otto-chan's real name was Tetsuko. Before she was born all Mother's and Daddy's friends and relatives said they were sure the baby would be a boy. It was their first child, and they believed it. So they decided to name the baby Toru. When the baby turned out to be a girl, they were a bit disappointed, but they both liked the Chinese character for toru (which means to penetrate, to carry far, to be clear and resonant, as a voice) so they made it into a girl's name by using its Chinese-derived pronunciation tetsu and adding the suffix ko often used for girls' names.

So everybody called her Tetsuko-chan (chan is the familiar form of the san used after a person's name). But it didn't sound quite like Tetsuko-chan to her. Whenever anyone asked her what her name was, she would answer, "Totto-chan." She even thought that chan was part of her name, too.

Daddy sometimes called her Totsky, as if she were a boy. He'd say, "Totsky! Come and help me take these bugs off the roses!" But except for Daddy and Rocky everybody else called her Totto-chan, and although she wrote her name as Tetsuko in her notebooks at school, she still went on thinking of herself as Totto-chan.