Pathway to Japanese Literature

Now, let’s clear away the clutter on the desk a bit,

(—At least put the cup in front of window frame.)

Let’s spread out the Moscow map.

Twisting in great undulations from the city’s west towards the east and south is the Moscow River, known to all.
On the northern bank where that river forks into two branches stands the Kremlin—an enclosure surrounded by irregular triangular walls whose name resonates with a certain awe among the bourgeoisie and proletariat across the world.

Lately, the green grass within the walls had grown thick, and the Byzantine-style antique green and brown spires presented quite a picturesque view. The Red Flags fluttering on the dome, surrounded merely by antique buildings, appeared all the more vibrant, brimming with summer's joy beneath gleaming white clouds.

Where the Kremlin walls end, there’s a narrow street—

Ah!
This was the place—the Labour Palace, that was.

If one took tram A around the Moscow riverbank, there would have been a remarkably impressive white building on the left.
That was the Labour Palace.
Within this dynamic grand edifice—solidly constructed with the rational brightness of organization and planning itself—resided the complete organizational network of socialist labor.

From the day before May Day—the festival for all Soviet workers—Moscow City had prohibited the sale of all alcoholic beverages.

On the day itself, there were no trams in the entire city.
There were no buses either.
Amidst the Red Flags and festive decorations, the footsteps of hundreds of thousands of laborers resounded.
The lofty strains of The Internationale and the roar of airplanes flying in formation while scattering celebration from above filled Moscow City.

Red Square at nearly 1 AM was a blaze of illuminations and crowds.
The soil of Red Square, trampled beneath countless human feet from morning till evening, had turned soft and crumbly.
Even in the night air—where its lingering heat and unrelenting excitement had yet to fully subside—the overflow from temporary drinking water facilities' fountains created small patches of mud here and there.
Fresh crowds—children and elderly companions in tow—trudged onward toward the riverbanks, ever toward the riverbanks.

Before the State Department Store stretched a flood of red placards.

—To the victims of imperialism and fascism—greetings from your class brothers in the Proletariat!

And again:

—Long live the World Revolution‼

The Lenin Mausoleum was under repair.
It now gave the impression of "Lenin's absence".
The wide boarding above was covered with a vivid panorama of workers and peasants engaged in production, and the red illuminations could be read even by the crowds walking on this side's pavement.

Raise High the Banner of Leninism!

Complete the Five-Year Plan in Four Years!

How profoundly moving was the effect when streaming Red Flags caught the intense nocturnal backlighting.
The old execution grounds were adorned on that 1930 May Day night with such unforgettable beauty of Red Flags and the vigorous crowds of workers.
The large horns of radio loudspeakers blared out lively marches across the square, and the entire panorama was red!
Red!

The crowd that had formed a black wall and been pushed to the riverbank momentarily caught its breath at the foot of Kamenny Bridge. The river breeze was cool. In the distant night sky, the luminous structure burning like a house—the Labour Palace’s illuminations—melted into the river’s darkened surface. The Kremlin’s long outer walls lay in unlit shadow, rendering that remote glow indescribably radiant. Multicolored illuminations at the Moscow City Power Plant on the opposite bank made the waters of the Moscow River—which lay sullenly dark for three hundred and sixty-four days a year—shimmer with fractured light.

The Moscow crowds were unaffected by the illuminations.
From within the crowd came satisfied laughter; some leaned against the bridge railings just as they were.
Others made their way further along the dark Kremlin outer walls toward the Labour Palace.

Sovkino had lit spotlights and was filming the Labour Palace and the crowd heading toward it.
Beneath the bridge, two boats carrying young women were rowing slowly only where the illuminations melted into the surroundings.

The recent two years had changed everything.
The Soviet Five-Year Plan for production advancement—along with its 110% total production expansion plan—had bravely wrenched the entire life front toward socialist reconstruction.—

But that was a story for another time; we returned to the map. We wanted to find Moscow City’s ring-shaped Boulevard.

One of them was this—a ring-shaped line resembling a large circle drawn with a slightly opened compass centered on the Kremlin. This was the outer tree-lined boulevard; if one continued tightening the aperture [of a compass], yet another encircled the Kremlin in a circular—yes! This was the inner tree-lined avenue.

There existed an expression known as 'the Boulevard Newspaper.'

A few years ago, an unfortunate Japanese naval attaché stationed in Moscow caused some personal incident due to a nervous disorder. A Moscow newspaper wrote about it in its society section. The naval attaché, driven by an obsessive fear that Japanese newspapers would soon follow suit and that his honor would thereby be lost, ended his life through the traditional samurai method. One of the officials at that time expressed through diplomatic phrasing what seemed like characteristically European surprise regarding the incident: “We’ve never so much as glanced at those Boulevard Newspapers.”

