‘I never mentioned it for 25 years. I didn’t want to be a victim of the bomb’: Hiroshima survivor Koko Kondo on horror, anger and forgiveness

On that fateful day in 1945, Kondo was just a baby in her mother’s arms. She talks about her father’s newly discovered eye-witness account of the aftermath – and why she decided to continue his work as a peace campaigner

Koko Kondo holds up a tiny salmon-pink dress. “This is what I was wearing,” she says. The dress, with its white-ribboned collar, is in perfect condition. A miracle. On 6 August 1945, Koko was eight months old and crawling on a tatami mat at the family parsonage. Mrs Takaki, a member of the church, had just popped round to have a chat with Chisa, Koko’s mother. Chisa gathered Koko up in her arms so she wouldn’t be a distraction, and they stood by the door. It was 8.15am; a serene summer day in Hiroshima. That was when the uranium-fuelled atom bomb, named Little Boy by the Americans, was dropped. The most deadly bomb in history. Koko and Chisa were buried in the rubble, unable to move. The parsonage roof had crashed down on them. For 40 years, Chisa couldn’t bear to tell Koko about the day, the pink dress, and how they survived. It was too painful.

Today, 81 years on, Koko is talking to me via video link. She is an elegant woman with a kind face and a vertiginous silver quiff. She speaks quietly in perfect English, then surprises you by stamping on a word fiercely to make her point. The virtual background to her screen is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which was built on ground zero, the point directly underneath where the bomb exploded.

Chisa could not breathe and was on the verge of losing consciousness. Koko’s screams brought her round. Chisa eventually clawed her way out of the rubble, baby in one hand, digging with the other. She made a hole big enough to push Koko through, then crawled out after her. “The whole house crashed. If I had still been crawling on the floor, she probably wouldn’t have been able to find me. Without my mother I wouldn’t be here,” Koko says.

The parsonage and the Hiroshima Methodist church were less than a mile from ground zero. Both were destroyed by the blast and subsequent fires, alongside the other homes in the closely packed residential area. Chisa could find nobody to help Mrs Takaki, who was also buried in the wreckage. As for Koko’s father, the Rev Kiyoshi Tanimoto, he was in another part of the city at the time, and he also survived. Koko and her parents were lucky. Two days after the bomb, her aunt came to Hiroshima, with her baby daughter Kumiko, to support them. Kumiko suffered radiation sickness, and died five months later.

Her father often told Koko she was the only baby in the neighbourhood to survive, and that she had a duty to remind the world what had happened. But for half her life, she turned her back on the enormity of the bomb. Like her mother, she found it too much too bear. So she made a new life for herself away from the carnage.

Tanimoto was one of six survivors featured in a seminal 1946 New Yorker article by John Hersey that revealed the bomb’s true impact on the city. Before that, coverage had been limited and censored. Hersey’s 31,000‑word piece filled the whole magazine, which sold out in a few hours. The piece was turned into a bestselling book later that year. It was updated in 1985 when Hersey returned to Hiroshima 40 years on to see what had become of the city and, in particular, the six survivors. In his postscript, he wrote: “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence … so much as it’s been memory.”

A few years ago, an astonishing historical document was discovered in Hersey’s archive at Yale University: Tanimoto’s own real-time account of the disaster, and his hellish search for survivors of the Methodist church he ran. Apart from a handful of academics, nobody knew this 230-page diary existed. It is being published in book form, with a moving introduction by Koko. “I am 81 years old now. I am grateful for the life I almost didn’t have, and I love this world. There are not many of us still alive – the hibakusha, as the survivors are called. We are the only people left who experienced an event that remains unique in human history,” she writes. “My father had been a direct witness to a singular event.” And it has taken until now for the world to read this astonishing testimony to our capacity for barbarity and the power of human resilience.

* * *

There were about 350,000 people in Japan’s seventh largest city the day it was bombed. The heat after the bomb exploded was 3,000-4,000C (5,400‑7,200F) at ground level. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people died instantly or on the day, and by the end of 1945 the death toll had risen to about 140,000. An estimated 69,000 to 80,000 suffered nonfatal injuries. Of 76,327 buildings, 68% were totally flattened and only 10% were left intact. Three days later, a second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. Between 40,000 and 75,000 people died on the day, and by the end of the year the Nagasaki death toll had risen to 60,000 to 80,000. The bombs led the Japanese to surrender, but at an obscene cost.

