As a teenager, she recalled, Japanese girl friends would "prepare for marriage, learning flower arranging, but would not even meet their future husbands."
The outbreak of war caught her at Mills College in Oakland, California, and her parents at home in Tokyo. She spent the war years making American government radio broadcasts beamed to Japan and researching Japan for Time magazine. After the war she raced to Tokyo to track down her parents, who had been detained in a mountain village. As one of a handful of Caucasians with a strong command of Japanese, she became the translator for the Constitution writers.
In her memoir, The Only Woman in the Room, she recounts how in the grueling days of debates as the Constitution took form, almost all of the clauses that emerged from her Underwood typewriter ended up in the trash basket.
"Colonel Kades said, `My God, you have given Japanese women more rights than in the American Constitution,"' she recalled, referring to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Kades, head of the constitutional steering committee. "I said, `Colonel Kades, that's not very difficult to do, because women are not in the American Constitution.'"
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