At 22, Beate Sirota Gordon almost single-handedly wrote women's rights into the constitution of modern Japan and then kept silent about it, only to become a feminist heroine there in recent years.

Beate Sirota was born on October 25, 1923, in Vienna, where her Russian Jewish parents - Leo Sirota, a pianist, and his wife, Augustine (nee Horenstein) - had settled. When Beate was five, Leo was invited to teach at the Imperial Academy of Music in Tokyo. Beate was educated at a German school in Tokyo and then, after the school became far too Nazified for her parents' liking, at the American School in Japan. In 1939, she left for college in California.

Worked for General MacArthur as an interpreter … Beate Gordon.

By this time, she was fluent in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Russian, and she took a job at a government listening post in San Francisco, monitoring Tokyo radio broadcasts. She later worked in San Francisco for the Office of War Information. When the war ended, she didn't know whether her parents had survived.

Travel to Japan was all but impossible so she secured a job as an interpreter on General MacArthur's staff. Arriving in a devastated Tokyo on Christmas Eve, 1945, she went to her family's house and found only a single charred pillar. She eventually found her parents starving and nursed them while continuing her work for MacArthur.