At 8.15am, Tanimoto was two miles away from ground zero, on the outskirts of the city in the suburb of Koi. He was helping his friend Mr Matsuo move clothing and furniture to a safer place by pushcart. Its citizens were expecting to be bombed – after all, Hiroshima was home to the headquarters of the country’s second general army, served as a massive embarkation port and had about 43,000 military personnel stationed there. It just wasn’t expecting this kind of bomb.

Tanimoto and his friend Matsuo were at the front door of a large estate in the valley belonging to a wealthy rayon manufacturer, ready to deposit their items in fireproof storage. When Tanimoto saw a sharp flash of light streak out of a brown cloud, he dropped to the ground on his belly between two large decorative granite rocks in the garden. (Matsuo ran into the house to hide. Although the building collapsed, he survived.) The rocks shielded Tanimoto from the heat and flying debris. When he stood up a few seconds later, day had turned into night, and drops of rain, the size and colour of blackberries, fell out of the sky. He ran up Mount Mitake, the hillside overlooking the Koi district, for a better viewpoint. Hiroshima was a sea of flames.

An old woman with a little boy approached Tanimoto and said she was injured. He put the boy on his back and took him to a school already acting as a first-aid station. But all he could think about was Chisa, Koko and his church members. He sprinted through the devastation over dead bodies and injured people. To his shame, he continued running, ignoring their cries.

“So many people asked for help,” Koko says today. “Help! Help! Help! But people were caught under houses and he couldn’t pull bodies from out of there, so he said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive me!’ He said to me, on that day I only thought about what’s happened to my daughter and wife.” He felt guilty? “Yes, and when I heard that, I thought, ‘OK, Dad, you did a good job’.”

Remarkably, Tanimoto came across the blood‑stained Chisa and Koko near a Shinto shrine. They were too traumatised to embrace. Tanimoto simply acknowledged that they were safe, and they parted. Chisa and Koko went to shelter in the suburb of Ushita, and he continued running into the city to help others.

Tanimoto’s fame spread from Hiroshima through Japan and on to the US, where he toured tirelessly, asking for money to rebuild his church and the city, and to create a peace centre. He told anybody who’d listen about what he’d seen, preached Christian pacifism and argued for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Perhaps he was best known for featuring in Hersey’s Hiroshima. Hersey, then aged 31 and already an experienced war reporter and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, told the story of the bomb and its aftermath by piecing together the lives of the survivors. It was one of the first examples of what became known as new journalism, where reporters used creative storytelling techniques associated with fiction to create compelling narratives rather than simply reporting cold facts. In 1999, the article was ranked as the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a panel of experts assembled by New York University’s journalism department.

Tanimoto’s account, based on his diaries, is the perfect complement to Hersey’s Hiroshima. Whereas Hersey tells the story through supremely crafted, understated reportage, Tanimoto’s version is a gripping real-time search for life and hope. Everything he sees is meticulously recorded: the flesh of the injured stripped away or hanging loose; survivors walking silent and expressionless “like a procession of ghosts”; houses looking “like toy buildings crushed by a hammer”. He describes soaking scattered cushions in a water tank, holding them against himself then running through fire. Victims are incinerated to white ash. A skeleton hangs on to the door of a street car.

At its most dramatic, he comes across as the haunted hero of an apocalyptic action movie (which his story is being turned into). Tanimoto hauls five dead men out of a boat, says a short prayer for them, then ferries the injured across the Kyobashi River using only a single bamboo pole. He helps put out the blaze when trees catch fire in the Sentei Gardens; steals irradiated pumpkins to feed the sick; takes people by the hand only to find their flesh coming away like cooked fish off a bone. Even when he goes down with radiation sickness, suffering from high fever and violent diarrhoea, he continues until he’s on the verge of death. Tanimoto is as tough on his family as himself. When Chisa tells him that she had escaped without finding out what had happened to Mrs Takaki, he is indignant. (They later discovered that Mrs Takaki survived).

