Departures of note

Toshiko Takagi was a Japanese children's literature author born in 1932 in the Honjo district of Tokyo. As a child during World War II, she lost her mother and two younger sisters in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 1945, and her father was killed by machine-gun fire at Ninomiya Station just ten days before the war's end. These experiences shaped her life and work.

In 1977 she published her autobiographical novel "Garasu no Usagi" (The Glass Rabbit), which depicts a young girl surviving the devastation of war. The book became a bestseller with cumulative sales exceeding 2.4 million copies across editions, and was translated into seven languages including English and Chinese. It was adapted into a live-action film (1979), a television drama (1980), and an anime film (2005).

Takagi devoted much of her later life to peace activism, delivering over a thousand lectures across Japan on the horrors of war. She received the Ministry of Health and Welfare Children's Welfare Culture Encouragement Award (1978), the Japan Journalists Conference Encouragement Award (1979), and the Avon Women's Grand Prize (2005). She died of old age on August 8, 2026, at the age of 94.