Last Monday evening, 81-year-old Beate Sirota Gordon walked onto the stage of the Japan Bar Association auditorium in Tokyo, took a seat, and for 90 minutes explained in Japanese how she helped write Japan's post-war Constitution.
Gordon was born in Vienna but came to Japan at the age of 5 with her father, Russian pianist Leo Sirota, who had been invited to teach here. She went to California to attend college when she was only 15, and remained there after the war broke out in 1941. In 1945 she returned to work for the U.S. occupation forces, and when it seemed that the Japanese in charge of making a new Constitution couldn't come up with one that was substantially different from the previous one, U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur convened a secret committee of Americans to help them draft something else. Gordon, then 22, was in charge of women's issues because she was, as the title of her memoir says, "The Only Woman in the Room."
During her lecture, she said she grew up watching how Japanese women were accorded second-class citizenship. Her original draft of Article 24, which guarantees gender equality (something the U.S. Constitution doesn't guarantee), was specific about matters important to women such as divorce and inheritance because "I knew that men would eventually write the Civil Code."