Writing History
When the new Azabudai Club was unveiled in 2011, it featured one Women’s Group classroom named after Beate Sirota Gordon. But few Members know why.
Clouds of cigarette smoke hung in the air of the meeting room at the Daiichi Semei Building, the headquarters for the Allied occupying forces in Tokyo. It was 2 a.m. on March 4, 1946. The members of the American steering committee assigned to write a new constitution for Japan was at odds, again, with their Japanese counterparts.
The article in contention was one that provided equal rights to Japanese women in such areas as marriage, property rights and inheritance.
Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kades, the head of the committee and the main author of the document, was at his wit’s end. The argument over how to redefine the emperor’s powers had taken four hours alone.
Kades looked at the interpreter, Beate Sirota, the only woman in the room, and told the Japanese delegation, “Miss Sirota has her heart set on the women’s rights. Why don’t we pass them?”
The Japanese delegation capitulated. In part because the group held Sirota in high regard and, in part, because equal rights was a directive from General Douglas MacArthur, and the constitution would likely not be approved without the inclusion of article 24.
What the Japanese negotiators did not know was that Miss Sirota had written article 24. It was a secret for 25 years.
“She was very humble. She said, ‘I was in the right place at the right time,’” says her son, Geoffrey Gordon. “But any one person could have been in that place at that time and not done what [she] did…. Not only did she rise to the occasion, but she rose to the occasion in absolutely spectacular fashion.”
Beate Sirota Gordon (pronounced Bay-AH-tay), who married Lieutenant Joseph Gordon, the chief interpreter for American military intelligence, achieved her most recognized accomplishment at just 22 years old.
However, she was also a luminary in the performing arts world and, later in life, a tireless advocate for peace. One of the Club’s Women’s Group’s classrooms is named in her honor, and more than 200 obituaries were published after her passing, at the age of 89, in 2012.
“By just writing those things into the constitution—our constitution doesn’t have any of those things—Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment,” said Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, to The New York Times after Gordon’s death. “And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?”
Born into Viennese high society in 1923, Gordon’s father, famed pianist Leo Sirota, sold out concert halls across the world. Her mother, Augustine, was a well-connected socialite who hosted parties for Europe’s upper crust. By the age of 4, Gordon was debating composer Igor Stravinsky.
In 1929, Leo took the family on a six-month concert tour of Japan. Augustine was reluctant to go, but there was political unrest in Europe, which her husband predicted would subside by the time they returned. The US stock market collapsed while they were in Japan, devastating the Austrian economy and paving way for the rise of Nazism in Europe.
The Sirotas, of Russian Jewish origin, agreed to stay in idyllic Japan, where Leo was recognized as a master. In 1931, he began teaching Japan’s piano prodigies at the Imperial Academy of Tokyo.
“My grandfather was very happy in Japan. It suited his personality, and they lived a very good life,” says Gordon’s daughter, Nicole Gordon. “They were the center of attention for all Europeans that passed through.”
The family settled into a large European-style home near Nogi Shrine in Akasaka. Even though Gordon attended a German school, her closest friends were her Japanese neighbors. They played badminton and attended puppet shows together. Within three months, the precocious Gordon was fluent in Japanese and served as translator for her parents.
By 1936, her teachers were replaced with Nazi sympathizers, who spewed anti-Semitic rhetoric, calling Gordon “stupid” in front of her classmates. She transferred to the American School.
When Gordon graduated high school at 15, she was fluent in Japanese, German, English and Russian. With war looming, Gordon enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, the closest all-female American university, in 1939.
Two years later, Leo and Augustine visited their daughter in the United States. They returned on the last ship to leave US territory for Japan. Less than a month later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Gordon wouldn’t hear from her parents until the end of World War II.
Now fluent in six languages, Gordon took a job translating Japanese radio messages and then wrote propaganda programs for broadcast in Japan. In March 1945, she moved to New York City to work as a researcher for Time magazine. It was here she found out from a Japan correspondent that her parents were alive.
As a naturalized American and reportedly one of 65 Japanese-speaking non-Asians in the US, Gordon obtained a position with MacArthur’s staff as a “research expert.” On Christmas Eve 1945, she became the first female civilian to arrive in occupied Japan.
She located her malnourished parents at their summer home in Karuizawa and nursed them back to health. Disillusioned with their adopted home, Leo and Augustine left for the US in 1946.