Tanimoto had only lived in Hiroshima for two years when it was bombed. He had gone from Japan to the US to study, and graduated with a degree in theology from Emory University in 1940. This is why he still felt such warmth towards the US, despite the bomb, Koko says. I ask her if her father was her hero. “I guess so, because he was so concerned about peace. He loved the United States, he loved Japan, and he wanted to rebuild relationship between them. He so wanted world peace.”

In the book, we travel through the city with Tanimoto, as he tries to account for his flock. He names every victim he finds and tells their story. It’s an extreme act of bearing witness. He prays over the dying Tanaka, a wealthy man who despised him and spread rumours that he was a US spy. We hear about the high-school girls who suffocate in the smoke while singing Kimigayo, the national anthem of Japan; the stench of the dead baby carried by its mother for three days in the hope that her missing husband could see the child a final time. Tanimoto describes the dead floating in the river, and his attempts to row past them. “I had no more human feelings,” he writes. “Pushing aside the dead, I propelled my boat.”

There are moments of hope. Flowers and vegetables start to grow instantly out of the ruins. The radiation has somehow encouraged new life. He visits a woman whose eyeballs had been removed because of her injuries, and gifts her an aubergine, saying: “I hope you can overcome the atomic bomb as this plant has done.” Perhaps the greatest hope lies in the possibility of rebirth. Today’s Hiroshima is a vibrant, urbane city with a population of more than 1 million.

* * *

As KOKO grew up, her father reminded her that as the youngest survivor in their neighbourhood, it was her duty to work for Hiroshima and world peace. But she wasn’t having any of it. “‘No, sir,’ I told him. ‘Not me.’ I didn’t want to share in the trauma, or make it mine,” she says today. She refused to take her friends to talks he gave about the bomb.

But its impact was there for her to see in everyday life. The parsonage played host to older, disfigured girls she regarded as sisters. Eyelids were stuck to foreheads, lips to chins, fingers were fused together. For a long time, she didn’t realise the girls were orphans. Other disfigured children just hid at home. “Girls stayed inside a big mosquito net so nobody could see them. Many families broke every mirror they had because otherwise the children who were disfigured would see their faces.”

As soon as she discovered this had all been caused by the American atom bomb dropped from a B-29 aircraft, she swore revenge. “I said, when I’m a grownup I’m going to find the people who flew the B-29 Enola Gay and I’m going to give them a punch or bite or kick.” Incredibly, she got the opportunity to do so.

Ten years on from the bomb, Tanimoto was famous in the US for his work on behalf of Hiroshima. At the time, he had taken 25 disfigured young women, known as the Hiroshima Maidens, from the city for reconstructive surgery at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. The US version of the TV series This Is Your Life surprised him one day. He thought he was going to give yet another interview about Hiroshima, but in fact he was the subject of the show. That particular episode gained notoriety as one of the most shocking, tasteless and strangely moving TV programmes ever.

In between promotions for Hazel Bishop nail varnish, the presenter Ralph Edwards told the story of Tanimoto and Hiroshima. Behind a curtain, in shadow, a surprise guest said: “Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, my God, what have we done?” Tanimoto was frozen in shock when Edwards introduced the guest – Capt Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay. The tiny Tanimoto and the huge, bull‑necked Lewis shook hands in bewildered silence. Koko was in the audience, and the show changed her life.

“I will never forget that day,” she tells me. “I was just staring at him. He’s a bad one. But, after he said that, I saw the tears coming down from his eye. I was so surprised. I thought he was a monster. I never heard of tears coming out of a monster’s eyes. So this person must be a human being like me.” At the end of the show, she held his hand. In 1983, Lewis died, aged 65. “When I heard that he had passed away, the first thing that came back to my mind was the inscription at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. I said, ‘Captain Robert Lewis, rest in peace – we shall never repeat the mistake.’”

