Beate Sirota

Beate Sirota Gordon (born in Vienna, October 25, 1923) is a former Performing Arts Director of the Japan Society and of Asia Society, and was a member of the team that worked under Douglas MacArthur on the Constitution of Japan. She is the only child of pianist Leo Sirota, a Ukrainian Jew who had fled war-torn Russia and settled in Vienna, Austria. Sirota's family later emigrated to Japan, where Leo Sirota taught at the Imperial Academy of Music (now Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music) in Tokyo. She attended the German School for six years, until the age of 12, when she transferred to the American School in Japan as a result of her parents deeming the German School "too Nazi"; she lived in Tokyo a total of ten years before...