第二次世界大戦後、ＧＨＱ（連合国軍総司令部）民政局員として日本国憲法の男 女平等などの条項を起草した米国人女性、ベアテ・シロタ・ゴードン女史が１２月３０日(土)に膵臓癌のため、ニューヨーク市内の自宅で死亡しました。享年８９歳でした。(1923年生まれですから一昨年亡くなった Ernesto Mr. T の母と同い年だったわけです。)
ゴードン女史は生前、「日本の憲法は米国の憲法より素晴らしい。決して『押しつけ』ではない」と主張 し、９条（戦争放棄）を含む改憲の動きに反対していました。親族は、故人への供花をする代わりに、大江健三郎らが設立した「９条の会」への寄付など を呼びかけています。
１９２３年、ウィーン生まれ。有名ピアニストだった父が東京音楽学校（現東京芸大）に招かれたことに伴 い、一家で来日。５歳から１５歳まで東京で暮らしました。この日本での10年弱の生活で、ベアテはすでにロシア語（両親の母語）、ドイツ語（幼少時代とドイツ学園）、フランス語（家庭教師）、英語（家庭教師）、スペイン語、ラテン語（ドイツ学園とアメリカン・スクール）、さらに日本語と計7言語を習得していました。16歳になる少し前に米国の大学に進学しましたが、2年後に太平洋戦争が開戦してしまいました。ニューヨークで米タイム誌に勤務していたころ、日本に残った両親 の無事を知りＧＨＱの民間人要員に応募、1945年に再来日しました。
２５人の民政局員の中では最年少の２２歳でした。憲法起草委員会では人権部門を担当しました。１０年間の日本生活で、貧しい家の少女の身売りなどを見知っていたことなどから、女性の地位向上を提案したそうです。１４条（法の下の平等）や２４条（両性の平等）に反映されました。
米国に戻った後もしばしば講演などで来日しました。2000年５月２日には国会の憲法調査会で意見陳述し、「日本国憲法は世界に誇るモデルだから５０年以上も改正されなかった。他の国にその精神を広げてほしい」と訴えました。
また、ニューヨークの日米交流団体「ジャパン・ソサエティー」などに勤務し、文化の橋渡し役としても活躍しました。
Беа́та Го́рдон (англ. Beate Sirota Gordon; * 25 жовтня 1923, Відень) ― † 30 грудня 2012 ― американська громадська діячка. Феміністка, борець за права жінок. Донька єврейського піаніста-віртуоза Лео Сироти.
Автор спогадів «Єдина жінка у кімнаті» («The Only Woman in the Room»).
Beate Sirota Gordon, the daughter of Russian ( Ukrainian ) Jewish parents who at 22 almost single-handedly wrote women’s rights into the Constitution of modern Japan, and then kept silent about it for decades, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years, died of pancreatic cancer on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.
A civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army of occupation after World War II, Ms. Gordon was the last living member of the American team that wrote Japan’s postwar Constitution.
Her work ― drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society ― had an effect on their status that endures to this day.
It set a basis for a better, a more equal society. By just writing those things into the Constitution ― the Constitution of the U.S. doesn’t have any of those things ― Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?
If Ms. Gordon, neither lawyer nor constitutional scholar, was indeed an unlikely candidate for the task, then it is vital to understand the singular confluence of forces that brought her to it:
Had her father not been a concert pianist of considerable renown; had she not been so skilled at foreign languages; and had she not been desperate to find her parents, from whom she was separated during the war and whose fate she did not know for years, she never would have been thrust into her quiet, improbable role in world history.
Nor would she have been apt to embark on her later career as a prominent cultural impresario, one of the first people to bring traditional Asian performing arts to audiences throughout North America ― a job, pursued vigorously until she was nearly 70, that entailed travel to some of Asia’s most remote, inaccessible reaches.
The daughter of Leo Sirota and the former Augustine Horenstein, Beate Sirota was born on Oct. 25, 1923, in Vienna, where her parents had settled.
When she was 5, her father was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo, and the family moved there for a planned six-month stay. Mr. Sirota soon became revered in Japan as a performer and teacher, and they wound up living in Tokyo for more than a decade.
次の写真は6歳になったばかりのもので、両親と一緒に琴の演奏を¿楽しんで?いるところです。
Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo and, from the mid-1930s on, after the school became far too Nazified for her parents’ liking (ユダヤ系だったことも関係しているのでしょうか), at the American School in Japan. In 1939, shortly before her 16th birthday, she left for Mills College in Oakland, California. Her parents remained in Japan.
In December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it became impossible to contact Japan. Beate had no word from her parents, and no money.
She put her foreign language prowess to work: by this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian. She could read Latin, too.
次の写真は17歳の時、ミルズ大学でのものです。
Obtaining permission from Mills to take examinations without having to attend classes, she took a job at a United States government listening post in San Francisco, monitoring radio broadcasts from Tokyo. She later worked in San Francisco for the United States Office of War Information, writing radio scripts urging Japan to surrender.
