(In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to...)
In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution. The Only Woman in the Room chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitution; how she almost single-handedly ensured that it would establish the rights of Japanese women; and how, as a fluent speaker of Japanese and the only woman in the room, she assisted the American negotiators as they worked to persuade the Japanese to accept the new charter.
Beate Sirota Gordon was an Austrian-born American performing arts presenter and women's rights advocate. She was the former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society and the Asia Society and was one of the last surviving members of the team that worked under Douglas MacArthur to write the Constitution of Japan after World War II.
Background
Beate Sirota Gordon was born on October 25, 1923, in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Russian-Jewish parents a pianist and teacher Leo and Augustine (Horenstein) Sirota. Her father was a world-famous classical pianist, and Gordon grew up in a culturally rich atmosphere. The family moved to Japan when Gordon was five, and her father taught at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Their house in Tokyo was a salon of artists from super-traditional KABUKI actors, modern dancers, and European musicians to Japanese painters and sculptors. She grew up in cultural diversity and richness. Meanwhile, through housemaids, friends, and ladies coming to 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.
Education
Gordon attended a German school in Japan, then she was transferred to the American school in Japan. Her parents sent her to study in California in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II. In 1943 she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in modern languages at Mills College, Oakland, California, United States.
In 1941-1943 Beate Sirota Gordon worked for the U.S. government in San Francisco in Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, Federal Communications Commission, and in 1943-1945 she was a writer and translator in Office of War Information, San Francisco, using her fluency in Japanese to monitor overseas radio signals during World War II. She monitored Japanese broadcasts and worked for Time magazine doing research on Japanese affairs in 1945. Upon the war’s end, she landed a job as an interpreter and translator with the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces, which, under U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, oversaw the occupation of Japan (1945-1947). When the war with Japan ended, Gordon was intent on returning and finding her parents. She went to Washington, DC, and was interviewed by the Foreign Economic Administration, which immediately offered her a job with General MacArthur’s supreme command on the Civil Rights Committee of the Constitutional Steering Committee.
Also, she was the author of an autobiography, “Christmas 1945,” written in Japanese. Gordon’s memoir begins on Christmas Eve, 1945, when she returned to occupied Japan on a plane filled with men, most of them soldiers. At the age of twenty-two, she was asked to contribute to the Japanese Constitution. She reviewed other constitutions, including the Weimar Constitution of 1919, which defined marriage as being based on the equality of the partners. Japanese women had traditionally been treated as property to be bought and sold and had no say in deciding who they would marry.
In an interview with Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline, Gordon said that MacArthur’s plan was not only the physical rebuilding of Japan but also the democratization of Japan. He hoped for a peaceful occupation and cooperation from the Japanese emperor and government. The work was top secret, and they had one week to complete the Constitution. Gordon’s was one of the one hundred three articles written by the three-person writing team. On the final day, they worked through the night. In the morning, a review of the women’s rights section by three Japanese representatives brought fierce objections that the provisions were not in line with Japanese culture and customs. Gordon said Colonel Cadeys was worried that the process was being stalled and said to them: “'Gentlemen, Ms. Sirota has her heart set on the women’s rights. Why don’t we pass them?' And I think they were stunned, the Japanese, first of all that he would say such a thing in this top-secret, very important meeting, and secondly that it was I who had written the women's rights. They had no inkling about it. They thought I was just an interpreter. And I think they were so stunned that they just passed it. And thus history is made and thus the women got their rights in the Japanese Constitution.” Years passed before it became known that MacArthur’s staff had drafted the new constitution promulgated by the emperor.
In a Kirkus Reviews article the writer noted, that when Gordon returned to the United States to live in New York in 1947 she took on an important role in bringing Asian art to American audiences, “and traveled, consorting with emperors, gurus, and koto players." The reviewer, however, felt the memoir "fails to convey the passion and excitement of her extraordinary life.”
She worked as a translator in Hanover Bank, New York, in 1950-1952. In 1954-1970 she was a director of performing arts in Japan Society, New York.
Gordon became director of the performing arts department of the Asia Soviets based in Manhattan (1970-1986). Later she worked there as a director of performances, films, and lectures, (1986-91). In 1983 she was an associate editor for Tim International Encyclopedia of Dance. She traveled extensively from the 1970s to the mid-1990s to such destinations as Mongolia, Iran, Tibet, and Borneo. Patricia Ryan noted in the New-York Times Book Review that Gordon’s memoir grew from a video documentary, taped in Japanese, then translated into English. “The writing suffers in the conversion, and is, for the most part, colorless, a superficial outline of an interesting life,” wrote Ryan. Booklist reviewer Brad Hooper said the book is “interesting reading for those who enjoy hearing about quiet but strong lives." A Publishers Weekly reviewer said the “engaging, modest account recalls the life and times of a woman who made significant contributions to both Japanese and American cultures.”
