Beate Sirota Gordon

Beate Sirota Gordon (/beɪˈɑːteɪ/) October 25, 1923 – December 30, 2012) was an Austrian-born American performing arts presenter and women's rights advocate. She was the former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society and the Asia Society, and was one of the last surviving members of the team that worked under Douglas MacArthur to write the Constitution of Japan after World War II.

Early life and education

Born in Vienna on October 25, 1923, and educated in Tokyo, Beate Sirota was the only child of Augustine (Horenstein) and noted pianist Leo Sirota, a Ukrainian Jew who had fled war-torn Russia and settled in Austria. Her uncle was conductor Jascha Horenstein. Sirota's family emigrated to Japan in 1929, when Leo Sirota accepted an invitation to become a professor at the Imperial Academy of Music – now Tokyo University of the Arts – in Tokyo. She attended the German School in Tokyo for six years, until the age of twelve, when she transferred to the American School (also in Tokyo) as a result of her parents deeming the German School "too Nazi". Beate Sirota lived in Tokyo a total of ten years before she moved to Oakland, California in 1939 to attend Mills College, where she was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and graduated in 1943 with a bachelor's degree in modern languages. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in January 1945.