There were times when one walked along the tree-lined boulevard.
This phrase carried a dual meaning in Soviet parlance, much like "my acquaintance."

It was the hotel's kitchen. At the front stood a large nickel-plated water boiler heated by birch firewood. There was a table. Unwashed dishes were piled mountainously there. The area was neat and tidy, but flies were crawling all over those dishes, scurrying up and down them. The flies crawled about quietly and darkly under the electric light, as if the dishes themselves were squirming.

At a corner of such a table, the Japanese Woman was breaking lumps of sugar with a nutcracker. Sugar could be purchased at 1.5 kilograms per month through the residence booklet, along with bread, meat, tea, soap, petroleum, and other items. However, the lumps were too large to be placed directly into the teacup. Because nutcrackers, along with the walnuts they were meant to crack, had now disappeared from hardware stores throughout Moscow, she borrowed the hotel’s sole remaining tool in its kitchen and began the task of breaking sugar—a practice not found in Japan.

(There was probably no one who maintained as frank a domestic relationship with the kitchen as Soviet hotel residents.
(The Savoy and Grand Hotel—where English and German interpreters bustled about the entrance—were exceptions.)
(There, it was merely a narrow Soviet parlor.))

In the late 1920s, one could see bellboys in any hotel corridor loading large trays with tea and food, then carrying them off drenched in sweat. Long ago, the Tsukiji Little Theater staged Gogol’s *The Government Inspector* through skillful imitation. In that play as well, didn’t the waiter still bring roasted meat resembling shoe soles to Khlestakov’s basement room despite his having no money? That's exactly how it was. Even if someone rang the bell just for a ten-kopek cup of tea, the waiter had to climb up to the fourth floor—which had no elevator—waving a napkin in hand, then go back down, place it on the tray, and deliver it to the room.

With the commencement of socialist construction under the Five-Year Plan, Moscow's People's Nutrition Labor Union members implemented labor rationalization.
In ordinary hotels, they completely abolished the practice of delivering food and beverages to guest rooms.
The bellboys of 1930 were no longer beings whose sweaty odor could be caught in the corridors.
They now appeared only around the dining hall.
And so, different individuals came to walk between the nearly eighty rooms, the dining hall, and the kitchen.)
——

Between eight and ten in the morning.
From around nine to eleven at night, the hotel's black cat would curl into a ball beside the enamel spittoon in the corridor and watch the procession of shoes and kettles in assorted colors.
Just as each footstep differed, so too did the hotel residents—carrying kettles of varying sizes and shapes—come and go through the hotel corridors like commuters traveling from trains to station water boiler rooms.
The Japanese Woman had a round sky-blue enamel kettle.

At the bend of the corridor, there was always a room with its door left wide open.
It was a rest room, dining hall, trade union mestkom, and party cell for those working at the hotel, with a small library section decorated in red cloth called "Red Corner" in one corner.
The People's Nutrition Laborers—those with the highest illiteracy rate—were the cells that should achieve their Cultural Revolution and socialist construction.

The Japanese Woman’s sky-blue kettle passing through the corridor popped the red color of the "Red Corner" into vivid relief.
At times, it also resonated with "The Song of the Red Flag" from the neighboring Publishing Workers' Union Club.

While breaking sugar, the Japanese Woman chatted with the Dishwashing Woman.
The Dishwashing Woman was a thin woman with black hair who often sang while working, wearing a grey work jacket.

“Ah!
It will soon be the season for all kinds of fruits.
In your country, do cherries and blackberries grow?
You have everything there, don’t you?”
Over there.

Are there blackberries in Japan? I’d never seen any. They’re delicious, aren’t they—blackberries.
My teeth turned completely black—it was quite a predicament.

——If you just boil them with plenty of sugar.

“How much do you get a month?”
“One and a half kilos?”
“I see.”

“Where does the portion for sugared fruit preserves come from?”

“In your country now, even sugar and tobacco are all being exported abroad to be turned into machinery, you see.”
“They say there are mountains of sugar in Odessa’s port.”

“There, see! And so—‘The Five-Year Plan in four years—’ We’ll get it done. If we just endure going hungry here and there for now, things will improve later.”

The Dishwashing Woman blinked in a manner both earnest and jesting, then shook her head. She was a temporary employee. She received fifty-seven rubles.

If only they’d make me a regular employee.

They said at the office they might make me a chambermaid, but who knows how that will turn out.

Everywhere now, people are in an uproar because there aren’t enough workers—they’re being taken off to collective farms and state farms. The employment offices are empty.

“Clerical workers are in short supply.”

While pouring hot water from the nickel-plated large kettle's crank into a bucket, the Dishwashing Woman said.

“Temporary or whatever—if I can work like this, it’s fine. If I’m working, I don’t have to go strolling down the boulevard… right?”

