Every country has its own heroes of female emancipation, some unlikelier than others. Austrian-Ukrainian Beate Sirota moved with her parents to Japan in 1929 when she was six. Ten years later she was sent to college in California, and because of the war she lost contact with her parents. She went back to occupied Japan after the peace as a translator for the US Army, mostly in order to reconnect with her family. One of the US Army’s first tasks was to draw up an entirely new constitution in just seven days and Sirota was enlisted to assist. Since she was the only woman on the subcommittee on
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