
Beate Sirota Gordon (25 October 1923-30 December 2012) was an Austrian-born American and Japanese women's rights advocate and one of the drafters of Japan's 1946 constitution amid the Allied occupation of Japan.
Biography[]
Beate Sirota was born in Vienna, Austria on 25 October 1923 to a Jewish family. Her family emigrated to Japan in 1929 when her father was offered a job as a music professor in Tokyo, and she and her family lived in Tokyo until 1939, when they relocated to Oakland, California in the United States. Sirota became a naturalized US citizen in January 1945, and, as she was one of very few white Americans who were fluent in Japanese, she worked for the Office of War Information during World War II. On 25 December 1945, she arrived in Japan at the start of the Allied occupation, and she served as a translator for General Douglas MacArthur. In February 1946, she was assigned to help with the drafting of a new constitution for Japan, and she added language which established legal equality between men and women. In 1947, Major General Charles A. Willoughby accused her of attempting to advance communism within the Japanese government, and she returned to America ayear later. She went on to become an award-winning performing arts presenter, and she died in Manhattan, New York City in 2012 at the age of 89.