In addition,

On the boulevard, there was a street performer named Timofey Timofeyevich who had a bear.

Three photos for eighty kopecks, a thirty-minute quick-photo studio.
Under the shade of a lush linden tree, on a chair before a painted backdrop set up there, a woman with a red cloth over her head pulled at the wrinkles of her plaid skirt.

Gazing at the Boulevard scenery from daytime benches, nine-tenths were women of varied hair and eye colors, along with rattan baby carriages.

At Nikitsky Gate, where Herzen Street crosses the Boulevard, stood a monument to Timiryazev.
Around the monument’s pedestal, red, purple, white—summer grasses and flowers were planted.
The "October" of 1917
There had been fierce urban combat there.
This year, tomato sellers at one hundred rubles appeared.
Grape sellers also appeared.
From high above, radio loudspeakers poured guitar ensemble music into the twenty-one-degree brightness of the Northern summer sky.
It was the sound and light of Soviet Year Thirteen.

Inside the rows of baby carriages—there they were, there they were! Toward those sounds and lights, countless infants with pale pink buttocks and exposed bellies slept or sucked their lips while gradually breathing toward their future trade union membership booklets, while cheerfully directing the unbiased nature of Soviet infants toward the nineteenth-century evolutionist Timiryazev and summer grasses and flowers.

On the Boulevard, there were infants as numerous as linden leaves. No—from four o'clock when offices and government buildings across Moscow closed, until around nine in the evening, the boulevard became a festival of children ranging from toddlers just learning to walk up through elementary school-aged young boys and girls. During that time, Red Guards strolled through. Pioneers passed by, their red neckties fluttering. Of course, con artists also walked through these crowds, but what caught the eye were children, children all the way to the end of the tree-lined avenue. The bustle was so intense that one might wonder how the knees of Gogol's statue on Arbat remained unoccupied.

The majority of Soviet citizens did not hold in their minds any distinction between Japan and China, whether geographically or culturally-historically.
Those enlightened individuals who knew enough to recognize Japan as a constitutional polity would undoubtedly say to you all next:

“Moreover, Japan has an enormous population—isn’t that right?”
“By how much does it increase each year?”
“Seven hundred to eight hundred thousand.”

“Good heavens! What an enormous number!”

But what should have been truly surprising was not the number of infants being born.
For the Soviet had been increasing its young members of society by nearly three million annually in recent years—at a rate equivalent to one-third of its total population.
What was truly astonishing was the fact that in Japan, some ninety percent of the seven hundred to eight hundred thousand infants born each year—born to proletarian mothers who had no social protection—were being brought into this world as infants who possessed no means to assert their right to survival.

The October Revolution fulfilled its historical mission for humanity through this single point alone.
In the USSR, women were completely equal to men in their rights as citizens and workers; furthermore, they were fully granted by law protection of their gender as mothers.

Outside the window was still a severe cold of minus fifteen degrees.
Frozen snow-light flickered across the white walls of the room.

The window frame was slightly old, letting in a draft.
The Japanese woman, wearing a white woolen shawl over her head, lay with a thin rubber tube hanging from the edge of her lips and watched the cat sideways.

Beside the bed was placed an oval table.
A brass call bell with its wobbling neck wrapped in gauze, and alongside it, a potted plant resembling asparagus hung its fine green leaves in lush profusion.

I wonder if cats in Japan eat leaves too—

On the floor was a large glass with a yellow transparent liquid pooled at the bottom.
Bile.
The calico cat avoided the glass, aligned its front paws, tilted its whiskers upward, and gently pulled at the leaves to eat them.
Only the lush leaves swayed.
There was no sound.
The Japanese woman had already been lying like that for two hours.

The cat finally jumped onto the table.
This made the Japanese woman uneasy.
In the potted plant, pale blue buds had just sprouted.
"It’s those fresh sprouts the cat wants to eat—I’m sure of it."

While lying down, she rattled the table with her hand.
It did not move.
At just the right moment, the hospital room door opened.

"Ah, Tanya!"

“Is it still at it?”
“It’s almost dinner time now.”

With dazzling blond hair framing red cheeks and one arm of her white uniform rolled up to hold bread piled high，Tanya chased the cat off the table.

“How are things today? And how’s your little one doing?”

“Hey! They’re doing physical exercises real vigorously.”

Tanya laughed, lightly patted her own ample seven-month belly, and left.

About a month and a half prior—on a day not long after the Japanese woman had been admitted to Moscow First University Hospital—a not very tall, pregnant, red-cheeked nurse wheeled in a wheelchair after instructing her to bathe. As the Japanese woman moved her body, liver pain brought streaming tears to her eyes; unable to enter the bath, through her tears she found herself sharply struck by the swelling beneath the young pregnant nurse's white uniform.

