Koko Kondo’s Experience of the Atomic Bombing

Koko Kondo’s Experience of the Atomic Bombing
This video is an A-bomb testimony in English.
00:41　Koko Kondo Introduction
03:40　Memories with John Hershey
14:50　Childhood A-bomb experience
27:08　Meet Robert Lewis
42:30　What Happened at ABCC
50:28　President Obama Visits Hiroshima
53:45　Question and answer session with students
01:06:50　Interview with Hiroko Kondo
Hiroshima Peace Program TSS ARCHIVE PROJECT
www.tss-tv.co....
As a broadcasting company based in the atomic-bombed city of Hiroshima, TV Shin-Hiroshima (TSS) has worked to create peace-related programming with the aim of helping to realize peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.
On February 28, 2023, TSS Archive Project’s Hiroshima Peace Program will broadcast to the world the testimony of hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivor) Koko Kondo, filmed on February 4, 2020 and jointed translated with the Center for Peace Kawano Seminar, Hiroshima University. The testimony is given entirely in English and was translated by Professor Noriyuki Kawano (Director of the Center for Peace, Hiroshima University), Vladisaya Bilyanova Vasileva, a Bulgarian research assistant at the Center for Peace (Doctoral Course of the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University), and Rachel Nicholson (former Hiroshima University exchange student and freelance translator from the US).
The TSS Archive Project is used as educational materials in peace studies at Hiroshima University to convey the realities of the atomic bombing and the importance of peace to the next generation.
Program Contents
American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey’s Hiroshima was published in full in the New Yorker in 1946. Written based on interviews Hersey conducted directly after the atomic bombing, it exposed what the US government was trying to hide about the devastation of Hiroshima. On the day it was published, it caused a sensation, selling 300,000 copies. To this day, it continues to be read in schools across the US, and remains one of the most famous works of journalistic reporting, having been named number one in New York University’s list of Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Century. One of the six hibakusha who appeared in Hiroshima was Kiyoshi Tanimoto, reverend of the former Hiroshima Nagarekawa Church and a pioneer of the No More Hiroshimas movement. This documentary features his daughter, Koko Kondo, and the 2020 lecture she gave in English about her experience in the atomic bombing to the students of the Canadian Academy in Higashinada Ward, Kobe.
Raised in a church community, Ms. Kondo interacted with people from the international community at a young age and would go on to live in the US for a time. She is a powerful speaker, able to speak from both the Japanese and US perspectives, and her lecture tells the story of her exposure to the bombing when she was just eight months old, her meeting with Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot of the Enola Gay B29 bomber, her experiences with the ABCC (current Radiation Effects Research Foundation), as well as meeting John Hersey during his visit to Hiroshima 40 years later and her memories of seeing Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union who helped end the Cold War.