A pianist’s daughter
Beate Sirota was born in Vienna on October 25, 1923, the only child of the pianist Leo Sirota and his wife Augustine, née Horenstein. Both parents were Russian-born Jews. Leo, born in Ukraine and trained in St. Petersburg, had left the Russian Empire because of its antisemitic violence and built a glittering concert career in Vienna. Augustine, an artist and sister of the conductor Jascha Horenstein, was, in the words of her daughter’s friend Nassrine Azimi, a feminist well before her time. The family were secular, cosmopolitan Jews who believed in tolerance and in the ennobling power of the arts.
In 1929 Leo Sirota went to Japan for a six-month concert tour and stayed for almost seventeen years as a revered teacher at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Beate grew up there. She attended the German School in Tokyo until her parents decided it had become too Nazi, then the American School in Japan. She learned Japanese as a child and, as she grew, watched closely how Japanese women lived. What she saw stayed with her for life: women with almost no rights of their own in marriage, property or the family. “Japanese women were historically treated like chattel,” she said in 1999; “they were property to be bought and sold on a whim.”
Cut off by war
In 1939, worried by Nazi influence in Japan, her parents sent her to Mills College in Oakland, California. She graduated in 1943 with a degree in modern languages and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. When the Pacific war began she was completely cut off from her parents, who could no longer send her money; from the age of eighteen she paid for her studies herself. She later said she was one of only sixty-five white Americans fluent in Japanese, and she put that rare skill to work for the Foreign Broadcast Information Service of the Federal Communications Commission and for the Office of War Information, monitoring and translating Japanese broadcasts. She also worked briefly for Time magazine. In January 1945 she became an American citizen. In all, she spoke six languages.
The only woman in the room
As soon as the war ended she set out to find her parents. On Christmas Eve 1945, aged twenty-two, she arrived in Tokyo, the first civilian woman to enter occupied Japan. She found Leo and Augustine alive; they had survived the war interned in the mountain resort of Karuizawa. She took a job with the Government Section of General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, researching the women’s movement and Japan’s small political parties.
On February 4, 1946, General Courtney Whitney, head of the Government Section, called about twenty staff into a conference room. The Japanese government’s own attempts at a new constitution had kept the old order largely intact, and MacArthur had decided his staff would write a model draft. “You are now a constitutional assembly,” Whitney told them, and the draft had to be done in a week. Sirota was one of three people assigned to civil rights, and the only woman on that committee. Her two male colleagues told her that since she was a woman, she should write the women’s rights provisions. She agreed, and asked to write on academic freedom too.
Using her knowledge of Tokyo’s libraries, she gathered constitutions from many countries, among them those of France, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, the Soviet Union and Uruguay, as well as the United States Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and drafted far-reaching articles. Her text declared that the family was the basis of human society and that marriage must rest upon the undisputed legal and social equality of both sexes, upon mutual consent instead of parental coercion, and upon cooperation instead of male domination. She also wrote protections for expectant and nursing mothers, equal rights for children born outside marriage, free medical care for schoolchildren and the abolition of primogeniture.
The night of March 4
On March 4, 1946, American and Japanese officials met in secret to agree the final text. Sirota was there as an interpreter, because she was fast, and the Japanese side had no idea she had written any of it. The session went on through the night, with fierce argument over every word about the emperor. At about two in the morning they reached the article on women’s rights, and, as she recalled, all hell broke loose: the Japanese delegates were as vehement against it as they had been about the emperor. Colonel Charles Kades, noticing that the Japanese had warmed to the young interpreter, told them that Miss Sirota had her heart set on the women’s rights provisions, and asked why they should not pass them. Taken aback, the Japanese side agreed. Afterwards Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida sent her a silver sake cup bearing the imperial emblem and the words “In commemoration of the Constitution.”
Much of her longer draft, including the social welfare provisions for mothers and children, was cut. But her core principles survived, as scholars of Japanese law note, without significant alteration. Article 14 declares that all people are equal under the law and that there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin. Article 24 requires that marriage be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes, maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife, and that laws on choice of spouse, property, inheritance, divorce and family be made from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes. The constitution was adopted later that year and came into force in 1947.
What the clauses changed
For Japanese women the change was revolutionary. Equality before the law, the right to choose a spouse, equal rights in property, inheritance and divorce: all became constitutional guarantees, and Japan’s family and civil laws had to be rewritten to match. Every Japanese woman born since has grown up under those guarantees, and the constitution has never been amended. Japan’s journey toward equality is far from finished, and Gordon said so; but the legal foundation for every advance since, from women’s rights in marriage to equal treatment at work, rests on the clauses she wrote.
A bridge for Asian arts
In 1947 she was investigated as part of a year-long hunt for leftist influence by MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Major General Charles Willoughby, but nothing came of it. In 1948 she married Lieutenant Joseph Gordon, who had headed the interpreting pool on the night of March 4, and they settled in New York and raised two children.
Her second career was in the arts. In 1954 she joined the Japan Society in New York as director of student programmes, counselling Japanese students including the young Yoko Ono, and from 1958 she was its director of performing arts. She later directed performing arts for the Asia Society. Travelling to remote parts of Asia in search of authentic performers, she produced 39 tours by 34 companies from 16 countries, seen by an estimated 1.5 million Americans in 400 cities and towns. She introduced Americans to koto music, Korean drumming and many other traditions, and won an Obie and a Bessie award for her work. She retired in 1991.
Breaking her silence
For decades Gordon said little publicly about her role in the constitution, which conservatives in Japan sometimes attacked as an imposed American document. Only in the 1990s did she tell the story in full: a Japanese television documentary in 1993, a memoir published in Japan in 1995 and in English as The Only Woman in the Room, and many lectures in both countries. She became a heroine to Japanese women. In 2002 she wrote, for a Hiroshima conference on rebuilding societies after war, that the basic rights of women remain, regardless of what one may say about cultural differences, one of the pillars of postwar reconstruction, and she warned how quickly such rights could be lost. Japan awarded her the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1998. She remained a passionate defender of Article 9, the constitution’s renunciation of war, and wished other countries would copy it.
Jewish roots and a universal cause
Gordon’s life was shaped by the Jewish experience of the twentieth century. Her father had fled antisemitic Russia; her parents left Europe for Japan; she was sent from a German school that had fallen under Nazi influence; and much of her father’s extended family scattered into exile, a story told in the 2008 documentary The Sirota Family and the 20th Century. Her parents’ secular Jewish humanism, their belief in tolerance and in culture as a bridge between peoples, became her own. She believed that only by understanding one another’s culture can people make lasting peace.
Last words
Beate Sirota Gordon died of pancreatic cancer at her home in Manhattan on December 30, 2012, aged 89, four months after her husband. Her last public statement urged that the peace and women’s rights clauses of the Japanese constitution be preserved. The Economist devoted its weekly obituary to her, and an asteroid, 5559 Beategordon, bears her name. The rights she wrote into Japan’s constitution at twenty-two remain in force for every woman in Japan.
Sources & further reading
Beate Sirota Gordon, Jewish Women’s Archive · Beate Sirota Gordon, Wikipedia · She put women’s rights into Japan’s constitution (Beate Sirota Gordon’s 1995 FCCJ talk), Asia Times, August 2020 · Nassrine Azimi, The many legacies of Beate Sirota Gordon, Hiroshima Peace Media Center · Joel Rheuben, Vale Beate Gordon, Japanese Law and the Asia-Pacific blog, University of Sydney · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.