“Koko-chan, Koko-chan!”
As a child, Koko was treated like a younger sister by the young ladies who came to her church. However, Koko, four years old at the time, had a certain problem. “Their eyes, noses, lips, chins … Their faces were covered with severe keloids. As a young girl, I was too scared to look directly at their faces. I did not know where to look.” As she interacted with the women, Koko gradually developed a hatred for the atomic bomb that had damaged their bodies. “I will never forgive the pilots who dropped the bomb. If I ever meet them, I will take my revenge,” she thought at the time.

When she was 10, Koko unexpectedly got her wish.
She, along with her family, appeared on an American TV show called “This is Your Life” with the recommendation of the Hiroshima Peace Center in order to collect funds for keloid treatment.

A screen was quickly removed, and a tall white man in a suit appeared in the studio.

“Who is he?” Koko asked her mom.

“Koko, that’s the co-pilot who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima,” she replied. That man was Koko’s longtime “nemesis”: Robert Lewis, co-pilot on the Enola Gay, the US military plane that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The climax of the program that day was a face-to-face meeting between Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Koko’s father who had dedicated his life to helping hibakusha, and Captain Lewis, one of the men who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The time had finally come! The person Koko had always hated was right in front of her. If it hadn’t been for him…! Koko fought the urge to immediately punch him and continued to glare.

But his next words shocked her. “My God, what have we done?” Captain Lewis explained the words he had written down in his flight log as the Enola Gay circled back over a Hiroshima that had disappeared. Tears were in his eyes as he spoke in a choked voice.

Koko was struck by his tears. “This man who had been my enemy was also dealing with guilt, sorrow, and pain,” she thought. She approached him and held his large, warm hand.

“We all have evil in us. It is not him that I should hate. It is the weakness of people who start wars that we should hate,” she realized. In that moment, Koko overcame her hatred.

On May 27, 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima. In his speech, he said, “One woman forgave the pilot who dropped the bomb.” It is said that he was referring to Koko and Captain Lewis.

After graduating from high school in Tokyo, Koko studied in the US for five and a half years, never returning to Japan during that time, and working hard at her studies while earning a scholarship. It was during her study abroad that she deepened her relationship with Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author whom she admires as her “second mother.” Pearl Buck, who was a supporter of the Hiroshima Peace Center founded by Koko’s father, Kiyoshi, had adopted and raised children herself, including war orphans, and had devoted her personal wealth to protecting the rights of children of mixed heritage born to American soldiers and local women during the Korean War. “For all children, regardless of the circumstances they were born under, it is a pure miracle that they were born into this world,” she said. Her words and actions became etched deep in Koko’s heart and continued to serve as guiding principles for her life.

Blessed with friends, Koko had a fulfilling youth overseas. However, in her senior year of college, just before her graduation, she once again fell under the curse of Hiroshima. She fell in love with a young American man she met there and agreed to become engaged to him, partly because she had been holding on to the feeling that she did not want to return to Hiroshima due to the emotional trauma she had suffered at ABCC.

However, her fiancé’s uncle, who was a doctor, opposed their marriage. “A girl who was exposed to the atomic bomb near the hypocenter in Hiroshima would never be able to give birth to a healthy child,” he argued.

Koko had run and run, and even though she had come such a long way, across the ocean, Hiroshima followed her everywhere. In the end, they broke off their engagement. Koko was deeply hurt again, but at the same time, the image of the “young women” flashed through her mind.

The young women with severe keloids on their faces, who would gently comb Koko’s hair when she was a little girl. The young, kind women who would look at their fingers, seared together with keloids, and say, “Because of this body, I wasn’t able to marry my fiancé.”

“Although I am hurting right now, those women must have felt worse,” Koko reflected. She felt a strange feeling, as if she could deeply sympathize and lean into the suffering of these women.

This incident spurred Koko to return to Japan after graduating from university. After working in Tokyo for a while, she and her husband, whom she married at the age of 30, returned to Hiroshima in 1976, in response to her father Kiyoshi’s strong wish that she help with peace activism in Hiroshima.

By that time, the sense of resistance Koko had felt toward her hometown, which she desperately longed to leave, was slowly fading. She had also gradually begun to feel closer to her father, although she had previously felt uncared for as a daughter because he was always traveling around the world for peace activism.

“Had I been running away, avoiding facing the atomic bombing?” she wondered. The people she had met and the time that passed brought about a change in Koko’s mind. “I will not run away anymore. I was born here, so I will do what I have to do.”

Koko lived with her husband, who became a minister a few years after their marriage, in Miki City, Hyogo Prefecture, for many years while her husband served at Miki Shijimi Church. Following his retirement, they returned to Hiroshima once again. Koko continues to advocate for nuclear abolition in Japan and abroad.