Beate Sirota Gordon was born in Vienna in 1923. Her father Leo Sirota, Russian by birth, was a concert pianist, and her mother, Augustine Sirota, was famed as a gracious hostess. She remembers her early childhood home as a gathering place for such notables as Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill, Alma Mahler, and Sergei Koussevitsky. Leo Sirota was invited to perform in Manchuria and Japan in 1930, met an enthusiastic reception, and decided to stay in Tokyo, a fortunate decision as it turned out, given his Jewish ancestry and the rise of Hitler. He was befriended by prominent Japanese musical figures Yamada Kosaku and Konoe Hidemarô, gave recitals and piano lessons, and became a professor in the piano department of the Imperial Academy of Music. Young Beate Sirota grew up in 1930s Tokyo where she learned to speak but not to read Japanese, took Japanese dance lessons, and attended the German School and the American School. The Sirotas lost relatives in the Holocaust, but Beate and her parents would survive. Although Japan was allied with Germany in World War II, it did not enforce the final solution—extermination of the Jews.

Beate's parents sent her to the United States in August 1939, age sixteen, for higher education at Mills College in Oakland, California, a women's college headed by a woman president. When the war came in December 1941, she was cut off from her parents. They had intended to visit her in the late fall of 1941 and were passengers on a Japanese ship which was forced to turn back shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Sirotas were not incarcerated as Civilian Internees but instead were sent with other foreigners to Karuizawa, in better times a popular summer retreat in the mountains. While still at Mills College, Beate’s knowledge of spoken Japanese became useful to the American government. She helped to interpret Radio Tokyo overseas broadcasts for the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, worked for the Office of War Information. After graduation, she found a job in New York as a researcher for Time magazine, a publication which at that time did not hire women as writers. At war's end, she was eager to be reunited with her parents. She was accepted as a Department of the Army civilian (DAC), and at age twenty-two was among the first civilian foreign women allowed to enter Occupied Japan.

Assigned to the Government Section (headed by General Courtney Whitney), Beate, to her surprise, was appointed in early February 1946 to a small group of about twenty Americans, including a few other women, to write a model draft constitution for the Japanese in complete secrecy over a nine day period. As she relates in her memoir, she served with two older men on the Subcommittee on Civil Rights. Recalling the low position of Japanese women Beate had observed during her childhood years, she was largely responsibile for phrasing the equal rights passages in the draft—in effect banning social, political, or economic discrimination against women. To support her position, she had scoured libraries in Tokyo for copies of various national constitutions. Beate was also on hand as a translator-interpreter in a marathon thirty-six hour session in early March when Japanese and Americans exhaustively contested the language and terms of the model draft. A fellow interpreter was American Army Lt. Joseph Gordon, who had been trained during the war as a Japanese linguist. Subsequently, Beate was assigned to work on the economic purge—the removal of designated businessmen from high company positions for alleged war mongering activities. In return, she became one of the civilian members of the Occupation who was hounded for alleged leftist views by General Charles Willoughby, head of counter-intelligence. In 1947, Beate returned to New York, married Lt. Gordon in 1948, had two children, and became head of the Performing Arts Division of the Japan Society of New York, 1954-1991. As Beate Sirota Gordon, she was on occasion tapped to accompany famous Japanese who toured the United States, including suffragist Ichikawa Fusae in 1952. She also befriended a young Japanese student at Sarah Lawrence College named Yoko Ono, a connection that allowed her son and daughter to meet the Beatles in later years.

In the early 1960s, Columbia University recruited Beate to conduct fourteen oral histories of Americans in the Allied Occupation, including New Dealer Charles Kades, deputy chief of the Government Section, 1945-1949, a Wall Street lawyer in subsequent years, and a close friend. Other interviews included chief wartime planners for the Occupation at the expert level: Foreign Service Officer Eugene Dooman, born in Japan of missionary parents and Deputy Chief of Mission under Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo, 1937-1941; and Dr. Hugh Borton, the first American to earn a Ph.D. in Japanese history and one of the founders of the Department of Chinese and Japanese at Columbia before the onset of the Pacific War. Also included was a rare interview with Kume Ai, one of Japan’s first women lawyers and reluctant to be viewed as an Occupation collaborator. Many of these interviews have become available in a New York Times microfilm edition. Gordon herself granted an interview to the University of Maryland Oral History Project on Americans in Occupied Japan. In the early years of the Committee on East Asian Studies at Maryland (founded 1969) helped bring Japanese dancers to the recital hall of the then new, now old, Tawes Fine Arts Building. In April 1987, Beate and Joe Gordon were invited to the University of Maryland as part of a public panel, “We the People, Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of Japan's Constitution,” moderated by the editor of this site. The panel, a reunion of nine members of the Occupation who were closely involved in the making or monitoring of the draft constitution, included Charles Kades, Justin Williams, and Richard Poole. It was videotaped and may be viewed at the Nonprint Media Section, Hornbake Library.

In the 1990s, Beate Sirota Gordon became internationally famous, to the point of an icon. She appeared on National Public Radio, in Occupation documentaries, and on the late night television show, Nightline. A play, "A String of Pearls," has been produced about her in Japan, where she has a loyal following of women who also raised funds to make a documentary film, "A Gift from Beate" (2005), highlighting her contribution to civil rights and equality of the sexes. In 1998, she was decorated by the Japanese government. Questions have been raised in recent feminist scholarship, some of it forgetful of Japan's own imperial past and the colonial gaze of Japanese women, about the nature of Gordon’s contributions to Japanese women’s rights, suggesting that she lived a privileged life in 1930s Tokyo and returned to Occupied Japan as a well-meaning but nevertheless Western imperial woman with a sense of superiority. The application of social science theory in this case may seem a bit thin when one remembers her long standing career in cultural exchange and sophisticated appreciation of Japanese and Asian performing arts. One thing, however, which seems to be missing from her memoir (and adulatory websites) is greater emphasis on the home-grown efforts of Japanese women to bring about political and legal reform—in effect, a women's movement with roots in the late 19th century. Moreover, Japanese women had already received the vote in Diet legislation passed in December 1945 when the voting age for men and woman was lowered from age twenty-five to twenty. They were actively campaigning for rights even as the young Beate Sirota Gordon was working on the draft model constitution.

In recent years she has spoken out in support of altering the Japanese law (the Imperial Household Law) to allow women to become Emperor and exhorted Japanese women to protect their rights against the attempts at consitutional revision.