Some times an individual has a major influence on society by being the right person at the right place at the right time. Beate Sirota Gordon is one such person.

      Fleeing revolution torn Russia, internationally known pianist Leo Sirota, a Russian Jew, settled in Vienna where his only child, a daughter, was born. Sirota's family later emigrated to Japan where Leo Sirota taught at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. As a child, Gordon was encouraged to visit Japanese families, where she not only learned firsthand of the powerlessness of women in Japan, but learned to speak Japanese easily, soon adding Japanese to the list of languages she spoke fluently. She attended the German School in Tokyo until it fell under Nazi control in the mid-1930s, and then transferred to ASIJ (American School in Japan) for her final two years of high school.

      Gordon grew up in Tokyo and became, as she notes, "part Japanese." The Sirota family house in Tokyo was a salon of artists from super-traditional Kabuki actors, modern dancers, and European musicians to Japanese painters and sculptors. With only about 2,000 foreigners from many countries living in Tokyo, Sirota was exposed daily to speakers of German, Japanese, English, Russian, and French. She grew up in cultural diversity and richness. Meanwhile, through housemaids, friends, and ladies in her mother's social circle, Gordon came to know about Japanese women, rich or poor, whose social status was low under the feudalistic family system. The Japanese women talked angrily of men who, without bothering to ask their wives, brought home and then adopted children they had fathered outside marriage. Women had no final say in marriage or divorce; wives were condemned for infidelity, but not husbands; women had neither suffrage nor property and inheritance rights; women were regarded as incompetent no matter how well educated they were. Women were the first to be victimized by poverty or family causes. The family name and its succession were more important than the happiness of mothers, wives, sisters or daughters.

      In 1938 Sirota's parents sent her to Mills College in California to study languages because it was the closest to Japan and a woman's college, therefore safe for a sixteen-year-old girl. There she experienced a culture shock. According to Sirota, "When I arrived at Mills, I suffered my second bout with "culture shock." There were no maids to make my bed, do my laundry, or clean my room. My college classmates looked upon me as an exotic creature. "

      Since Mills was a women's college and had a woman president who was a feminist, as well as a strong female leader, she learned again women's rights, women's wrongs, and the discrimination women faced. After the war broke out, she supported herself and her studies by monitoring Tokyo Radio for the US government and later writing radio propaganda. She also worked for the Office of War Information, even having her own radio show, a nostalgia program to try to convince the Japanese people to surrender. After graduating from college at 19, she worked for Time magazine as a researcher, again experiencing first-hand discrimination toward women.

      Meanwhile, her parents, who had remained in Japan, had been imprisoned by the Japanese government in 1942 because of their Jewish background. Concerned about her parents, Sirota was anxious to return to Japan as soon as the war ended. One of only sixty Caucasians in the U.S. who spoke Japanese, fluent in six languages, and able to see Japan from a variety of perspectives, Gordon had no problem returning to Japan after the war. On Christmas Eve, 1945 Sirota became the first American civilian to enter post-war Japan. She found her parents suffering from malnutrition and from the freezing cold under village arrest in Karuizawa, a mountain resort. Moving to Tokyo. Sirota quickly landed a job on General MacArthur's staff.

      Fearing that other allied powers would foist an inferior constitution on post-war Japan, on February 4, 1946, MacArthur ordered the Government Section, where Gordon worked, to draft a new constitution for Japan in seven days. Since no one on the staff had ever written a constitution before, Gordon began her task by scouring war-torn Tokyo for all national constitutions she could find to use as guidelines for their work. The ten constitutions which Gordon located helped the young American staff to succeed beyond all of their hopes by writing an entirely new constitution that has governed Japanese affairs ever since without the change of a comma.

      The Constitution had 3 new pillars; Renunciation of War, Sovereignty in the People (with the Emperor as symbol of nation), and Abolition of Feudalistic Family System (or Equality of Sexes). Sirota had been assigned to Civil Rights Committee. From the 1918 Soviet Union Constitution came the idea of specific rights for women and children. From the 1919 Weimar Constitution came the idea that the state should promote social welfare policies supportive of families. Eventually, the Civil Rights Committee drafted 41 articles including social security, free education, medical support for the poor, abolition of discrimination against illegitimate children, special protection toward pregnant women and infants, and paid maternity leave. There even was a provision guaranteeing the human rights of foreign residents in the country. Believing that such provisions should be part of the Civil Code not a part of the constitution, the Steering Committee led by Col. Charles Kades unfortunately deleted most of these articles from the final draft.

