hat was a red-letter day for Totto-chan. It was the first time she had ever swum in a pool. And without a stitch on!

It happened in the morning. The headmaster said to them all, "It's become quite hot all of a sudden, so I think I'll fill the pool."

"Wow!" everybody cried, jumping up and down. Totto-chan and the first grade children cried "Wow" too, and jumped up and down with even greater excitement than the older students. The pool at Tomoe was not rectangular like most pools, as one end was narrower than the other. It was shaped pretty much like a boat. The lay of the land probably had something to do with it. But nonetheless; the pool was a large and splendid one. It was situated between the classrooms and the Assembly Hall.

All during their lessons, Totto-chan and the others kept stealing glances out of the windows at the pool. When empty it had been littered with fallen leaves just like the playground. But now that it was clean and beginning to fill up, it started to look like a real swimming pool.

Lunchtime finally arrived, and when the children were all gathered around the pool, the headmaster said, “We'll do some exercises and then have a swim.”

"Don't I need a swimsuit to go swimming?" thought Totto-chan. When she went to Kamakura with Mother and Daddy, she took a swimsuit, a rubber ring, and all sorts of things. She tried to remember if the teacher had asked them to bring swimsuits.

Then, just as if he had read her thoughts, the headmaster said, "Don't worry about swimsuits. Go and look in the Assembly Hall."

When Totto-chan and the other first graders got to the Assembly Hall the bigger children were taking off their clothes with shrieks of delight as if they were going to have a bath. They ran our, one after the other, stark naked, into the school grounds.

Totto-chan and her friends hurriedly followed them. In the warm breeze it felt wonderful not to have any clothes on. When they got to the top of the steps outside the Assembly Hall they found the others already doing warm-up exercises. Totto-chan and her classmates ran down the steps in their bare feet.

The swimming instructor was Miyo-chan's elder brother--the headmaster's son and an expert in gymnastics. He wasn't a teacher at Tomoe but he was on the swimming team of a university. His name was the same as the school's--Tomoe. Tomoe-san wore swimming trunks.

After their exercises, the children let out screams as cold water was poured over them, and then they jumped into the pool. Totto-chan didn't go in until she had watched some of the others and satisfied herself they could stand. It wasn't hot, like a bath but it was lovely and big, and as far as you could stretch your arms there was nothing but water.

Thin children, plump children, boys, girls - they were all laughing and shouting and splashing in their birthday suits.

What fun, thought Totto-chan, and what a lovely feeling! She was only sorry Rocky couldn't come to school. She was sure that if he knew he could go in without a swimsuit he'd be in the pool, too.

You might wonder why the headmaster allowed the children to swim naked. There were no rules about it. If you brought your suit and wanted to wear it, that was perfectly all right. On the other hand, like today, when you suddenly decided to go in and hadn't a suit, that was perfectly all right, too. And why did he let them swim in the nude! Because he thought it wasn't right for boys and girls to be morbidly curious about the differences in their bodies, and he thought it was unnatural for people to take such pains to hide their bodies from other people.

He wanted to teach the children that all bodies are beautiful. Among the pupils at Tomoe were some who had had polio, like Yasuaki-chan, or were very small, or otherwise handicapped, and he felt if they bared their bodies and played together it would rid them of feelings of shame and help to prevent them developing an inferiority complex. As it turned out, while the handicapped children were shy at first, they soon began to enjoy themselves, and finally they got over their shyness completely.

Some parents were worried about the idea and provided their offspring with swimsuits which they insisted should always be worn. Little did they know how seldom the suits were used. Observing children like Totto-chan-who right from the start decided swimming naked was best--and those who said they had forgotten to bring their suits and went in anyway, most of them became convinced it was much more fun swimming naked like the others, so all they did was make sure they took wet swimsuits home! Consequently, almost all the children at Tomoe became as brown as berries all over, and there were hardly any with white swimsuit marks.