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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, Yasuo Kondo 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 Koko’s father to work with him at the Hiroshima Peace Center.
Under the influence of his father-in-law, Yasuo became a Christian, and later became a minister. Today, the Rev. Yasuo Kondo is the pastor of Miki Shijimi Church in Hyogo Prefecture.
“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 as the Peacemakers 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 potential 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.” |