That was Tanya.

The nursemaid commuted to work.
Six people worked twenty-four hours in three eight-hour shifts.
Tanya did not come for night duty.
She was twenty years old.
Her husband studied baritone at the State Music School.
Tanya would press her bare arms against the desk in the duty room and study algebra whenever she had free time.
Every evening from six to eleven, she absorbed at Moscow University’s Labor Department—bearing Bukharin’s name—the culture that the revolution had liberated from bourgeois monopoly and directed toward the proletariat.

In the morning, Tanya was cleaning the floor with a wet rag.
They had various exchanges.

“Tanya, how many more years do you have left in the Labor Department?”

“It’s my second year now, so just one more year.”

“About how many women are there?”

“There are so few, you know—just nine people.”

As she watered that potted plant—the one the cat liked—from a siphon tube, Tanya said with a pensive gaze:

"In our department, generally speaking, women still lag behind no matter what."
"Even among working women engaged in production, those with high qualifications remain fewer than men."
"And since the Labor Department requires daytime work first, with studies being quite strenuous, some women can't complete the program—especially those with families and children."

“So?”
“Do you have confidence you’ll see it through?”
“With that body of yours—working days and studying nights—there must be times when it’s hard.”

“It’s nothing.”
“I’ve never once thought it was hard.”
“In the Labor Department, only those who truly want to study are studying there.”
“But the sleepiness sometimes—I tell you!”
“There are times when your eyes just won’t stay open—the sight of everyone lined up dozing off one after another, I tell you!”
“Hey!”
“I can’t stand it!”

Tanya, bursting out laughing herself, brushed her blond hair back from over her cheeks.

“But they’re all fine young men.”
“In the USSR, there are about fifty thousand young men studying in Labor Departments now (1928).”
“They’re all people doing something for the Soviet state.”
“Didn’t Lunacharsky say it?”
“‘What the Soviet state needs most now are those who are overcoming difficulties as they study in the Labor Department,’ he said.”

(The number of female students in Labor Departments within the Russian Republic alone was 15 percent in 1927.)

Throughout the entire USSR, women undergoing higher specialized education programs accounted for 29.8 percent (1927), ranking sixth among the world’s civilized nations.
(Japan ranks approximately eleventh.)

Another snowy day.

Tanya, having finished her work, sat in the armless easy chair in the Japanese woman's room and bit into a green apple with relish.

"Tired?"

"A little."

While biting into her second apple, Tanya said with such evident delight that she seemed ready to stomp her feet from sheer joy.

"My vacation will start soon!"

Soviet Labor Law provides pregnant laboring women with fully paid leave for two months before childbirth and two months after childbirth.
(Intellectual laboring women receive three months before and after under the same conditions.)

Elena, who had come to borrow a magazine and was chatting while there, looked at Tanya through her emaciated yet luminous eyes—those of a young diabetic worn thin by disease—and asked:

"How much do they give you for childbirth preparations?"
"You."

"Anyone can get up to half their monthly salary."
"...But they'll provide nine months' milk allowance."

Tanya stood by the window and gazed at the snow piling thickly on the bare elm tree's branches.

“Good idea!”
“Once my vacation starts, we’ll go for walks every single day!”

In the verb “to go for walks,” Tanya unconsciously used the plural form.
And the gentleness of that tone flowed through the room like light.

Elena, who had been seeing off Tanya as she disappeared from the snow-lit room—her figure whiter than the snow itself, walking with heels dragging slightly from the weight of her rounded body—suddenly straightened her back and pulled the gray hospital gown tight against her high chest with one hand.

“This is our era!”

There was something that gripped and shook Elena’s heart with deep intensity.
She stared with dark burning eyes that pierced into the Japanese woman’s black ones—but soon—

“Have you ever had children?”
she asked in a low voice.

“No, I haven’t.”

“I have had children.”

——………….

“But that was 1919—the year of famine.”

She said as if speaking to herself.

“The professor who examined me said: ‘How will you feed a child if you give birth?’”
“‘What we need now isn’t babies—it’s finishing this revolution,’ he told us.”
“He was kind—that white-bearded professor—so earnest... We survived even that.”

Tanya began to walk more slowly each day, and in her blue eyes and moist lips there bloomed a strained beauty like that of a heavy, oversized fruit.
As Tanya’s white, swollen figure passed slowly across the three-foot-wide corridor that lay open before her bedridden field of vision, her golden hair gleaming, the Japanese woman felt, with unvarnished truth, the beauty and power of a woman about to become a mother.