Despite the revelation when meeting Lewis, Koko still wanted nothing to do with Hiroshima. This resolve was hardened by a humiliation in her early teens. The hibakusha had annual medical checkups for radiation sickness. She was used to them, but one year she was led to an auditorium full of men speaking different languages. She didn’t know who they were, or whether they were even doctors. Koko was told to go on the stage and a light was shone on her. An anonymous voice asked her to remove her gown in front of the men. “It really hurt my feelings,” she says simply. You can still hear her pain when she talks about it. “I stared at the ceiling and removed the gown,” she writes in the intro to her father’s book. “I felt so ashamed that I didn’t mention it to anyone for 25 years. I never again wanted to be identified as a victim of the bomb.”

There was so much discrimination against the hibakusha in Hiroshima and elsewhere. They struggled to find partners, get jobs, rent property. “Not many people want to marry a survivor who has experienced the atomic bomb,” she says. “Not many companies wanted to hire survivors because their health might not be good.”

As her father had done, Koko left Hiroshima to study in the US. She graduated from American University in Washington DC with a degree in psychology and sociology. Koko fell in love with a Chinese-American student, and they got engaged in her final year. Her fiance’s uncle was a specialist in radiation sickness and he told the family that she would never give birth to a healthy child. His parents made her fiance call the wedding off.

She returned to Japan in 1969, aged 24. By now she had lost her faith. In Tokyo, she met Yasuo Kondo, a young documentary film-maker. He admired the work of her father and the couple had a natural affinity, not least because he was an atheist. “I didn’t want to marry a minister so I decided to marry the atheist,” she says. “But life is interesting. Ha ha ha!” Koko starts to laugh before her story is out. She has a joyous, hiccupy chuckle. “He became a Christian and later a minister of the church. Ha ha ha!” Just as she couldn’t escape from the impact of the bomb, she couldn’t escape the church. Her faith returned.

Koko suffered a miscarriage, and the couple decided not to try for children again. Medical assessments concluded that radiation sickness left her unable to carry a pregnancy to term. She and Yasuo adopted two newborn babies, who are now in their 40s. When he retired from his pastoral ministry in January 2025, they returned to Hiroshima.

For many years, Koko worked in business. It was only when she turned 40 that she began to think seriously about Hiroshima. Her mother finally told her how they had escaped and revealed that she had saved the pink dress. When Hersey returned to Japan in 1985 to catch up with his survivors, the conversation opened up further. A year later, Tanimoto died, aged 77. Koko realised he had been right all along. It was her duty to take up his mantle. What’s more, she now wanted to. “I don’t think I can do it like he did, but I just wanted to walk in the footsteps of my father,” she says.

She worked with orphans and abandoned children, and became a renowned peace campaigner in her own right. She presented Mikhail Gorbachev, president of the then Soviet Union, with a crystal globe as a symbol of the fragile Earth; shared philosophies of forgiveness with Desmond Tutu; advocated for nuclear disarmament with then US president Jimmy Carter; and, last year, Pope Leo XIV welcomed her to a peace conference in Rome. Like her father, she believes it is important to acknowledge the harm Japan caused with its aggressively expansionist ideology in the 1930s and 40s.

Despite their phenomenal work, Kiyoshi Tanimoto and John Hersey were controversial figures. Not everybody was convinced by Tanimoto’s altruism. Critics said he was a vain publicity seeker. They laughed at the flash green Cadillac he briefly drove (an American friend had passed it on when he had no further use for it), challenged his use of funds, and questioned why he only sent young women to the US for plastic surgery.

“I don’t know why my father was so concerned about the girls, not the boys,” Koko says. “As a father he might have been conscious of the beauty, and he knew life could be even more difficult for the disfigured girls than the boys.”

After one of the “maidens” died in an operating theatre in the US, he was accused of exploiting them for political spectacle and medical experimentation. Meanwhile, the security services, on both the Japanese and US sides, were suspicious of Tanimoto’s support for the US. After his This Is Your Life appearance, there were suggestions that he might be an agent of the Americans or the Chinese. Some dismissed him as a useful idiot. Yet he had saved many lives and helped to broker peace between Japan and the US.

