How Meeting a Hiroshima Survivor Gave Me Hope

During a wet morning in July in Hiroshima, Japan, I sat in a conference room under the subsoil under Peace Memorial Park with 40 other delegates in the American-Japan leadership program, listening to Koko Kondo, 80, describe the horror of American atomic bombardments.

Koko is a HibakushaLiterally a person “affected by the bomb”. She was just a baby when the 9,700 lb. The “little boy” bomb fell by bomber B-29 Enola Gay Incinerated most of his city 80 years ago today. Last week, his mind was sharp, his remarks surprisingly funny and her stable voice. She told how her father Tanimoto, a priest, initially rushed into him after the deafening explosion and the burning light to search for his wife and her little daughter instead of helping people burned and blinded around him. This memory haunted him for the rest of his life.

Find out more: The survivors of atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki share their stories

But what really surprised me was what came afterwards.

Koko had always dreamed of what she would do if she met one of the Enola Gay The crew, the men she supposed to be monsters. However, when she surprisingly met her co-pilot, Captain Robert Lewis, in the American game “This Is Your Life” in 1955, she saw a tear sink into her cheek while he was saying while looking at the ruins of Hiroshima of the plane and wondering: “My God, what did we do?”

“I realized that I did not hate him,” she said. “I hated war.” They ended up holding hands. Then Koko stopped and said that “when he came to Hiroshima, President Obama spoke of a survivor of Hiroshima who” forgiven a pilot who stole the plane “. I always wonder … was it?

I felt a strange electricity pass through my spine. My palms began to sweat. I had been an editor of Obama speeches when he became the first American president sitting on Hiroshima. And I remembered that I had helped collect research for Ben Rhodes, the brilliant editor of speeches that helped prepare for these remarks. As I worked with a few others to search the stories and the stories, I suddenly remember reading Koko’s tale.

I headed forward in the conference room, located a few hundred meters from zero terrestrial in the detonation. “Koko-san,” I said slowly, “I think I can answer your question on President Obama because I did research for this speech. was Your story he told.

Some of my delegated colleagues captured this moment on video. In this document, you can hear them haleter because they realize what is going on. Koko glans and applauds with surprise. Tears well. Koko and I kiss. In one way or another, over eight decades and two continents, the different parts of history had the impression of meeting.

The global account of atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains uncertain and the debates continue to rage on this subject. Some maintain that this accelerated the end of the Second World War and saved incalculable civil and military lives that would have been lost in a land invasion of Imperial Japan. Others argue that the bombings were militarily useless, intrinsically immoral and mainly designed to flex American power.

Then there are disorderly human stories. For example, a Japanese delegate revealed that his grandfather had to perish as Kamikaze Pilot on August 17, 1945. His life was spared when Japan went two days earlier, and then met and marry his grandmother. I was wondering if its very existence was made possible by the death of more than 100,000 others.

However, for many in the United States, the Second World War is memories as a “just war”. As a Jewish American, I mainly learned war at the Hebrew school, reading the horrors of the holocaust and the bravery of our greatest generation to save the world of Nazis and fascism. It is an easy story to tell as a simple story of good and evil, hero and villain.

Meeting Koko and spending time in Japan complicated my very idea of this “just war”. I have seen how conflicts can devastate communities, and after -effects can persist for generations.

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It didn’t even happen.”

I used to think that the quote concerned memory. But sitting next to Koko, who survived a nuclear bomb, met the man who dropped him and lived to see his story told by an American president, I realized that it was also our future.

The past has not passed because it always asks us for things today. As a merchants, when we consider the current conflicts that rage in the world, or when we debate domestic immigration or criminal justice policy, our algorithms of politics and social media can encourage us to flatten people in simple enemies.

Koko’s story invites us to find a better way and seek human connection. The meeting with Captain Lewis allowed him to forgive a man who dropped a bomb on her. Meet another delegate whose grandparent had been a Kamikaze The pilot forced me to rethink my hypotheses as a Jewish American on the descendants of the military members of Axis Power.