The Story of Beate Sirota
Nightline
Wednesday, February 10, 1999
(This is an unedited, uncorrected transcript.)
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Beate Sirota Gordon is an American woman who has become a Japanese icon. A young American woman found herself writing the Japanese Constitution. |
TED KOPPEL
Hundreds of hours of television time have been consumed, barrels of printers ink have been spilled these last few months marveling over the wisdom of the American constitution and over its durability. More than 200 years old now and functioning as well as ever.
There is another national constitution also drafted by Americans, not quite as old, but nearing its 53rd birthday and doing very well, thank you. The fact that this constitution was cobbled together by Americans was actually a state secret for a number of years. Immediately after the Second World War it might have been more than the Japanese people could have taken had they known that their new constitution, the one debated in the Japanese privy council and then passed by both chambers of the Imperial Diet or parliament, the constitution promulgated by the emperor himself had actually been drafted by members of General Douglas MacArthur=s staff.
They wrote the famous article under which Japan renounces war and arms. They drafted the language under which the emperor was defined as merely a symbol with no governing authority. But there are also in the Japanese constitution two paragraphs dealing specifically with the rights of women, paragraphs that were researched and written and passionately defended by a very young American woman who has now, late in life, become something of a heroine in Japan. It is her story, gathered and compiled by Nightline Producer Matliqa Siqa that we tell tonight.
(VO) When Beate Sirota was five, she embarked on a journey that would literally change history. Her father, Leo Sirota, an accomplished musician, had been invited to Japan to perform and teach at the Imperial Academy of Music. The Japan that young Beate saw was mainly the exotic side as extolled in travelogues.
LEO SIROTA
To us it was the land of Fujiyama, of cherry trees, exquisite gardens, geisha girls.
BEATE SIROTA
My memories are wonderful. It was a country for children, really. They did everything for the children. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers, all they thought about is how to make children comfortable.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
But even as a young child what she was struck by was the way that women in Japan were treated.
BEATE SIROTA
Women walking on the street behind their husbands, women preparing dinners that the husband had arranged for his friends, preparing the dinner, serving the dinner but never entering into conversation with the men and eating dinner by herself in the kitchen. That is the Japan I knew as far as women were concerned. Women never came to my mother=s parties. The men came. The Japanese men came. They didn=t bring their wives. I knew a little bit also about the Geisha and the mistresses Japanese men were keeping, sometimes in the same house as their wives.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Beate spent her formative years in Japan. It was the late 1930s when it came time for Beate to go to college. Hitler=s troops were marching through Europe so her parents decided to send her to college in America.
BEATE SIROTA
It=s very strange but my father, being a musician, really didn=t know much about politics and international relations and all that and I don=t think that he thought that there was going to be a war. He kept on saying that it is impossible for such a small nation as Japan to get into a war with such a powerful nation as the United States. And so when my parents brought me to America in 1939 to enter Mills College, they had no notion that there would be a war.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Then came December 7th, December 7, 1941.
BEATE SIROTA
I had been to a movie and I came back to campus and people were sitting around radios and one girl called to me oh, did you know that war has been declared? Of course I was terribly shocked because my parents had just gone back to Japan. They had been in the States visiting me in the summer of =41. And they went back on the last ship, on the very last ship, again, because my father just did not believe that there was going to be a war.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
That visit from her parents was the last contact she would have with them until the end of the war. As soon as the war with Japan ended, her priority became to get back to Japan any way that she could in order to find her parents.
BEATE SIROTA
So I went to Washington and the Foreign Economic Administration interviewed me and gave me a job immediately because, again, I spoke Japanese and I had lived in Japan and there were so few of us. I was told that I would be working for the government section in GHQ, general headquarters of the, of General MacArthur=s supreme command.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Little did she know that the job she was about to take would change things not just for her, but for the Japanese women she had admired so much.
