wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] A-bomb survivor devotes her life to a quest for peace

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Note #8829 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05399
August 4, 2005

No room for hatred

A-bomb survivor devotes her life to a quest for peace and healing

by Pat Cole

OSAKA, Japan - Koko Kondo was literally a babe in her mother's arms when the
atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima 60 years ago.

	Their home, less than one mile from ground zero, collapsed around
them. Kondo's cries summoned her mother back to consciousness; she managed to
dig her 8-month-old daughter out of the rubble before flames consumed the
debris.

	Kondo's father, the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, was away from the city on
Aug. 6, 1946, helping a friend move furniture. When he got home he learned
that at least 70 percent of his congregation had perished.

	Rev. Tanimoto immediately went to work, trying to relieve the
suffering of survivors. With the help of Norman Cousins, then editor of
Saturday Review, he eventually organized Hiroshima Maidens, a program that
helped badly disfigured victims of the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Many were brought to the United States for corrective surgery.

	Kondo grew up amid the devastation. She felt great hostility toward
the people responsible, and she wanted revenge. "One of these days I'm going
to do something," she told herself.

	She felt that she couldn't tell her parents about these feelings,
because they had devoted themselves to working for healing and forgiveness.
Kondo simply could not understand their way of thinking.

	When Kondo was 10, her family was invited to appear on "This is Your
Life," a popular American television program hosted by Ralph Edwards. 
Unbeknownst to them, another guest was Capt. Robert Lewis, copilot of the
plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

	The encounter had a life-changing impact on Kondo. The pilot
tearfully described the destruction he saw at Hiroshima. As the Enola Gay
flew over the city, he said, he wrote in his log, "Oh, my God, what have we
done?"

	Kondo felt her hatred drain away. "I just stood next to him and held
his hand," she recalls. "I said, 'God, please forgive me.'"

	Kondo came to the United States for high school and college, earning
a degree from American University in Washington, DC.

	At age 30, she met the man who would be her husband. At the time, he
was a documentary filmmaker in Tokyo. He also was a self-professed atheist,
which suited Kondo, because she had lost interest in religion.

	Times were hard in the film business, so the couple accepted an
invitation from Kondo's father to work with him at the Hiroshima Peace
Center. 

	Under the influence of Kondo's father, her husband became a
Christian, and later a pastor. 

	"I thought, marrying this man I would not have to go to church," she
says. "Now I live on the second floor of the church."

	Kondo acknowledges that "down deep inside," she had always wanted to
stay connected to the church. 

	"I am just so pleased to be God's child," she says now.

	Kondo has spent much of her life traveling around the world, speaking
out for peace. She has worked closely with the San Francisco-based Children's
Peacemaker Foundation, an organization committed to building a peaceful world
by working with children.  Her travels have included visits to several of the
least peaceful places on Earth. She visited Baghdad in 1991, two weeks before
the first Gulf War. She couldn't stop the violence, she says, but at least
she could "stand next to" some of the victims.

	Kondo's approach to peacemaking is one she learned from her father.
"It's person-to-person," she says. "That's all I can do. I cannot do anything
with governments."

	For her, peacemaking is more than the elimination of violence. 

	"Some in Japan say that if we have no war, that's peace," she says,
"but that is not peace. Peace must be in your heart."

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