Hersey was also regarded as politically suspect by the US security services. He spent the first 11 years of his life in China, where his American parents were Protestant missionaries. The Hiroshima article was considered anti-American, and the US war secretary Henry Stimson countered it with a defence of the atom bombs, arguing that they were the “least abhorrent choice” that saved more than a million American lives by avoiding a mainland invasion. In 1950, during the height of McCarthyism, the liberal Hersey was labelled a communist by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

While these were blatant smears, some criticism was justified. The writer celebrated for the integrity of his work went on to be accused of plagiarism in both his journalism and fiction. In 1988, five years before his death, Hersey apologised for a piece he wrote in the New Yorker about the novelist James Agee after Laurence Bergreen, Agee’s biographer, complained that material had been lifted from his book.

Even Tanimoto’s recently discovered Hiroshima book is contentious. Why was it found in a box among Hersey’s papers at Yale University, where he went on to become a professor of English? Why had neither Hersey’s nor Tanimoto’s families known about it?

The Japanese film-maker Taku Nishimae and Hersey’s grandson Cannon Hersey came across the book when researching his life. But even they disagree about when it was found – Nishimae tells me it was 2022, while Cannon insists it was back in 2014 when they made their first documentary film together. They are agreed, however, that it was in the form of a perfectly typed 230‑page English-language diary starting on 6 August 1945 and ending in November 1947. The new book condenses the diaries and limits it to the year following the bomb.

Nishimae thinks Hersey was given the manuscript during one of Tanimoto’s visits to the US in 1948-49, but Cannon suggests it may have been later. I call Nishiame in Japan and ask if he thinks Tanimoto would have wanted it published? “Yes, certainly,” he says. Why does he think Hersey did nothing to publicise it? “Well, I don’t know. We don’t even know how it ended up in Yale library. There is no record. There are lots of letters between John and Kiyoshi, and there is no mention of the manuscript at all. It’s incredible. And it’s incredible that we found it.”

He tells me about the genesis of the relationship between Hersey and Tanimoto. When Hersey arrived in Hiroshima, Tanimoto couldn’t initially meet him, so he wrote a nine-page letter for him about his experience. By the time they met, a day later, Hersey had read it and told him he found it “quite moving”. Cannon and Nishiame found the letter in 2014 when researching their documentary. “It is very similar to the account Kiyoshi is writing in his diary and John Hersey used those texts in the original book Hiroshima.” Hersey quotes extensively from it, saying it was a letter “sent to an American”. (He never refers to himself in the piece.)

Why did he remain silent about the full manuscript he later received? Perhaps he thought Tanimoto’s memoir would detract from his bestselling book, I suggest to Nishimae. “Mmmm,” he considers. “I don’t think so. He was very generous and they were great friends. John was working with him all along until Kiyoshi passed in 1986. I don’t think he would have any such intention. I think it was just a lost memoir in his library.”

Tanimoto revered Hersey and his work. In 1949, he translated Hersey’s Hiroshima into Japanese. He believed the book had made it far less likely that nuclear weapons would be used again, and that without it the rest of the world would have remained oblivious to the full horror.

From New York, Cannon tells me he doesn’t think it was the job of his grandfather to find a publisher for Tanimoto’s manuscript. Nor does he think he would have succeeded if he had tried. “I don’t think the publishing world was ready to publish a book like this in the late 1940s or early 1950s. It’s only now that we’re seeing space made for people of colour to tell their story.”

As for Koko, the thing she cares about is that her father’s book is now out there for the world to read and learn from. And the lessons are every bit as important as they were 81 years ago. She finds it distressing that nuclear warheads still in commission are far more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For the rest of her life, she hopes to show people her pink baby dress and explain its significance. And she will continue to pass on her message that hope can emerge from the most profound despair. A few years ago, she discovered that a positive had come out of her teenage humiliation. “I was told that all the medical data from the children from Hiroshima was given to Chornobyl to help the children there. When I heard that, my gosh! My bad memory helped other children. It made me so happy.”

Most of all, she is determined that Hiroshima and Nagasaki will never be repeated. “I don’t want to see any child go through that. That’s why I do not want to see any war in this world. This beautiful world.” And she swirls the word around in her mouth as if she can taste it. “Think of it. We cannot destroy it.”

• Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Kiyoshi Tanimoto is published by Ebury on 6 August at £16.99. To buy a copy for £15.29 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.