Koko Kondo's voice is one that has echoed through history – a survivor's haunting account of the Hiroshima atomic bombing on 6 August 1945. As an eight-month-old infant, she was caught in the blast with her mother Chisa at their parsonage, less than a mile from ground zero. The sheer scale of destruction would forever be etched in Kondo's psyche, and yet it is a story that has only recently begun to unfold.
On that fateful day, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Kondo's father, was elsewhere in the city. A subsequent feature in John Hersey's seminal 1946 New Yorker article brought his harrowing experiences to a global audience – alongside those of five other survivors – for the first time. The piece, later published as the bestselling book 'Hiroshima', remains an unparalleled account of nuclear devastation.
Kondo had long struggled to confront the trauma she endured that day. Her mother's four-decade silence on the matter was mirrored in her own reluctance to speak out about being a 'hibakusha' – a survivor of the atomic bombings. However, the discovery of her father's 230-page diary in Hersey's archive at Yale University has been a game-changer for Kondo.
The previously unknown account, which provides an unflinching portrayal of Reverend Tanimoto's desperate search for survivors from his Methodist church, is set to be published with Kondo's moving introduction. In it, she reflects on the bittersweet gratitude she feels for a life that nearly slipped away and her position as one of the remaining hibakusha – witnesses to an unprecedented tragedy in human history.
Kondo's courageous decision to share her story and her father's account underlines the enduring significance of the atomic bomb. As John Hersey wrote in 1985, it is 'memory' that has kept the world safe from nuclear catastrophe since 1945 – not deterrence. The efforts of Kondo and other hibakusha serve as a poignant reminder of the humanitarian consequences of nuclear warfare, urging future generations to strive for a world free from such devastation.