European civilization, with its religious sentiment since Maria, and Eastern culture, through the enduring traditions of family systems, had each to some extent sanctified women who sought to become mothers.
But have the practical expectant mothers of the proletariat ever been considered objects of aesthetic beauty?
"The ‘virtuous mothers-to-be’ have long been a classic tragicomic trope of poverty in both East and West."
For tens of millions of proletarian women under the bourgeois social system, motherhood—far from granting them easier living rights—stands as a clear gateway to daily hardship.
It even threatens their very survival.

Look at Tanya!

The Japanese woman felt even the motherhood sleeping within her being awakened and stirred with the same joy.
The deep peace filling her entire body—and what of that unclouded expectation to become a mother!
Tanya’s radiance—what else could it be but a reflection of how Soviet society protects proletarian motherhood!
.

When a working woman had been pregnant for five months or more, factories and offices were not permitted by labor law to dismiss her.
This also applied when they had an infant within ten months after birth.
(Needless to say, this applied to the four-month leave period as well.)

There was not a single factory or workshop with a considerable number of working women that lacked a nursery.
Nurseries were open from 8 AM to 5 PM.
From five PM to midnight.
Some places protected children up to the age of seven free of charge, while others did so at cost proportionate to parental income, providing meals, bathing, and elementary social training.
Mothers with infants were granted nursing time every three hours.
Mothers brought their children to work in the morning, and until dismissal time, there was no need to worry about the children being under the care of female doctors and nurses.

The tragedy of bearing a child only to be abandoned by the man—in the Soviet Union, this did not drive women to the Seine or Sumida Rivers.
It simply sent her to the People’s Court.
The Civil Code determined the obligation to pay support amounting up to half of the monthly salary received by the father—depending on circumstances—until the child reached eighteen years of age.

In the unlikely event that the man engaged in even more un-Soviet-like conduct, refusing to pay child support and disappearing—what would Tanya do?
With her income alone, she could never manage to raise a child.
By law, the father had an obligation to support the child with food or money.
In cases where even that parent was absent.

A child, regardless of the relationship between father and mother that brought about their birth, is not Tanya’s alone.
Once born, the child is a legitimate child of Soviet society.
In times of need, the Soviet state bears collective social responsibility for each young member added to its ranks.
“Children’s Homes” act as the final safety net, embracing as members of society those children about to slip through the hands of economically vulnerable mothers.

To guarantee the economic independence of maternity anticipated in women, the divorce law stipulates that in cases where a woman lacks vocational skills, the husband is obligated to provide living support for one year (during which time the woman will acquire a profession).

Legal abortion, positioned as the last of these several positive conditions, serves to protect motherhood and prevent secret crimes.

Is it that Tanya alone, through some special circumstance of hers, has attained her independence as a young working woman, freedom in love, and the joy of motherhood upon such extensive social solidarity?
That is not so.
All Soviet working women stand upon this foundation.
The Proletariat's "October" severed with revolutionary force the shameful bond between motherhood and the private property system, firmly reconstituting motherhood within socialist social solidarity.
There exists no working woman who does not belong to a trade union.
There exists no baby who, once born, lacks an organization to accept it as a member of society.

Knowing all this, everyone—let us stroll along the elm-shaded tree-lined avenue on a certain clear summer afternoon and take fresh stock of the countless babies sleeping there.

Soviet babies.

At factory shift changes, one heard the children’s cheers and mothers’ laughter overflowing from nurseries.
They were Soviet children and mothers.

(The Soviet Industrial Expansion Five-Year Plan spanning 1928 to 1933 allocated 350 million rubles as funds for Proletariat cultural advancement.)
Using part of these funds after the completion of the Five-Year Plan, 1.5 million children of workers and lower-level employees would come to receive pre-school-age protection.

＊In 1929, there were nearly fifteen million children in the USSR.

In the practical workings of Soviet society—composed of workers—the issue of infant protection education held significant meaning.

1927–28  1932–33  Increase Rate

Kindergarten children’s hearth: 107 (thousand) 217 (thousand) 102.2%

Children's play areas  203 (thousand) 506 (thousand) 149.3%

Fixed nurseries  1008  1597  58.0%

(Soviet Republic)

Child health protection medical staff         63.1%

The new USSR residences being vigorously constructed these days often took care to allocate plazas and rooms within them specifically for the children of residents.
This was to have a nursery at the very location where residences were built.
Not only was this objective itself extremely appropriate, but interestingly, it was also playing a dual role.
The housewives—originally recognized alongside domestic workers as those who had remained politically behind the longest—began to break away from their habitual individualistic ways of thinking, having become accustomed through necessity to collective action centered around nurseries that had advanced even into these residential buildings.

That teacher had been given the nickname "Stiff-Booted".

He always wore knee-high boots when he came.
Upon entering, he would neatly align the heels of his boots, bend his tall frame with exaggerated politeness, and extend his hand for a handshake with a gesture as if scooping something up from below.

