“What we suffered the most was a sense of guilt as we kept wondering why we could not save the many people who died before our eyes.”īut now she has also found solace by telling her story. It was 40 years after the war before she felt comfortable telling her stories. I have no intention to blame them, but just want them to know the facts, and think.” “But I wanted young Americans to know what their country had done. “In the beginning, it was really painful to remember those days,” she said at a recent online briefing. Ogura established Hiroshima Interpreters for Peace in 1984 to translate survivors’ stories, including her own. Remembering the atomic bombing and how she survived is painful, but Keiko Ogura is determined to keep telling her stories as she organizes English guided tours for foreign visitors at Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. “To tell my story, I had to explain why Koreans are in Japan,” he said.
So Lee lived under a Japanese name, Masaichi Egawa, until eight years ago when he began speaking out. His parents talked in Korean and wanted him to learn the language, but he didn’t like going outside with them, fearing people would notice their Korean accent. That would only “double” his suffering when he was trying hard to hide his Korean identity. When he returned to work, co-workers stayed away, saying he had “A-bomb disease.” He decided not to tell anyone about the atomic bombing. He suffered burns on his face and neck that took four months to heal.
6, 1945, 16-year-old Lee watched the blue summer sky turned yellowish orange. “I ask younger people to never forget us and to understand the tragedy, absurdity and cruelty of the war so that nuclear weapons will be eliminated from the world as soon as possible.” The city had a large number of Korean workers, including those forced to work without pay at mines and factories under Japan’s 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula.Īt a memorial Wednesday for Korean victims, Lee laid flowers and prayed for those who perished. Some 20,000 ethnic Korean residents of Hiroshima are believed to have died in the nuclear attack. “Survivors won’t be here 20 years from now, but our stories must be,” said Lee, who will meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after Thursday’s memorial to demand Japan do more to ban nuclear weapons. He also wants them to learn about the difficulty that Koreans have faced in Japan. Lee kept his secret as an atomic bombing survivor for nearly 70 years, not even telling his wife, always fearing people might notice the burn marks on the face.īut today Lee, a second-generation Korean born in Japan, is training young people to tell survivors’ stories. Hiroshima has become a beautiful place, but atomic bombs still exist, she says, and another nuclear attack would destroy the world. Now, Kondo is following in her father’s footsteps, busy telling her stories to younger people. One day as an adolescent she was told to undress except for her underwear at a medical conference in an auditorium. Still, she suffered years of humiliation.
She said she was grateful she met Lewis because it helped the hate go away. I knew that I should hate the war, not him,” Kondo told The Associated Press. “He was not a monster he was just another human being. Kondo saw tears well in Lewis’ eyes, and her hatred melted away. “Looking down from thousands of feet over Hiroshima, all I could think of was, ‘God, what have we done?’” he said. While Kondo, who survived the bombing as an infant, was wondering if she would act on her fantasy and punch him, the host asked Lewis how he felt after dropping the bomb. Robert Lewis, co-pilot of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the bomb. Kondo stared in hatred at another guest: Capt. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, one of six survivors profiled in John Hersey’s book “Hiroshima.”
Ten-year-old Kondo appeared on an American TV show called “This is Your Life” that was featuring her father, Rev. She was determined to find the person who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the person that caused the suffering and the terrible burns she saw on the faces of girls at her father’s church - and then square off and punch them in the face.