Beate Sirota received her bachelor’s degree in modern languages from Mills in 1943 and became a United States citizen in January 1945. At war’s end, she still did not know whether her parents were alive or dead.
For American civilians, travel to Japan was all but impossible. She went to Washington, where she secured a job as an interpreter on General MacArthur’s staff. Arriving in a devastated Tokyo on Christmas Eve 1945, she went immediately to her family’s house. Where it had stood was only a single charred pillar.
She eventually found her parents, who had been interned in the countryside and were malnourished. She took them to Tokyo, where she nursed them while continuing her work for General MacArthur.
One of MacArthur’s first priorities was drafting a constitution for postwar Japan, a top-secret assignment, begun in February 1946, that had to be finished in just seven days. As the only woman assigned to his constitutional committee, along with two dozen men, young Beate Sirota was deputized to compose the section on women’s rights.
She had seen women’s lives firsthand during the 10 years she lived in Japan, and urgently wanted to improve their status.
“Japanese women were historically treated like chattel ( ¡bienes muebles! ); they were property to be bought and sold on a whim,” Ms. Gordon said. “Women had no rights whatsoever.”
Commandeering a jeep at the start of that week in February, she visited the libraries in Tokyo that were still standing, borrowing copies of as many different countries’ constitutions as she could. She steeped herself in them and, after seven days of little sleep, wound up drafting two articles of the proposed Japanese Constitution.
One, 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.” ( Todos los ciudadanos son iguales ante la ley y no existirá discriminación política, económica o social por razones de raza, credo, sexo, condición social o linaje. すべて國民は、法の下に平等であつて、人種、信條、性別、社會的身分又は門地により、政治的、經濟的又は社會的關係において、差別されない。)
The other, Article 24, gave women protections in areas including “choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters.” ( la elección del cónyuge, derechos de propiedad, herencia, elección de domicilio, divorcio y otros asuntos. 配偶者の選擇、財產權、相續、住居の選定、離婚竝びに婚姻及び家族に關するその他の事項に關しては、法律は、個人の尊嚴と兩性の本質的平等に立脚して、制定されなければならない。)
The new Constitution took effect in 1947; the next year, Beate Sirota married Joseph Gordon, who had been the chief interpreter for American military intelligence in postwar Japan.
In the 1950s, Ms. Gordon joined the staff of the Japan Society in New York, becoming its director of performing arts. In that capacity, she introduced many Japanese artists to the West, including masters of traditional music, dance, woodblock printing and the tea ceremony.
In 1970, she became director of performing arts at the Asia Society in New York. She scoured Asia for talent, bringing Balinese gamelan ensembles, Vietnamese puppeteers, Mongolian dancers and many others to stages throughout the United States and Canada. She retired in 1991 as the society’s director of performances, films and lectures.
For decades, Ms. Gordon said nothing about her role in postwar Japan, at first because the work was secret and later because she did not want her youth ― and the fact that she was an American ― to become ammunition for the Japanese conservatives who have long clamored for constitutional revision.
But in the mid-1980s, she began to speak of it publicly. The release of her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room,” published in Japanese in 1995 and in English two years later, made her a celebrity in Japan, where she lectured widely, appeared on television and was the subject of a stage play and a documentary film, “The Gift From Beate.”
In recent years, amid renewed attacks on the Constitution by Japanese conservatives, Ms. Gordon spoke out ardently in its defense.
下の写真は 1998年に日本の国会議事堂内で撮られたものです。
Ms. Gordon was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, a high honor bestowed by the Japanese government, in 1998. But perhaps the greatest accolade she received came from Japanese women themselves.
“They always want their picture taken with me,” Ms. Gordon said. “They always want to shake my hand. They always tell me how grateful they are.”
なお、名前の シロタ Sirota は白田、代田、城田のような日本語とは何の関係もありませんが､来日したとき､「私は専門家ではなくシロタ(素人)です」と日本語で洒落を言っていました。以下の video に その場面が出て来ます。
Somos mortales. 私たちはいつか必ず死にます。最近心身ともに調子が芳しくないので、こういった人の訃報に触れると、ただ自分の人生の味気無さ・無力さを嘆くばかりです。Somos mortales.
P.D. Vivir por comleto su vida 満ち足りた人生 live one's life all the way up
P.D. Vivir por comleto su vida 満ち足りた人生 live one's life all the way up
P.D. 2: igualdad de género 男女格差、Japón 日本 101位､España スペイン 26位
P.D. 3: ところで、Ernesto Mr. T の辺りでは圧倒的に女性の方が強いのですが､スペインでも Valladolid などではその傾向が見られるようです。次の戯画は El Norte de Castilla に載っていたものです。
ご意見、ご質問等ございましたら、
P.D. 3: ところで、Ernesto Mr. T の辺りでは圧倒的に女性の方が強いのですが､スペインでも Valladolid などではその傾向が見られるようです。次の戯画は El Norte de Castilla に載っていたものです。
ご意見、ご質問等ございましたら、
FC2ブログのスペイン語、英語、＋雑学 (補充・再確認版)もどうぞ宜しく。