By this time, two Japanese commissions had submitted revised constitutions, both of which were rejected by MacArthur. Since time was short, an American team was formed and given seven days to write a new draft.
Gordon was assigned to a three-person team charged with writing the articles on civil rights. “Beate, you’re a woman,” she was told. “Why don’t you do the bit about women’s rights?”
Ever resourceful, Gordon traveled to three libraries in war-ravaged Tokyo and collected 10 constitutions, including those of Germany, Russia and the US. While writing her sections, she was inspired by the Japanese girls from her childhood, who could not choose their husband and were expected to live a life of servitude.
Gordon wrote 20 constitutional provisions, which were pared down by the committee to the two existing articles: 14 and 24.
“I do think that her role in the Japanese constitution was absolutely crucial to what happened for women’s rights,” says Nicole Gordon. “It is hard for me to imagine any other person having accomplished what she did, just because of the confluence of all of those combinations of experiences and language skills and fearlessness that maybe comes with youth.”
The Japanese government promulgated the constitution on November 3, 1946. To gain acceptance from the Japanese public, American involvement was kept secret until 1971.
When Gordon’s contribution was revealed, article 24 was highly criticized because it was written by a 22-year-old woman and not a constitutional law expert. For that reason, she did not publicly comment on her involvement until 1995, when she published her memoir, The Only Woman in the Room.
“There are still some conservative-types who consider my mother politically naïve, at best, and other things, at worse,” says Geoffrey Gordon. “It was smart to wait 50 years. When it became declassified, this gave energy to the anti-constitutional movement: ‘Americans made us adopt this. We view peace and war differently.’ All of this talk gained momentum in the late 90s.... That was frightening to my mother, and that galvanized her response.”
Gordon moved to New York City in 1947 to be closer to her parents. She was director for performing arts at the Japan Society and then the Asia Society. She introduced Asian art and culture to America, including Japanese artists like contemporary dancers Eiko and Koma, architect Kenzo Tange and woodblock print artist Shiko Munakata.
She traveled across Asia, climbing mountains in Tibet and searching the jungles of Bengal to find authentic performers to bring to Carnegie Hall and other acclaimed stages. She spearheaded development of the Lila Acheson Wallace Theatre and produced films based on her events.
“Occasionally, she was rebuffed and no meant no, but that was rare. Her philosophy won the day most of the time, because she was willing to do whatever it took,” says Geoffrey. “She was a steamroller, which was a wonderful thing because her cause was righteous.”
After Gordon’s retirement from the world of arts in 1991 and the publication of her memoir, she began a new career as a proponent of article 9, the so-called peace clause of the Japanese constitution. Gordon conducted more than 200 lectures, and she spoke at the Club at the invitation of the Women’s Group in May 1999.
Gordon had the opportunity to reflect on her achievements during a collaboration with Nassrine Azimi and Michel Wasserman for the book Last Boat to Yokohama: The Life and Legacy of Beate Sirota Gordon, which was published this year.
“What she did during the war was extraordinary, and what she did to introduce Asian theater to the American audience is absolutely pioneering,” says Wasserman, a professor at Kyoto’s Ritsumeikan University. “She was not a specialist in constitutional law, and she was not a specialist of ethnical theater either, but she was able to change things.”
Azimi visited Gordon at her New York apartment, with its Japanese art, books, sheet music, grand piano and Hudson River views, numerous times.
“When I met her she was not the glamorous Asia Society and Japan Society impresario, not the 22-year-old drafter of article 24, but she was a grandma,” says Azimi, co-founder of the Green Legacy Hiroshima Initiative. “To see this grandmother come to Hiroshima to give a talk, it was like a rock star. These Japanese women of a certain age, and even younger people, really adored her.”
During Azimi and Wasserman’s final interview with Gordon in 2012, six months before her death, she expressed her admiration for the way Japan had protected its constitution for more than 60 years. She believed it was a treasure for other countries to replicate.
“She would always say, ‘Here is a constitution that emphasizes all of the things a constitution should do, and adds this jewel that no government can take a nation into war,’” says Azimi. “Imagine if half the world’s constitutions had that. We would be in a different world.”
The Only Woman in the Room and Last Boat to Yokohama: The Life and Legacy of Beate Sirota Gordon are available at the Library
Meet the Author: Nassrine Azimi and Michel Wasserman
Monday, October 5
Toko Shinoda Classroom | 7–8 p.m.
¥1,500*
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*Excludes 8 percent consumption tax.
Words: Nick Narigon