BEATE SIROTA
I got there in December 1945, Tokyo was completely devastated. I=d been on the plane I would say, I guess I was the only woman. There were other, a few other civilians who were also going to work, but the rest of the plane was filled with soldiers. And as we approached Atsugi, the air base, there was great excitement, of course, to see what Japan was like. It was just not to be believed what it looked like. There was nothing left. I realized, you know, what this war had meant to the Japanese. They were in lines, the men and the women, to get food. The clothing was torn. They looked as if they had not had had enough to eat, of course. And in general it was a very sad picture.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
What General MacArthur had come to do was to rebuild Japan, but as it turns out, not just to rebuild it physically.
BEATE SIROTA
General MacArthur had certain ideas in mind, certain goals he had for the occupation and of course one of the big goals was to democratize Japan. And the government section was his liaison with the government of Japan. He wanted to rule through the Japanese government, through the emperor of Japan. He thought it would be a more peaceful occupation if he could do that. And then one day, February 4th, I came to -- early in the morning, it was a very cold day -- to the government section and we were called in at 10:00 by General Whitney to his conference room. There were about 25 of us who were called in. And he said to us, you are now the constitutional assembly. This meeting is top secret and what you will be doing is top secret. You shall write the draft of the new Japanese constitution. General MacArthur has ordered that it be written in seven days. When you=re in the army if you=re given an order, you don=t have much time to think about it. You just do it. We had no time to think, you know, were we qualified, how would we do it.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Beate was only 22 years old but as the only woman on the team, she found herself as the obvious choice to write one particular section.
BEATE SIROTA
We just sat down immediately and Colonel Rousse said to us well, there are three of us and there is a lot to write for civil rights. So let=s divide it. And the two men looked at me and Colonel Rousse said well, you=re a woman so why don=t you write the women=s rights?
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Tokyo was devastated, but so seriously did Ms Sirota take her task that she commandeered a jeep, combing the city for libraries, looking for constitutions of other nations.
BEATE SIROTA
I found that in the European constitutions, contrary to the American constitution, there were a lot of women=s rights detailed and, also, social welfare rights.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
All the inequalities she had seen as a child came back to her.
BEATE SIROTA
I remembered the women around my mother and I remembered the conversations they had had. These were women who were some from the aristocracy, from, some from among the literati who had gone to Europe and had seen what was going on in Europe as far as women=s rights were concerned and who brought this knowledge back to Japan and discussed it with my mother and were saying to her how much they felt deprived not having these rights in Japan. And I finally decided that I must give rights that were very detailed and explicit so that they could not be misinterpreted.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
So that is what she set out to do.
BEATE SIROTA
Expectant and nursing mothers shall have the protection of the state. There shall be no full -- time employment of children and young people. Freedom of academic teaching, study and lawful research. And they looked at my draft and Colonel Cadeys said the fundamental rights you have written are fine. But all these social welfare rights, we don=t even have those in the American constitution. You=ve gone way beyond the American constitution. And I said Colonel Cadeys, if they are not included in the constitution the bureaucrats who are going to write the civil code of the Japanese constitution will not write those into the civil code. They will not write it into law because I know the bureaucrats in Japan and they are certainly not for women=s rights. And Colonel Cadeys said don=t worry and the other two men with him agreed. And I burst into tears because I was very emotionally involved in the women=s rights.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Eventually, her early draft was boiled down to two revolutionary paragraphs.
BEATE SIROTA
Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation. Laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Her contribution was just one of 103 articles in the constitution that the Americans presented in hours of painstaking discussions with the Japanese that Beate helped translate.
