In 1998, Beate Sirota Gordon, former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society, was decorated by the Japanese Government for her long-term service to Japanese culture. However, she should be better remembered for her contribution to Japanese women’s equality by drafting portions of the post-World War II Japanese Constitution. How was she, at the age of 22, involved in this historic and highly political enterprise?

The Constitution of Japan was ultra-secretly prepared in only 9 days, February 4th to 12th 1946, by 25 Americans including Beate Sirota Gordon. They were the officials of the Government Section, General Headquarters (GHQ). The Constitution was expected to follow "the MacArthur Note" and Washington guidelines. This was because General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, had became convinced that a Japanese committee on constitutional revision was incapable of adequately democratizing the Imperial Constitution and that the Far Eastern Commission (representing the allied powers) might soon intervene in the matter. On 13th February, the Government Section officials delivered their hastily drafted constitution to the Japanese cabinet and said that the adoption would help to protect the imperial throne and to hasten the end of the Allied Occupation. In this off-the-record meeting, Miss Sirota was "the only woman in the room" as an interpreter. After difficult negotiations and wording revisions, on March 6, the Shidehara cabinet published the text as its own handiwork. General MacArthur announced to the world that he was satisfied with the "new and epoch-making" constitution. On the day when it was promulgated by Emperor Hirohito, Gordon and other GHQ members sat at the Diet gallery.

Though imposed by the United States, the Constitution itself was excellent and beneficial for the redevelopment of Japan. The people were released from militarism, which meant no spending on weapons for years to come. For the happiness of the majority, even land reform was conducted to some extent. The drafters were inspired with pacifism and humanistic idealism, for it was right after the war and before the Cold War. The Constitution had 3 new pillars; Renunciation of War, Sovereignty in the People (with the Emperor as symbol of nation), and Abolition of Feudalistic Family System (or Equality of Sexes). The articles on women read:

They (the ladies) talked angrily of men who, without bothering to ask their wives, brought home and then adopted children they had fathered outside marriage. (Gordon 111)

In terms of marriage and divorce, women had no final say. Wives were condemned for infidelity, but not husbands. Women had no suffrage nor did they have property/inheritance rights, and were regarded as incompetent how much they were educated. Women were the first to be victimized by poverty or family causes. Family name and its succession were more important than the happiness of mothers, wives, sisters or daughters.

In 1938, when she was fifteen, Gordon left for the United States to undertake her college education. She majored in languages at Mills College, California. Two years later, the War broke out. As a student she had to support herself by monitoring Tokyo Radio for the US government and later writing radio propaganda.

She worked for the Office of War Information, even having her own radio show, a nostalgia program to try to convince the Japanese people to surrender, that was supposed to be the counterpart of Tokyo Rose. (New York Times)

She graduated from college at 19, and worked for Time magazine as a researcher. While there she often experienced discrimination toward women.

On Christmas Eve, 1945, anxious to find her parents, she hurried back to Japan. With other foreign residents, her parents had been evacuated to Karuizawa, a hillside resort, under secret service surveillance, while she had been in demand as a translator and interpreter for Japanese-Americans in detention camps. This is war!

Gordon was the first civilian woman attached to the US Occupation forces. No wonder. She was vested with 6 languages and could see Japan from multi-perspectives. On Feb. 4, 1946, she was assigned to the Civil Rights Committee, one of 7 committees under the Constituent Assembly, and was in charge of provisions on women. With full sense of mission, she immediately collected more than ten constitutions in the world. It was a miracle that those constitutions in English were found in air-raid-burnt-down Tokyo, and they were tremendously helpful for comparative reference for all concerned. The 1918 Soviet Union Constitution spelled out specific rights for women and children. The 1919 Weimar Constitution saw that the state should promote social welfare policies supportive of families. Eventually, the Civil Rights Committee drafted 41 articles including social security, free education, medical support for the poor, abolition of discrimination against illegitimate children, special protection toward pregnant women and infants, and paid maternity leave. There even was a provision guaranteeing the human rights of foreign residents in the country. We can see how the ideas were advanced and broad. To her regret, however, most of these articles were deleted at the last stage, because the Steering Committee led by Col. Charles Kades thought that the constitution should be brief as principles and details should be specified in statutes. She shed tears when these articles were deleted one by one, feeling that the number of unhappy women would increase.

About the subsequent historic meeting with the Japanese representatives, she says, "It was 2 a.m. and we had been negotiating in secret for the entire day. They were furious, sputtering with rage. --- Women’s rights? They really objected to that. --- they were as angry about women’s rights as they were about changes in the emperor system." (Newsweek).

"This article was written by Miss Sirota," he (Col. Kades) announced. "She was brought up in Japan, knows the country well, and appreciates the point of view and feelings of Japanese women. There is no way in which the article can be faulted. She has her heart set on this issue. Why don’t we just pass it?" (Gordon 123) And they did pass women’s rights.

Gordon wrote women’s rights as explicitly as possible so that the constitutional intent could not be eviscerated by Japanese old, male bureaucrats, when they would prepare the new Civil Code at a later time. Also, she knew that American women had been disadvantaged because the US Constitution failed to specifically guarantee women’s rights.

After the fact that a young American woman had drafted the women’s rights provisions was declassified in recent years, Gordon has often invited to speak to groups of Japanese women on Constitution Day (May 3rd). At one such meeting, she said, "Because I was young, welfare of the elderly never occurred to me." (Asahi)

She also said that the new Constitution was a pearl born from the miserable war. Naturally, she is against the idea of amending "the Peace Constitution."

The Gordon’s pearl seems to be handed down to a Japanese female lawyer, 22 years old, who volunteered to go to Uganda. She responded to the call by the first female Minister of Justice who was trying to prepare a constitution for new Uganda after civil wars.

Bibliography

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of the World War II . New York: W.W. Norton and Company

Duncan, Erika. "ENCOUNTERS; A link to Pre-War Japan Builds in the Arts." New York Times (New York) 4 August, 1996: 13LI-1.

Gordon, Beate Sirota. 1945-nen no Kurisumasu (Christmas Eve, 1945): Biography of the Woman Who Stipulated "Equality of Men and Women in the Japanese Constitution,Ed. Makiko Hiraoka. Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo

Gordon, Beate Sirota. The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir New York: Kodansha America 1997

McKillop, Peter. "Defending the Constitution." World Affairs (interview) Newsweek [Japanese Version] 10 July, 1993: 23

"I Wept When Women’s Rights Draft Provisions Were Deleted." KOTOBA SHO Column (Word Excerpt). Asahi [Japan] 15 April, 1997

© 1999, Kuniko Fujisawa  

(translation by Vicki L. Beyer)

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Temple University Japan