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Beate Sirota Gordon (1923–2012)

Author of The Only Woman in the Room

1 Work 45 Members 3 Reviews

About the Author

Beate Sirota Gordon (1923-2012) was an Austrian-born American performing arts impresario. Following her work on the Japanese Constitution, Gordon devoted her life to bringing the arts of Asia to the United States. She would receive many honorary degrees and awards, including an Obie, an American show more Dance Guild Award, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government. show less

Works by Beate Sirota Gordon

The Only Woman in the Room (1998) 45 copies

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Common Knowledge

Birthdate
1923-10-25
Date of death
2012-12-30
Gender
female
Nationality
Austria
USA
Birthplace
Vienna, Austria
Place of death
Manhattan, New York, USA
Places of residence
Manhattan, New York, USA
Vienna, Austria
Tokyo, Japan
Education
German School, Tokyo, Japan
American School, Tokyo, Japan
Mills College
Occupations
performing arts presenter
women's rights activist
memoirist
Awards and honors
Order of the Sacred Treasure (1998)
Short biography
Beate Sirota Gordon was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Her parents were Augustine (Horenstein) and Leo Sirota, a concert pianist. Her maternal uncle was conductor Jascha Horenstein. The Sirota family went to Japan in 1929, when her father was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Mr. Sirota soon became a revered performer and teacher there, and the family stayed in Tokyo for more than a decade. Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo until the mid-1930s, when it became Nazified, and then attended the American School in Japan. She became fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. In 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, she left for the USA to attend Mills College in Oakland, California. Her parents remained in Japan. In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the USA's entry into World War II, it became impossible to contact Japan. Beate had no word from her parents, and no money. She was permitted by Mills College to take her examinations without having to attend all her classes and graduated in 1943 with a bachelor's degree in modern languages. She got a job at a U.S. government listening post in San Francisco, monitoring radio broadcasts from Tokyo. She later worked for the U.S. Office of War Information, writing radio scripts urging Japan to surrender. She went to Washington, DC, where she obtained a position as an interpreter on General Douglas MacArthur's staff. Arriving in Tokyo with the U.S. Army after Japan's surrender in 1945 she went immediately to her family's house but found only burned ruins. She was eventually reunited with her parents, who had been interned in the countryside, and took them to Tokyo, where she nursed them back to health while working for MacArthur. One of the General's top priorities was drafting a new Constitution for postwar Japan, a top-secret assignment begun in February 1946 that had to be finished in seven days. Beate Sirota, the only woman assigned to the constitutional committee, was deputized to compose the section on women's rights. So at 22, almost single-handedly, she wrote women's rights into the Constitution of modern Japan. Her work on Article 14, "Basic Human Rights" and
Article 24, "The Essential Equality of the Sexes," gave Japanese women a set of legal rights for the first time in their history. Ms. Sirota Gordon later embarked on a career as a prominent cultural impresario. In the 1950s, she joined the staff of the Japan Society in New York, becoming its director of performing arts. In that capacity, she introduced many Japanese artists to the West, including masters of traditional music, dance, woodblock printing, and the tea ceremony. In 1970, she became director of performing arts at the Asia Society in New York. She brought many Asian artists to stages throughout North America. She retired in 1991 as the society's director of performances, films and lectures. Her memoir, The Only Woman in the Room, published in Japanese in 1995 and in English two years later, made her a celebrity in Japan, where she lectured widely, made appearences on television, and was the subject of a stage play and a 2004 documentary film called The Gift From Beate. Ms. Gordon was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Japanese government in 1998.

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Reviews

The memoirs of the only woman on the American occupation team to write Japan's post-World War Two constitution, I picked this up not quite sure what to expect. I found it very well-written and easy to read. It was fascinating to read Gordon's thoughts of writing the section on women's rights in Japan's constitution and the process 'behind the scenes' of SCAP, the occupying force. That was the section I was most interested in but after the occupation of Japan, Gordon went on tell of how she became a cultural ambassador, bringing over Asian arts and performers to the United States. It was quite an interesting read and I recommend it to anyone interested in modern Japan.… (more)
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wisemetis | 2 other reviews | Jan 26, 2023 |
Six-word review: European woman helps define postwar Japan.

Beate Sirota Gordon tells her story capably enough, but it's nothing brilliant. The most striking thing about it is its brevity. I know I wouldn't be capable of telling a minor fraction of my unremarkable history in 171 pages, much less a life as vivid, varied, and consequential as hers. She has a memoirist's knack of letting representative observations and anecdotes convey a sense of events rather than narrating them in exhaustive detail.

Indisputably, the author (who died in 2012 at age 89) led a noteworthy life spanning three continents, both in the performing arts and in her pivotal role as one of the authors of the Japanese constitution drafted by General MacArthur's team in 1946. But my rating is not of her life or deeds but of her book. And I'm more impressed by the one than by the other.
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Meredy | 2 other reviews | Dec 7, 2016 |
In Oct. 2007 I had the privilege of hearing Ms.Gordon speak at a renowned women's college in Tokyo. Now in her 80s, Ms. Gordon traveled from her home in the US to visit again the country of her youth, Japan. She spoke in Japanese for over an hour, giving a summary of her life, but most importantly, stressing the importance of the Equal Rights Clause of Japan's consititution, which by quirk of fate she had written.

The Only Woman in the Room, a brief memoir, which includes her contribution to the history of post-war Japan, is refreshingly modest. For some 50 years after the Pacific War, the details of the drafting of Japan's constitution by the 'allied powers' (General MacArthur) had been kept quiet, much of it classified secret documents. To the world, appearances were kept as if the Japanese had drafted their own constitution, but in reality it was strictly managed by MacArthur.

Given the prevailing gender chauvinism of Japan (and even the west) at that time, if Ms. Gordon and another woman (economist Eleanor Hadley) had not been present, articulate, and assertive, there would possibly have been no 'equal rights clause' set forth in Japan's constitution. Had Ms. Gordon not had experience growing up in Japan, fluency in the language and knowlege of the plight of women, equal rights in Japan might have taken many more years to arrive.

Speaking before a group of future women leaders of Japan, Ms. Gordon was living testimony to the fact that today's Japanese women have rights of marriage, divorce, voting, owning property, etc., which was not true prior to 1946.

It seems she has always been the type of person so involved in living life that to stop and record all of it in detail would have gotten in the way of living it. Certainly her biography would be a sweeping epic, from her parents' roots in Russia, her father's respected talent as a musician and teacher, through the chaos of the war in Europe, loss of family in Hitler's holocaust, her parents' surviving the war as "non-persons" in Japan, her US college education, her linguistic contributions to the war effort, and so on. Despite all this, I believe perhaps Ms. Gordon does not view herself as being that different from thousands of others who lived through those years, but she did have extraordinary talent and the luck to be in the right place at the right time.
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nobooksnolife | 2 other reviews | Feb 27, 2008 |

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Rating
3.8
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ISBNs
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