Thread by @MikeBosack

Need some inspiration to start your week? Let me tell you about another of my #heroes,

Beate Sirota Gordon,

who at just 22 years of age became the godmother of women's rights in postwar #Japan...1/

2/Beate Sirota was born in 1923 in Vienna, Austria, to Jewish parents.

Fortunately for them, Leo Sirota's piano skills gave them the opportunity to move to Japan long before Nazism had consumed their country.

3/Beate attended the American School in Japan after transferring from the German school (which was "too Nazi" according to her father), but she traveled around Japan becoming fluent in the culture and the language.

4/Sirota later moved to the US for college, but that was when Japan started its conquest of Asia. Her parents were interred in Japan, and Beate was alone in the States.

So what'd she do? She went to work for the War Department, using her Japanese language skills for Intel work.

5/When the war ended, she immediately traveled to Japan to serve in the General Headquarters (GHQ) of Occupation forces.

She started as an interpreter (fluency in five languages certainly made her an asset), but her role would change in 1946.

6/Soon after the formal surrender in Sep 1945, it fell on Japanese officials to draft a new, liberal constitution. The GHQ issued directives for what should be incorporated in the constitution (things like renunciation of war & removal of the emperor from governance, etc.)

7/The Japanese constitutional debates were..well...lacking. You should see some of the early Japanese recommendations that were sent to the GHQ for consideration. Most were a rewording of the 1868 Meiji Constitution...

8/...for example, the Japanese proposals submitted on 8 February 1946 offered this change:
ORIGINAL
"The emperor is sacred and inviolable..."

PROPOSED
"The emperor is supreme and inviolable..."

Yup, it was clear that more drastic action was necessary.

9/MacArthur was fed up, so the GHQ concurrently worked on a separate draft to submit to the Japanese.

It was the GHQ's Government Section that was responsible for it. (Fun fact: that section still exists in its evolved form today as @USForcesJapan's Government Relations branch)

10/The staff knew they needed articles on egalitarianism & women's rights, but the GHQ was full of male troops. To their credit, they didn't think women's rights should be dictated by a man.

So the task went to 22-year old Beate Sirota.

11/It would have been easy for Beate to give into imposter syndrome & self-doubt. However, she knew she had intimate knowledge of gender roles in Japan. She supplemented that by diving into constitutional law & seeking as many precedential examples as possible to guide her hand.

12/It's not like she had much to work from; after all, it's not as if 1946 was a banner year for women anywhere in the world, and the UN Declaration on Human Rights was still two years away.

So, Beate Sirota took the opportunity to set some new precedent.

13/The articles covering egalitarianism & women's rights effectively overturned an institutionalized system that had been in place for centuries.

It's not to say that problems don't still exist, but the effect in Japan was immediate and profound.

14/Case-in-point: In 1947, 83 women ran for election in the newly formed Japanese Diet, and 39 of them won seats.

Had it not been for the GHQ & Beate Sirota Gordon, that number probably would have been zero.

15/Afterwards, Beate kept quiet about her role at the GHQ for decades. During that time, she became involved in the performing arts and quietly continued to champion equality & women's rights.

It wasn't until the 1990s that she opened up about her experiences in the GHQ.

16/In 1998, the Japanese govt recognized Beate for her contributions to Japan by bestowing upon her the Order of the Sacred Treasure.

But perhaps the real symbol of achievement is that the constitution this incredible woman helped draft has remained unchanged to this day.