The Japanese Woman was living in a single room with another person.
For nearly two years in Moscow, she had lived like this.
When she grasped "Stiff-Booted"'s veiny hand, the Japanese Woman took off her coat from inside the door, put it on, and prepared to go outside.
"Stiff-Booted" stood by the table at the center of the room, watching her.

“Why must you go out? You’re not in the way at all.”
“On the contrary, isn’t it even more pleasant to be able to study together?”
“That’s entirely unnecessary consideration.”

In any case, the Japanese Woman exited the room.
For it was so that another Japanese woman could make the most beneficial use of an hour and a half and three rubles.

The Moskva River had frozen over, and people and horse-drawn sleds passed incessantly across its surface.
There were people dangling fishing lines from holes in the ice.
Women with cotton calico skirts of various colors peeking out from under black coats gathered in a group of five or six, breaking through the thick ice and rinsing laundry they took out from baskets.
Some dye had dissolved; the water within the ice appeared greenish.

When she climbed up the bank and looked around, all human figures on the ice appeared black and small, with only the faces of those skating here and there in the distance each marked by a single spot of rosy color.
From the power plant's chimney, thick black smoke rose straight up.

The Japanese Woman gazed at the frozen Moskva River's scenery, then returned to her original spot and opened the entrance to a certain building.

The floor was flagstone-paved, with ancient Russian-style swollen pillars and heavy corbels surrounding the front staircase.

She opened the door labeled "Office."
Books.
Books.
Women.
Women.
And books!
This was the Central Children’s Library.
Children’s literature had long been a Soviet issue.
And it still remained unresolved—the editorial office of the magazine Pioner took the lead in holding meetings between writers and young readers.

“Here, while having children read books, we also conduct various research projects.”

The calm, thirty-four or thirty-five-year-old female Party member who was the supervisor explained.

"As you know, our Soviet culture remains extremely young, and we have no prior experiences to reference."
"Everything is new."
"This is an excellent thing overall, though not without difficulties."
"Our primary task here involves researching what books Soviet children should read."
"This institution leads in researching and deciding which stories to have them hear in kindergartens and elementary schools, which books they should read there, and what selections forty children's libraries ought to purchase."

She said as she guided the Japanese Woman toward the bookshelves.

“The women here now are mostly elementary school teachers.”
“They come from the regions as well to conduct their research.”

There was one special bookshelf beside them.
Books for children bearing red, yellow, green, purple, and black paper slips were lined up beside the shelf.
That was the report card given to newly published children's literature by the Screening Committee, which convened once every week.

"The red ones are the top category.
When it comes to purple and black ones, they don’t purchase them for other libraries.
As for the green ones, we ourselves aren’t entirely sure.
Whether the children will find them interesting or understand them—even if we ourselves think they might not be good—since the children themselves might discover something, we tentatively give them a try."

“What color did Alyosha’s ‘The Three Fat Men’ receive?”
“Geijutsu-za is currently staging it, and the book was quite a lavish publication, but—”

A young Papuchiki (Companion) writer—his novel “Emotional Association” was staged at the Vakhtangov Theatre—both novel and play were acclaimed.

“Ah, did you see it?”
“You too?”

The Supervisor laughed.

“What color was it again… That’s an adult fairy tale, you see. A fantasy where revolution emerges from within confections—that’s a bit problematic.”

The one now marked with red was a picture book.
It was a picture book that used clear color illustrations to explain how proletarians from various ethnic groups across the Orient, Occident, and globe engaged in production unique to their respective peoples through distinctive clothing, landscapes, and methods.
Behind the thin Indian man with conspicuously large earrings who cultivated cotton and worked in a textile factory stood a British man wearing a helmet cap, his pince-nez glinting.

Soviet children learned directly—in kindergarten or elementary school—the relationship between the natural world and human society through every vivid labor of daily life. Now spring had begun scenting from beneath the snow’s depths. What do adults do in spring? How do children help adults? (First-Grade Curriculum Program)

It was sowing season in the countryside.

It was the season when migratory birds came to the city park.
Elementary school children prepared to handcraft birdhouses to hang from the treetops in the park, while at the Central Children’s Library, one bookshelf was replaced with books on the Five-Year Plan, collective farms, state farms, other general agricultural topics, and spring flora and fauna.

“This is our most strenuous and crucial task.”
“Soviet children live in the same society as adults.”
“The only difference lies in their simpler understanding.”
“They must learn about both the Five-Year Plan and collective farms—and they eagerly want to know.”
“How to explain today’s complex real-world problems simply and concretely...”
“The issues shift rapidly from one to the next, you see. When Soviet elections come around, for instance, we must find books suited to those too.”

In the Soviet Union, how essential literacy was as a weapon for understanding actual life and construction became immediately clear if one lived for just a month within this astonishingly progressive, flexible, and multifaceted new society.

