Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan

2. Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonial Genealogies: Women’s Enfranchisement and Constitutional Revision

2 Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonial Genealogies Women’s Enfranchisement and Constitutional Revision B eate Sirota Gordon’s 1997 memoir, The Only Woman in the Room, opens with a chapter titled “Homecoming.” The time is 1945, and the setting is Japan, where Gordon is being sent as a member of the American occupation forces. The title is “Homecoming” because to her, Japan was home. Born in Vienna in 1923, Gordon spent her childhood , the late 1920s and 1930s, in Tokyo, prior to immigrating to the United States. Japan was also where her Russian Jewish parents, Leo and Augustine Sirota, had been stranded since the beginning of the Pacific War. The foremost personal goal of her return was to find her parents, from whom she had not heard in several years. Flying in, Gordon saw enormous devastation: “Charred ruins and solitary chimneys . . . stood up from the bare red earth like nails.” As she recalls, “[l]ooking down, I knew beyond a doubt that the Japanese were finished.” As her plane approached Atsugi Airport, where Douglas MacArthur had triumphantly landed several months earlier, the Americans on board were ecstatic with the panorama of their victory, but Gordon’s reaction was distinctly different: The soldiers on the plane whistled and flocked to the windows, exulting openly, but I felt numb with shock. We were all American citizens assigned to the General Headquarters of SCAP (Supreme Commander Allied Power), where General Douglas MacArthur Feminism, Nationalism, and Colonial Genealogies / 33 wasdirectingtheoccupation,butatthemomentIwasbroughtupshort by the differences between us. To me, Japan meant home, the country where I had been brought up and where my parents still lived.1 Following the account of her arrival, Gordon’s memoir takes us back to the Sirota family’s emigration from Europe to Japan in the 1920s, when Leo Sirota, a renowned pianist, was invited to chair the Piano Department at the Japanese Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Her life story then proceeds in chronological order: her growing up in prewar Japan, moving to the United States to attend college, obtaining American citizenship, returning to postwar Japan and authoring the women’s rights articles in Japan’s new constitution, and finally moving back to the United States to pursue her career and family life. Central to her narrative is her involvement in the revision of Japan’s constitution, a revision intended to transform Japan’s political, economic, and social systems. In her early twenties and fresh out of college, she had absolutely no constitutional or legal knowledge. She was confident, however, that she “knew” Japan, especially women’s lives, because of her childhood experience in prewar Tokyo. Being “the only woman” on the all-American—and all white and almost all male—team drafting the constitution, she was driven by the conviction that she alone was responsible for emancipating Japanese women. Using the Weimar and Soviet constitutions as her model, she drafted women’s rights articles. That the articles pertaining to women’s rights in the new constitution were written singlehandedly by a woman member of the U.S. occupation forces has not escaped the attention of women’s studies scholars. In both Japan and the United States, Gordon has been celebrated as a symbol of international feminism, a woman who brought emancipation to Japanese women. Gordon is not the only member of the occupation forces hailed as a liberator of Japanese women. General Douglas MacArthur continues to be a central figure in the narratives of Japanese women’s emancipation in the U.S. occupation of Japan. As the story goes, even before MacArthur reached Japan, he spoke of his deep concern for the low status of Japanese women, telling an aide that the liberation of women would be one of the priorities of his democratization efforts. In his autobiography, Reminiscences, MacArthur, who embodies American military prowess, portrays himself as a staunch advocate of women’s causes. His support for women’s suffrage provoked heavy criticism from those who believed that Japanese women, confined for centuries in their feudal and patriarchal tradition, would be unable to exercise political rights. However, asserting absolute confidence in Japanese women, MacArthur granted them the right to vote, thereby ensuring his renown as an advocate and liberator of Japanese women.2 34 / Chapter 2 In existing occupation narratives, MacArthur and Gordon are thus celebrated as champions of Japanese women. According to these narratives, acting on strong, personal beliefs, the two initiated remarkable reforms...