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    The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts
    Unavailable
    The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts
    Unavailable
    The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts
    Ebook214 pages3 hours

    The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts

    By Beate Sirota Gordon, John W. Dower, Nicole A. Gordon and Geoffrey Paul Gordon

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    About this ebook

    In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution. The Only Woman in the Room chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitution; how she almost single-handedly ensured that it would establish the rights of Japanese women; and how, as a fluent speaker of Japanese and the only woman in the room, she assisted the American negotiators as they worked to persuade the Japanese to accept the new charter.

    Sirota was born in Vienna, but in 1929 her family moved to Japan so that her father, a noted pianist, could teach, and she grew up speaking German, English, and Japanese. Russian, French, Italian, Latin, and Hebrew followed, and at fifteen Sirota was sent to complete her education at Mills College in California. The formal declaration of World War II cut Gordon off from her parents, and she supported herself by working for a CBS listening post in San Francisco that would eventually become part of the FCC. Translating was one of Sirota’s many talents, and when the war ended, she was sent to Japan as a language expert to help the American occupation forces. When General MacArthur suddenly created a team that included Sirota to draft the new Japanese Constitution, he gave them just eight days to accomplish the task. Colonel Roest said to Beate Sirota, “You’re a woman, why don’t you write the women’s rights section?”; and she seized the opportunity to write into law guarantees of equality unparalleled in the US Constitution to this day.

    But this was only one episode in an extraordinary life, and when Gordon died in December 2012, words of grief and praise poured from artists, humanitarians, and thinkers the world over. Illustrated with forty-seven photographs, The Only Woman in the Room captures two cultures at a critical moment in history and recounts, after a fifty-year silence, a life lived with purpose and courage. This edition contains a new afterword by Nicole A. Gordon and an elegy by Geoffrey Paul Gordon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateApr 11, 2014
    ISBN9780226132655
    Unavailable
    The Only Woman in the Room: A Memoir of Japan, Human Rights, and the Arts

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    Reviews for The Only Woman in the Room

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    • 3/5
      Six-word review: European woman helps define postwar Japan.Beate Sirota Gordon tells her story capably enough, but it's nothing brilliant. The most striking thing about it is its brevity. I know I wouldn't be capable of telling a minor fraction of my unremarkable history in 171 pages, much less a life as vivid, varied, and consequential as hers. She has a memoirist's knack of letting representative observations and anecdotes convey a sense of events rather than narrating them in exhaustive detail.Indisputably, the author (who died in 2012 at age 89) led a noteworthy life spanning three continents, both in the performing arts and in her pivotal role as one of the authors of the Japanese constitution drafted by General MacArthur's team in 1946. But my rating is not of her life or deeds but of her book. And I'm more impressed by the one than by the other.
    • 4/5
      In Oct. 2007 I had the privilege of hearing Ms.Gordon speak at a renowned women's college in Tokyo. Now in her 80s, Ms. Gordon traveled from her home in the US to visit again the country of her youth, Japan. She spoke in Japanese for over an hour, giving a summary of her life, but most importantly, stressing the importance of the Equal Rights Clause of Japan's consititution, which by quirk of fate she had written. The Only Woman in the Room, a brief memoir, which includes her contribution to the history of post-war Japan, is refreshingly modest. For some 50 years after the Pacific War, the details of the drafting of Japan's constitution by the 'allied powers' (General MacArthur) had been kept quiet, much of it classified secret documents. To the world, appearances were kept as if the Japanese had drafted their own constitution, but in reality it was strictly managed by MacArthur. Given the prevailing gender chauvinism of Japan (and even the west) at that time, if Ms. Gordon and another woman (economist Eleanor Hadley) had not been present, articulate, and assertive, there would possibly have been no 'equal rights clause' set forth in Japan's constitution. Had Ms. Gordon not had experience growing up in Japan, fluency in the language and knowlege of the plight of women, equal rights in Japan might have taken many more years to arrive. Speaking before a group of future women leaders of Japan, Ms. Gordon was living testimony to the fact that today's Japanese women have rights of marriage, divorce, voting, owning property, etc., which was not true prior to 1946. It seems she has always been the type of person so involved in living life that to stop and record all of it in detail would have gotten in the way of living it. Certainly her biography would be a sweeping epic, from her parents' roots in Russia, her father's respected talent as a musician and teacher, through the chaos of the war in Europe, loss of family in Hitler's holocaust, her parents' surviving the war as "non-persons" in Japan, her US college education, her linguistic contributions to the war effort, and so on. Despite all this, I believe perhaps Ms. Gordon does not view herself as being that different from thousands of others who lived through those years, but she did have extraordinary talent and the luck to be in the right place at the right time.