For example, the Japanese Woman's profession was writing novels.
Therefore, feeling interest in the field where Soviet art would likely emerge in the future, she visited the literary research department within the factory newspaper office of the "Sickle and Hammer" ironworks.

There was a single typewriter with a cover.
There were two tables and several chairs, with four or five young workers from the molding workshop and lathe sections sitting at ease after finishing their eight-hour workday.
The novice literary club members were in many cases poets.

“So, who’s reading today?”

The leader from MAP surveyed the group while smoking a cigarette.

“You?”

The curly-haired Komsomol member, wearing a crisp white shirt boldly open at the chest, blushed slightly.

“No...”

he said.

“I have nothing.”

“Show me what’s in your pockets.”

They burst into laughter.

“Well, what’s the hold-up?
“Artyom!”
“Then you’ve read it! You’ve read it!”

“I haven’t fixed it yet… I’m not confident.”

“There’s not a single person here who has any confidence.”

Rising amidst the laughter, Artyom—solidly built in his cobalt shirt—began reading his manuscript with the cadence of a genuine proletariat poet, his intonation elastic and assured.

“The sparks and music of iron being cut.
Iron’s beautiful force—becoming the framework of socialist construction in varied forms: becoming hoops, cranes, rivets—the volunteer labor brigade shouts from within: ‘Fulfill the production-economic plan to 100 percent!’
The volunteer labor brigade shouts—‘No—
Fulfill the production-economic plan to 120 percent!’
And the new gleaming Turksib’s tracks ran from Turkestan’s desert toward Siberia, linking the production of north and south.”

To even comprehend in literary terms the necessity of grasping themes, the Japanese Woman had to first absorb the production expansion Five-Year Plan—the central issue of the USSR. How was she to acquire that? She had to read at minimum. Pamphlets crammed with statistical tables and numbers. This absolutely had to be read. If she wanted to understand—when taking a walk—the meaning of the electric-lit map in Soviet Square.

In the USSR, the fact that illiterates—who had numbered 50,771,997 people (49.6%) in 1926—had already decreased to approximately 43 million by 1930 and would further decline to 7% in urban areas and 20.6% in rural areas after the Five-Year Plan’s completion was an entirely natural progression.
Life itself teaches that letters are as necessary as bread ration tickets and are social tools just like the hoe and file in one’s hands.
In the Soviet Union, adults too were nurtured in this manner.

“By the way, what kinds of books do upper elementary school children mainly read?”

“First, reference materials—technical materials—then literature.”

“Which modern writers are beloved?”

“Well…”

“Of course Gladkov, Libedinsky, Serafimovich and such are being read...”

The female party member thought for a moment.

“Lately they’ve been reading classics quite voraciously,” she said.

“Tolstoy? Gogol? That sort?”

“Pushkin as well—and Lermontov makes appearances too.”

“How do children generally receive works centered on the civil war, I wonder?”

“We’ve come to recognize one major common fallacy in literature about the civil war and revolution—works specifically crafted for young readers.”
“It’s that mechanical view of revolutionary work.”
“‘The Reds’ get portrayed as preposterously strong—these flawless paragons of justice and wisdom who know nothing but success—while ‘the Whites’ stay eternally cowardly and idiotic. As if revolution were some toy you could assemble without effort.”
“A grave error.”
“It utterly warps the Revolution’s reality.”
“The Revolution must be shown more organically—something hard-won through persistent struggles against pain, setbacks, repeated failures.”
“And honestly—those Red versus White tales? Dreadfully dull! Why bother reading them at all?”

She laughed cheerfully.
While climbing the stairs to the second floor, she praised the printing quality of Japanese children’s magazines and books as being remarkably good.

“Technically, it’s truly advanced.
But you’re quite blatantly incorporating numerous historical elements into the content. On this page—right after an illustration of Japanese children dressed entirely in European fashion playing at assembling radios—feudal-era samurai immediately appear.
Do Japanese children really feel nothing about being so frequently thrust back into the feudal era like that?”
“Not yet…”

In front of the book stands decorated with red cloth in the second-floor reading room, several boys and girls around eleven or twelve years old were busily searching through books.

“Aniuta!”
“Please give me a different one.”

“Why?”
“You haven’t finished reading that yet.”

The young librarian, dressed in Komsomol attire, said to the boy.

“You must get into the habit of finishing books completely.”

“It’s boring.”
“Please give me one that’s about Arctic adventures or something.”

There was a hall for gatherings with a grand piano, decorated with placards and palm planters.
In a vacant room at the back, two older Pioneer girls were cutting out colored paper, pasting it onto a ball, and crafting some sort of decoration.

"Moscow has its well-known housing shortage—many children have nowhere to go after school lets out," she said.
"The parents are out."
"Everyone comes here."
"Here they have various study circles, and this wall newspaper gets published there too."

