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The Making of an Esperantist

© David Poulson

Introductory note for new visitors to the Esperanto Topic.

If you have only just begun to take an interest in Esperanto and wish to know some basic information about this fascinating subject, please start your reading at the first article of this series. Having already completed 63 articles, I am now at the stage of writing articles for those readers who have learned quite a lot about the Esperanto language and movement already, and who are now wanting to find out more than just the basic introductory information. To get to the beginning of this series, please just click here:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/espe... ________________________________________________________

The Making of an Internationalist

"ARREST
Formally to detain one accused of unusualness."
Ambrose Bierce. The Devil's Dictionary.

Verda Majo was not kept in prison for very long - she had committed no offence - but after her release she was expelled from the University and compelled to return to her home in Tokyo. Wrongful arrest followed by unjust victimization of this kind is a highly traumatic experience. Timid people are usually thoroughly intimidated by it and are careful never again to antagonize the powers that be. But Verda Majo was not a timid person and she had great strength of character and a fervent sense of what was right and what was wrong. Her experience only strengthened her conviction that the evil reactionary forces which were seizing control of Japan had to be resisted.

And so, after she returned to Tokyo in the autumn of 1932, Verda Majo joined the Japana Prolet-Esperantista Unio and other small Esperanto groups, such as the Japana Esperanto-Literatura Societo and the Klara Rondo (a group of women with progressive ideas who named their little society after a German socialist, Klara Zeitkin.) She also enrolled in a typing course and put this skill to good use by contributing articles to various journals.

In fact, the speed with which she acquired fluency in Esperanto is impressive. In late 1932 she would still have been a novice but in 1935 she was capable of contributing a series of articles on "the present state of proletarian literature" to the Esperanto journal La Mondo which was not published in Japan, but in Shanghai.

For a sample of her work, see:

http://192.108.254.18/~napoleon/esperant...

This page also contains a sound file which will be of interest to new readers who have never heard Esperanto spoken. And the short quotation also appears, surprisingly, in a recent sermon by the Reverend Samuel A. Trumbore, which you will find here: