The right person, at the right place and time...
“In life, as in comedy, timing is everything” goes a popular adage in the United States.
It took an obit on New Year Day to disprove, at least
partially, this saying.
Until that day, I’ve never heard of the name Beate
Gordon. But what a story that was. And what an achievement, all for
being the right person, at the right place and the right time.
On August 15, 1945 Japan surrendered and thus ended the Second World War.
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Pacific front, received
the mandate to reconstruct and reorganize the Japanese society, a task he took
on with gusto.
By February 1946, he needed a new constitution for Japan; he
formed a team of about two dozens young staffers and gave them a week to come
up with a document to govern Japan. Among this team was a sole woman,
Beate Gordon, 22 years old at the time.
For seven days, Beate feverishly searched all remaining records and libraries
that survived both the war and the bombing to find model languages for one of
her particular interest: women’s dignity in Japan.
The result of her work was two clauses in the Constitution that read:
Article 14, said in part, “All of
the people are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in
political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social
status or family origin".
And Article 24 gave women protections in areas including “choice of spouse,
property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other
matters". Since taking effect in 1947, Japan’s Constitution has
changed the life of women in that country for the better and decisively. Today,
it can be readily observed that Japanese women are better educated, more
financially secure, and enjoying more freedom than most of their Asian
counterparts.
But the really fascinating part of this story has less to do with the justice
that Japanese women enjoy - important as that is - than how it came
about. It started with a person. Beate was born in Austria in
1923, from Russian Jewish parents, Leo Sirota and Augustine
Horenstein. Her father was a concert pianist and when she was 5, he was
invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo, where he stayed
until after WW II. Beate studied at first at the German school in Tokyo,
but when that school became too Nazified after the rise of the Third Reich, her
parents switched her to the American School in Japan. She graduated at
16, and went to California to study at Mills College, at that time still an
all-girl school, while her parents remained in Japan.
Two years later, in December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and the U.S.
joined the ongoing World War II, with Japan, Italy and Germany as the
Axis enemy. Needless to say, Beate lost track of her parents as well as
her source of financial support. She joined the war effort in the
U.S., both to try to locate her family and to support herself.
Because she was fluent in many languages, thanks to her background and her
international education - English, French, Japanese, Spanish, Russian and
of course German - Beate was hired first to work in San Francisco to
monitor radio broadcasts from Tokyo, then for the U.S. Office of War
Information to work in psychological warfare.
She graduated from Mills College with a degree in modern languages in 1943 and
became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945. At the end of the war, she obtained
a job as an interpreter on MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo. Eventually she
found her parents , malnourished and interned in the countryside, but alive.
So Beate Gordon had the fluency in languages as the means and the position on
MacArthur’s staff as the opportunity to do good. But not everyone with
the means and the opportunity would rise to the occasion, as we’ve witnessed so
many political or financial leaders around the world, from antiquities to the
present. There must be something else.
That “extra ingredient”, I surmise, is the fact that Beat was a woman and that
she had lived for more than decade in Tokyo during the years leading to WW
II. Another young man could have grown up in Japan at the same
time, under similar circumstances, but I doubt that he would have taken the
treatment of women as inferior beings as anything out of the ordinary or
unacceptable, just as it was the case everywhere else in the world.
If I have to venture a guess, I’d say that both because she was an intelligent
young woman and because her own Jewish heritage had experienced exile,
persecution, narrow escapes and survival… Beate would have observed more
keenly, and empathized far more deeply, with the plight of Japanese women among
whom she grew up.
That vivid empathy would have energized young Miss Sirota to make the best of
her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and really changed the fortune of all women
in Japan. She did give her best shot, and the result speaks for itself today
and in the future.
So, “timing is NOT everything”, after all.
Vu-Duc Vuong is the Director
of the General Education Program at Hoa Sen University,HCMC.