      Gordon had written the women's rights articles as explicitly as possible so that the constitutional intent could not be eviscerated by old, male Japanese bureaucrats, when they would prepare the new Civil Code at a later time. Also, she knew that American women had been disadvantaged because the US Constitution failed to specifically guarantee women's rights. Two articles on women's rights did survive. Written by Gordon, then only 22 years of age, they read:

      Article 14. All of the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin.

      Article 24. Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of the both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equalities of the sexes. . . .

      The new constitution was a thoroughly progressive document. Although the emperor was acknowledged as the head of state, he was stripped of any real power and essentially became a constitutional monarch. A bi-cameral legislature with a weak upper chamber was established, and with the exception of the Imperial family, all rights of peerage were abolished. Thirty-nine articles dealt with what MacArthur called "basic human liberties," including not only most of the American bill of rights, but such things as universal adult suffrage, land reform, labor's right to organize, and a host of marriage and property rights for women. But the most unique and one of the most important provisions came in Article 9, which outlawed the creation of armed forces and the right to make war.

      The names of those who had actually drafted it were kept secret for years for fear that, if Japanese conservatives learned that the writers were amateurs and that one had been a young woman, they might have convinced the Diet to alter it drastically. So it has only been recently that Gordon's story and the story of the drafting of Japan's post-war constitution has emerged.

      Gordon continued to play a large part in Japanese-American cultural relations over the next five decades. Returning to the U.S. in 1947, Gordon went into the field of cultural exchange -- first with Japan, later with all of Asia, encouraging bi-directional cultural exchange by bringing to this country artists, dancers and musicians from all over Asia. Perhaps no one has done as much as she to promote our knowledge and appreciation of Asian performing arts.

      Before World War II, Columbia Records sold more records in Japan than anywhere else in the world. Violinists Jascha Heifetz, pianist like Artur Rubinstein, and singer like Fyodor Chaliapin had performed in Japan. Japanese college students had literally stood in bookstores (they couldn't afford to buy the books) reading Mark Twain, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and other Western literary greats in translation. The American people need to be educated both about Asian culture and about Asians' love of Western music and literature.

      Gordon edited Theater Arts Magazine's first edition devoted to Japan then worked at Columbia University for a cultural exchange program which brought prominent Japanese to American for lecture tours. Gordon served as the interpreter for Fusae Ichikawa, the well-known Japanese suffragette, in the process meeting such influential Americans as "Ma" Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, and then President-elect General Eisenhower.

      In 1954, Gordon became the Japan Society's director of student activities, and in the course of this work, arranged a concert at Columbia University. Roberta Dewey, the widow of the philosopher-educator John Dewey, was in the audience. She took it upon herself to call Gordon's superior, Douglas Overton, who called the Japanese Consulate, which offered $3,000 in support of future events. Thus, the Performing Arts Program of the Japan Society was born with Gordon becoming its first Director and remaining there until 1991. Eventually, for her cultural work, she was awarded "The Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Rosette" by the Emperor of Japan.

      With the women's right articles included as part of the post-war Japanese constitution, Japanese women didn't need to fight many of the battles that western women fought for, things as simple as woman's suffrage. When Japan was sufficiently recovered from the war to turn to domestic humanitarian concerns, women found that many of their rights were already enshrined in their constitution. They would still have to battle to have the provisions codified into law and to have the law enforced, but they did so with the certainty that the laws would pass constitutional muster. Eventually along with Australian feminism, this toe-hold of feminism in Asia, will spread throughout Asia.

      So, for her work on the 1946 post-war Japanese constitution and her later work on Asian-American cultural exchange, Beate Sirota Gordon gets a vote from Sunny as one of the most influential women of the millennium.

References

      Gordon, Beate Sirota, The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir, New York: Kodansha America, 1997 (also available in Japanese as 1945-nen no Kurisumasu (Christmas Eve, 1945))

      Beate Sirota Gordon By: Kuniko Fujisawa

      Culture Shock

      ASIJ American School in Japan

      Creation of the Japanese Constitution (1945-1946)

      Gordon Speaks on Experience Drafting Post-war Constitution for Japan (This page is no longer at the listed address. The page has been left in as a citation, but the link was removed because it no longer functions. Sunny, Oct. 14, 2001)

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