Four rooms decorated with paintings of trees and birds were separately equipped for preschool-age children.
Small clean white-painted chairs and tables were arranged around the window filled with various bulbs beginning to sprout above water basins.
There were no children there now.

"When mothers need to go out shopping for somewhat long periods,
they stop by here and leave small children."

"This is genuine kindergarten work."

“This is necessary for mothers and children—and for us as well.”
“Work for children cannot advance even a single step without living children as counterparts.”
“Many mothers came here and for the first time learned how to select appropriate picture books for children, how to answer their questions, and how to tell stories properly.”

┌───────────────┐
│DON'T HIT CHILDREN!! │
│BEFORE HITTING CHILDREN, CONSULT THEIR FRIENDS!│
└───────────────┘

└───────────────┘

Throughout Moscow, such placards could frequently be seen on walls and advertising towers these days.

“Parents too have recently begun to adopt different ways of thinking about social education.”
“However, we still have plenty of shortcomings on our side as well.”
“We’ll try it out.”
“The children determine what is good and bad.”
“Through that, we make corrections and advance further.”

The Supervisor quietly passed by the boys and girls once more and whispered to the Japanese woman with tenacious fervor.

“Behold, they are truly the new Soviet people.”
“How they will grow!”

A chart showing the allocation of time infants spent in the library had been posted.

Cleaning 1·1% Races 1·5%

Block Building 4·3% Paper Cutting 4·5%

Playing with Toys 4·8% Lunch Time 5·5%

Drawing Pictures 10·3% Singing 8·0%

Group Games 10·3% Having Stories Read to Them 12·0%

The transformation was not limited to content alone.

Moscow’s appearance had also undergone remarkable transformation.
Beyond the outer tree-lined avenue of the city’s outskirts, along with reflections from Pond-style glass roofs of new factories, the crisp concrete walls of new worker housing stood beyond young street trees, silhouetting pedestrians draped in red cloth.

Along the banks of the Moscow River, a large-scale construction project occupying an entire section was underway.
Amid the black scaffolding, people saw the pale, intense beams of lamps used for night work; from the dense tangle of intersecting steel frames' complex shadows, they felt as though something enormous was swelling forth from the earth, and that humans were zealously laboring to press, consolidate, and solidify it into a fixed magnitude.
It was the building of the All-Soviet Union Central Executive Committee.
It was construction intended to turn the Kremlin into a museum.

In addition, large construction projects whose purpose remained unclear could be found everywhere.
Atop cranes whose boards thrust densely into the sky, Red Flags fluttered as bricks, sacks of lime, and the heavy ruts of tractors revealed their intriguingly unfinished forms in mud distorted by their weight.

But was it possible to fundamentally transform Moscow itself into a socialist city truly worthy of being the capital of the Soviet Union?
Moscow needed only let its historic temples' varied domes sparkle within pristine severe colds—
and have satirical effigies hung from Strashnaya Monastery's fortress-like façade: Pope with angels and monks manipulated via five-colored reins by some silk-hatted capitalist monstrosity—letting foreign strollers clutch their canes and gape wide-eyed.—Now then,

Now then—wouldn't you care to take a look at this small map?
Of course, it was neither Moscow nor Minsk.

It was one of the socialist city plans solicited by the magazine Pioner from children under the title "How Should We Live?"
The construction of socialist cities in the USSR had transitioned from planning to realization.
In the Urals, Donbass, and other emerging production centers, several new cities had already arisen.
There existed there a new lifestyle more rational than Moscow's; however, this plan by Yuzh was intriguing.
What kind of city did the Soviet boy demand for the ideal of socialist life, drawing from his actual experiences of collective living and domestic life?

Please note how this industrial city—surrounded by trees arranged in a "Red Star" shape—connected with rural areas, and observe that the various factories forming the nucleus of citizens' productive social labor were positioned according to their nature: some along riverbanks, others near residential areas.
Yuzh paid particular attention to nurseries.
Workers’ clubs for adults were located within residential areas, while Pioneer clubs, schools, children’s playgrounds, and other facilities were completely separated into two eastern corners.

The desire for a certain interval between adult life and children’s life—this is currently a common wish among the conscious young generation of the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, adults and children with more than a certain degree of age difference are often not so much adults and children as they are old humans and new humans with fundamentally different worldviews.
They wish to peacefully receive the necessary training within a healthy collective life as workers of the socialist state.

Ah, and Yuzh has another wish.
That the spacious school buildings are paneled with ultraviolet-transmitting glass.

“Ultraviolet-transmitting glass—”
he said.
“It transmits rays from sunlight that benefit human health.”
“That’s why children will certainly stop weakening.”
[October 1930]