Through diplomacy and ingenuity, twenty-two-year-old Beate Sirota Gordon wrote unprecedented rights for women into Japan’s post-war constitution. She was assigned to the Political Affairs staff as a translator, helping negotiate the Japanese constitution in 1946 and drafting language for women’s equal rights. She became Director of Student Programs for New York’s Japan Society in 1954. There she arranged exhibits and counseled Japanese students studying abroad, including the young Yoko Ono. She was the Director of Performing Arts for the Asia Society, traveling across the Far East in search of artists and performers she could invite to New York to inspire and educate Americans.
The Japanese television network, Asahi Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), produced a 90-minute documentary on Gordon's life, first broadcast in Japan on May 22, 1993. A Japanese-language biography, "Christmas 1945: The Biography of the Woman Who Wrote the Equal Rights Clause of the Japanese Constitution," was published on October 20, 1995. The English version of this book was published in March 1998 under the title "The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir." A play based on Gordon's role in writing the Japanese constitution, "A String of Pearls" by James Miki, was performed by the Seinen Gekijo in Tokyo, in April 1998. Gordon also lectured extensively in the United States and in Japan on her role in writing the Japanese constitution.
The film "The Sirota Family and the 20th Century," produced by Tomoko Fujiwara, made its debut in the West in Paris in April 2009. It is the story of Gordon's father's family and their flight from Europe into the diaspora.
Minor planet 5559 Beategordon discovered by Eleanor Helin is named in her honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 8 November 2019 (M.P.C. 117229).
She also received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from Smith College in 2008 and was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Mills College in 2011, where a collection of her papers now resides.
(In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to...)
1997
Religion
“I did not have a Jewish upbringing,” Gordon wrote. “I had a governess after I was born in Vienna, and she was Catholic, and apparently took me to church unbeknownst to my mother. I do not remember anything about my life in Vienna." - Gordon once said.
Politics
In 1946 having never even voted before herself, Beate Sirota Gordon typed out her radical alterations to the previous Japanese Civil Code in which women were “regarded to be incompetent.” In the final document, which remains effective to this day, Articles 14 and 24 bear her mark. They spell out that: “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 14), and that “Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.”
What resulted was one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. Also known as the “peace constitution,” the postwar Japanese constitution renounces the state’s right to wage war, guarantees the rights of workers to act collectively, and protects academic freedom. It is a document of a brief moment. From 1947 on, the Cold War froze the reformist zeal of U.S. foreign policy in East Asia and the Occupation took a conservative “reverse course.” The struggle between the personnel sector that wrote the constitution and the intelligence sector that monitored its articles foreshadowed the McCarthyism that would sweep American public life in the 1950s: even Gordon, small fry though she was, was implicated in the vitriolic, paranoid, and frequently fantastic notes of General Douglas MacArthur’s “pet fascist,” intelligence chief Charles Willoughby. He called Gordon a “childish,” “almost psychopathic,” “stateless jewess” [sic] with imagined family connections to Richard Sorge, a German communist spy who had relayed intelligence from Tokyo to the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Aside from drawing inspiration from the revolutionary Soviet constitution for its specific protection of the rights of women and children, Beate Gordon’s political views were less leftist ideology than youthful idealism.
The fact that she was so young when she wrote equality between men and women into the Japanese constitution made her reluctant to discuss her history, fearing that it could be used as a reason to alter the text and reduce women’s rights. Almost forty years passed before she was publicly recognized and was able to enjoy the adulation of many Japanese feminists.
Views
Gordon fought for women's rights in Japan and around the world and became one of the most famous feminists in Japan.
Quotations:
"Many things happened to me through my education, through my parents, through the women that I met in my life to enable me and enabled me all along to do the kind of work that I did. Oh, I don't feel like an icon. I think I just, I feel that in my life I was very lucky in that I was at the right place at the right time."