BEATE SIROTA
It was about 2:00 AM when we got to the women=s rights. We had worked from 10:00 AM the morning before and now it was 2:00 AM the next day. And we came to the women=s rights and they were furious, the Japanese representatives. There were three of them. This does not fit into a Japanese constitution. This is against our culture, against our customs. And I think Colonel Cadeys thought my god, this is going to go on for hours again and it=s so late. And he said to them, gentlemen, Ms Sirota has her heart set on the women=s rights. Why don=t we pass them? And I think they were stunned, the Japanese, first of all that he would say such a thing in this top secret, very important meeting and secondly that it was I who had written the women=s rights. They had no inkling about it. They thought I was just an interpreter. And I think they were so stunned that they just passed it. And thus history is made and thus the women got their rights in the Japanese constitution.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
Nine months after that feverish week of activity, the constitution that Beate helped write became law.
BEATE SIROTA
I remember sitting in the diet building and watching the emperor and I remember him opening the document and it was a scroll. And I remember his hands trembling as he read it. The Japanese who were there did not know that we had written the original draft. Nobody knew, really. We kept it as secret as we could even, of course, after we had written it because MacArthur wanted very much for the Japanese to accept this document as a Japanese document.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
It was decades before Beate=s involvement in that historic event would become public knowledge. But in recent years, her visits to Japan have been marked by her celebrity status. Since the story of her contribution to the Japanese constitution became known, she has become something of a feminist icon.
1ST JAPANESE WOMAN
You are the best person, I want to say, in the world.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
She has traveled across Japan speaking to gatherings mainly of women.
BEATE SIROTA
They always want their picture taken with me. They always want to shake my hand. They always tell me how grateful they are. I=m always on a high when I=m in Japan. I=m surrounded by so much love and it=s really inspiring.
CAROL GLUCK, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
Women today are admiring and disbelieving that this young woman did this all by herself. So the fact that women regard Beate both as a heroine to women and also as quite an incredible personage who managed to do this.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
So enamored are some women in Japan that they formed a Beate Appreciation Society and have designed this scarf commemorating Article 24 to raise money to have a movie made about her story. The scarf and her autobiography have been selling briskly. She has also been the focus of numerous television documentaries, a stage play performed in Tokyo and Japanese comic books known as manga, which are ready by millions of Japanese both young and old.
CAROL GLUCK
Here is this woman who knew Japanese, was so strong minded and as the only woman in the room made the most she could out of that position. And so Japanese women owe her a lot. And that=s why they are fascinated, as we are, with her story.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
She receives fan mail from Japanese women that is positively gushing. AWe Japanese women owe you so much,@ writes one. AThe savior of Japanese women,@ says another. And this from a school girl. AWe take for granted the tremendous efforts you have taken to free the women of Japan.@
CAROL GLUCK
And they look to her, I think, for her force of personality, not for her aura of political ideology or agenda. It=s Beate Gordon as an individual woman and what she managed to do that people find so irresistible.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
That is clear among the women who come to hear her speak.
2ND JAPANESE WOMAN
She encouraged me and all of the Japanese women.
TED KOPPEL (VO)
And for this young woman not much older than Beate was when she wrote the constitution, nothing but respect. If she wasn=t around at that time, you know, I don=t know how things would be now, she says. And this woman was struck by Beate=s benevolence. You know, we Japanese lost the war, she says, but we received a great gift from Beate.
BEATE SIROTA
Many things happened to me through my education, through my parents, through the women that I met in my life to enable me and enabled me all along to do the kind of work that I did. Oh, I don=t feel like an icon. I think I just, I feel that in my life I was very lucky in that I was at the right place at the right time.
TED KOPPEL
What is especially refreshing about tonight=s story is what it says about expertise. If the Japanese constitution had been drafted at any other time under any other circumstances, who would have dared suggest that anyone but a group of Japanese men could be qualified? In 1946, no Japanese woman would have been invited to join such a group. But as a defeated nation, Japan had no choice. Even though Japanese experts were consulted, the constitution was authored by a bunch of Americans, including a 22-year-old woman. And today, the Japanese people would be among the first to concede that it=s a constitution that has served them remarkably well.
Content and copyright 8 1998 ABC News. Transcript by Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.