Beate Sirota

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Beate Sirota Gordon (born in Vienna, October 25, 1923), former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society and of Asia Society, and a member of the team that worked under Douglas MacArthur on the Constitution of Japan.

She is the only child of pianist Leo Sirota, a Ukrainian Jew who had fled war-torn Russia and settled in Vienna, Austria. Sirota's family later emigrated to Japan, where Leo Sirota taught at the Imperial Academy of Music (now Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) in Tokyo. She attended the American School in Japan and lived in Tokyo ten years until she moved to Oakland, California, in 1939 to attend Mills College. During World War II, she was cut off from her parents who remained in Japan. During the war, she worked for the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service of the FCC, for the Office of War Information, Time Magazine. As soon as the war ended, she went to Japan in search of her parents. She was the first civilian woman to arrive in post-war Japan. At that time, being fluent in Japanese, she worked for SCAP as a translator.

When the U.S. began writing a new constitution for Japan, Sirota was enlisted to help and, as one of only two women in the room, the other being economist Eleanor Hadley, played an integral role in writing into the Japanese Constitution legal equality between men and women in Japan. In 1947, Sirota was a target of Major General Charles Willoughby's yearlong investigation of Leftist Infiltration where he tried, but failed, to construct a case against Sirota charging her with advancing the Communist cause within the new government of Japan (Bendersky, 2000, p.400).

Sirota currently resides in New York City and uses her married name, Beate Sirota Gordon. She often makes appearances at schools, universities, and other institutions in the United States and Japan, giving lectures about her life.

[edit] References

Beate Sirota Gordon. 1945 Nen no Kurisumasu (『1945年のクリスマス』). Tokyo: Kashiwashobo, 1995. ISBN 4-7601-1077-1
- originally published in Japanese under the title: 1945 Nen no Kurisumasu, given literary form in Japanese by Makiko Hiraoka
Beate Sirota Gordon. The Only Woman in the Room - A Memoir. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1997. ISBN 4-7700-2145-3
Bendersky, J.W. The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army. NY: Basic Books, 2000. ISBN 0-465-00616-3

[edit] External links

Biography (by Kuniko Fujisawa, Temple University Japan)
Biography (by Lindi Geisenheimer, ASIJ: American School in Japan)
Beate Sirota Gordon (1924 - ) (Sunshine for Women)
The Gift from Beate (Blog about Beate Sirota Gordon and the documentary film "The Gift from Beate")
The Only Woman in the Room (Beate Sirota Gordon speaks at Middlebury College. @ Youtube 80:16)American Jews