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Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
🇯🇵Japan
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi is a Japanese actress, television presenter, and author whose memoir Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window (1981) became the bestselling Japanese book of the twentieth century in Japan — a warm, luminous account of her unconventional childhood education at the Tomoe Gakuen school founded by the educator Sosaku Kobayashi, where children were encouraged to learn through their own interests and joyful curiosity.
The book, beloved by generations of Japanese readers and widely translated, is both a portrait of a vanished world (the school was destroyed in the war) and an implicit argument about the nature of childhood and education. Kuroyanagi also served for many years as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
