for the Naomi Yoshida Agency and moved toward the stage. That path ran through the musical Scarlett, which opened at the Imperial Theatre at New Year 1970 under the Broadway director Joe Layton. In October 1971, in spite of being at the crescendo of her career, Kuroyanagi stopped working to study acting in New York due to insecurity about her acting. Evelyn Russell, the wife of Scarlett's director, urged her to study with the Broadway teacher Mary Tarcai. While in New York, Kuroyanagi saw a Broadway performance by a deaf theater troupe, an experience that went on to profoundly impact her.
After a little over a year, she returned to Japan and began hosting Tetsuko’s Room, a daily interview program that has run since February 1976 and turned fifty in February 2026. Guinness certifies Kuroyanagi for the most TV talk show episodes hosted by the same presenter: 12,100 as of September 2023. Her motivation to continue hosting on television goes back to her NHK days, to a former NBC producer advising the network, Ted Agretti, and his belief that television could contribute to lasting peace. Kuroyanagi absorbed this modus operandi and named that lecture as one reason she has stayed in television so long. Every year near the anniversary of the end of the war, she asks her guests on Tetsuko's Room for their war experiences, “for fear that if I didn't ask them when I had the chance, their stories might be lost forever.”
Kuroyanagi’s story up to this point features a woman who is sensitive to the world around her, generous in spirit, willing to listen to other people’s music and regales, and indomitably wonderful and unique. This is also the pivot when her storytelling turns directly into philanthropy. Her first Totto-Chan, published in 1981, paid through its royalties for what she called “Japan's first professional theater of the deaf.” The full title (Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window) borrows an expression, popular a few years earlier, for people sidelined “over by the window” (madogiwa-zoku, 窓際族). That was how she initially felt at her first school, but that window gradually turned into the “the window of happiness that finally opened for me at Tomoe.” The book became a classic bestseller, and owing to its affective potency, many heartfelt letters addressed to Kuroyanagi flew in from various countries.
The Totto Foundation was founded on the book's royalties: a founding committee on March 5, 1981; authorization on December 28, 1981; formal establishment on January 11, 1982; and the launch of its deaf-theater program on March 31, 1982. Today the foundation runs the Japan Theatre of the Deaf and Totto Bunkakan, a work-support center for people with disabilities completed in 1987. She has brought in actors from the U.S. National Theatre of the Deaf to several Japanese cities and joined them onstage; her role included translating American Sign Language into Japanese Sign Language. She also has signed short messages to deaf viewers on television.
Her charity and mission could not be constrained to only Japan, and in 1984, UNICEF appointed her a Goodwill Ambassador, the first from Asia and now its longest-serving one. Two accounts explain the appointment. In UNICEF's version, then Executive Director James P. Grant chose her for her love of children and her work with people with disabilities and for the environment. In Kuroyanagi’s account, the first Totto-Chan opened the door: Sadako Ogata handed her story to UNICEF's executive director, who then concluded that its author understood children. Whatever the case, her reason for saying yes reaches back to her own childhood. From 1949, UNICEF distributed powdered skim milk through school lunches to Japan’s starving children, and in remembering that UNICEF fed children without distinguishing enemy from ally, Kuroyanagi unhesitatingly accepted the ambassadorship. She simply never wants children to live through what she lived through in the war again
Her first mission to Tanzania in August 1984 proved her destiny. In village after village, she thought the local chiefs were invoking her sobriquet “Totto” as they gathered people, but she later learned that “mtoto,” which sounds similar to Totto, means “child” in Swahili. Over the years, the scale of her work became undeniable. Kuroyanagi has visited nearly forty countries and territories since 1984 (most recently Lebanon in 2019), filmed her own television reports on her missions, and fundraised about US$55.5 million for UNICEF programs. After her first visit to southern Sudan in 1993, she led a fundraising appeal in Japan and ultimately donated US$300,000 for a trauma-care center for children. The eponymous Totto-chan Centre was subsequently founded in 1996. In 2000, she became the first recipient of UNICEF's Leadership Award for Children and recorded her missionary experiences in Totto-chan's Children: A Goodwill Journey to the Children of the World.
Kuroyanagi’s story resonated globally, and her achievements were recognized domestically. She received the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 2003, was selected as a Person of Cultural Merit in 2015, and was inducted into the Japan Art Academy in 2023. She now hopes she can keep Tetsuko’s Room running until she reaches one hundred years old. Over the long history of her sterling life, Kuroyanagi’s stories have reached all corners of the Earth. Regardless of the fame, she continues her pursuit in raising awareness for misfortunate children in need, such as those suffering in Ukraine, and her fight for every child to be free from hardships and restraints. Although she was never able to teach at Tomoe or become a mother who reads splendid bedtime stories, she has become a transcendent maternal figure to countless others. “Oh well, it was for the best,” she reflects, as her stories reach her children from across communities.
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