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.