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Her father's reputation was such that over the next years he performed classical piano recitals not only in Japan but also in China, Korea and Manchuria, taught music at Tokyo's prestigious Imperial Academy and gave private lessons at home. Suspicious of him teaching not only Japanese students but ones from Korea, Manchuria, Europe, America and Russia, this
last activity brought him under surveillance by the Kempeitai (Military Police Corps).
As political events unfolded in Europe, her German school increasingly mirrored the National Socialist metamorphosis, and when she was 12 her parents transferred her to Tokyo's American School. In 1939 she moved to California to study.
After Pearl Harbor left her stranded and alone in December 1941, as one of fewer than 100 Caucasians with Japanese language fluency nationally, she was exempted from attending classes at Mills College while working for the Office of War Information's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, monitoring radio broadcasts and writing propaganda. She obtained her bachelor's degree in modern languages in 1943.
On Christmas Eve 1945, her parents' fates unknown, she flew into Atsugi Airport near Yokohama, the first female civilian flown into Occupied Japan. She quickly established that her parents had survived internment and were at the family's summer home in Karuizawa. She set about working on a hush-hush and politically sensitive project: the American rushdrafting of post-war Japan's Constitution.
For all its industrial-military modernity, Japan was an oppressive feudal state. It discriminated against its indigenous Ainu tribal people and operated a caste system based on occupation or descent, with discrimination against the Burakumin a match for India's against its Untouchables. Japan also granted most women little status beyond that of chattels for buying and selling.
Sirota was not a legislator or a lawyer, yet she had a unique cultural and linguistic appreciation and overview of Japanese ways, and her clear-sighted reforms parallel Dr BR Ambedkar's drafting of India's constitution.
Facing a defeated nation and fearing Soviet intervention, the Douglas MacArthur-directed team had fewer political impediments and drove through democratic changes.