Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, Episode 59, The Only Women in the Room.

This week I want to take some time to talk about the lives of two women, who, though by all

accounts they were not exactly fond of each other, are generally considered to be two of the

most influential figures in post-war Japanese history, despite the fact that both of them

were Americans.

The first was a Russian Jewish woman named Biatta Sarota.

Sorota was born on August 25, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, to Augustine and Leo Sarota.

Leo, her father, was an immensely talented concert pianist who had fled Tsarist Russia,

technically what is now the Ukraine,

after the Russian Revolution,

fearing, not without cause, that the communists would kill him.

However, opportunities were not tremendous in Austria either.

So in 1929, the family jumped at the chance

when the Chancellor of Tokyo Gajits Daigaku,

Tokyo Arts University, Masagi Naohiko, offered Leo Sarota a position as an instructor of piano.

The family relocated to Tokyo with young Biata, a girl of only six, and for the next 10 years,

that was where she would live. Well there, she got to see Japanese only six, and for the next ten years that was where she would live.

Well there, she got to see Japanese life firsthand, and her later recollections described the

position of Japanese women in society as deeply disturbing to her.

Japanese women, she learned, were prohibited from divorcing their husbands for all but the most

egregious crimes, could not vote, were limited in their occupations and faced a slew of other blocks to social

advancement. Even in daily life, seemingly minor things underlined the subordination

...