Membership
Beate Sirota Gordon was the Director of Student Programs for New York’s Japan Society in 1954. There she arranged exhibits and counseled Japanese students studying abroad, including the young Yoko Ono. She was promoted to Director of Performing Arts in 1958. In 1970 she became Director of Performing Arts for the Asia Society, traveling across the Far East in search of artists and performers she could invite to New York to inspire and educate Americans.
Japan Society is a non-profit organization formed in 1907 to promote friendly relations between the United States and Japan.
New York Japan Society
,
United States
1954 - 1970
Asia Society
,
United States
1970 - 1991
Personality
Beate was supportive of the work of contemporary artists. Her mantra was that art is “genuine” and “authentic.” She opened many doors for many artists and even paid dental bills for those who needed help.
Physical Characteristics:
In her late years, Gordon had pancreatic cancer, and she died of it at her home in Manhattan, New York City on December 30, 2012, at the age of 89.
Quotes from others about the person
"Beate brought amazing traditional artists from Sri Lanka, Burma, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia," said Rachel Cooper, Asia Society's director of global performing arts. "She was a stickler for the most authentic and exceptional artists. She often worked with scholars to contextualize the work, and commissioned writings on the traditions she presented."
"Beate was iconic - from her work on the Japanese Constitution to her groundbreaking work bringing performing artists to audiences across the United States. as part of her work at the Asia Society," Cooper said. "She is famed in Japan for her work with MacArthur, and had a major impact on Asian performance, from traditional Burmese music and dance to Butoh-esque contemporary Kazuo Ohno. She will be remembered for inspiring a generation of artists and audiences on two continents."
“All of us have a lot to learn from Beate Gordon. A woman with the courage to match her convictions.” - Yoko Ono.
"The story of the life of Beate Sirota is an inspiring one, and one that continues to inspire long after she has left the room. She set an example for all individuals, regardless of gender or nationality, that one person - however modest, however unprepared for history - can make a difference." - The Japan Times.
"She witnessed chauvinism and mounting militarism and repression, of course. But she also was attuned to the opposite of this by virtue of interacting with the more liberal Japanese guests her family entertained as well as the household servants they employed. These formative years obviously made Beate Sirota a passionate champion of equal rights for Japanese women, but that was only the half of it. She emerged not only with respect for the aspirations and abilities of these women but also with a broader, non-condescending optimism concerning the promise of a genuinely democratic Japan. This mix of hard-headed realism and open-hearted idealism was rare and precious after such a bitter war, and it is just as precious today. Once her contribution to the constitution became known, years later, Beate Sirota Gordon never lost an opportunity to reaffirm her vision. Her legions of present-day admirers among Japanese women are moving testimony to the durability of that vision." - John Dower, Ford International Professor of History.
Interests
dancing, performing arts, music
Connections
Beate Sirota married Joseph Gordon on January 15, 1948. They had two children: Nicole Gordon Bernstein (born 1954) and Geoffrey Gordon (born 1958).
Father:
Leo Sirota
Leo Gregorovich Sirota (May 4, 1885 - February 25, 1965) was a Jewish pianist born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Podolskaya Guberniya, Russian Empire, now Ukraine.
Mother:
Augustine (Horenstein) Sirota
Spouse:
Joseph Gordon
Beate Sirota married Joseph Gordon, who had been chief of the interpreter-translator team for the military intelligence section at the Allied Supreme Commander GHQ and was also present for the negotiations on the constitution.
Dance on Camera Award, Dance Films Association,
United States
1984
1984
Obie Award, Village Voice,
United States
1985
1985
Bessie Award, Dance Theater Workshop,
United States
1987
1987
Bessie Award,
United States
which cited her "for beating an ever-widening path between the cultures of East and West and for understanding the essential creative dialectic between tradition and experimentation and the fundamental partnership of artists involved in both", 1990
which cited her "for beating an ever-widening path between the cultures of East and West and for understanding the essential creative dialectic between tradition and experimentation and the fundamental partnership of artists involved in both", 1990
Ryoko Akamatsu Award,
Japan
2005
2005
Avon Grand Award to Women's Award,
United States
1997
1997
President's Medal from the College of the City of New York,
United States
John D. Rockefeller Award from the Asian Cultural Council
given "recognition of your extraordinary contributions in introducing American scholars, artists, and general audiences to the performing arts of Asia and in increasing the American understanding and appreciation of Asian dance, theater, and music traditions," 1997
given "recognition of your extraordinary contributions in introducing American scholars, artists, and general audiences to the performing arts of Asia and in increasing the American understanding and appreciation of Asian dance, theater, and music traditions," 1997
