Kondo did not have to be a frontline activist for people to know that she hated the atomic bomb. They could sense that much without articulation. The survivors of the atomic bomb — known as “hibakusha” — often found themselves shunned in Japanese society, viewed as contagious or abnormal. Some hid their hibakusha status from their own family members, or pledged never to speak of the bomb, for fear of discrimination or alienation. Noble as her father’s activism was, Kondo told herself for a long time that his mission would not be hers to follow.
But there is no playbook for what happens to the little girl who realizes that little girls like her can be hated, maimed or murdered for who they are and where they are from. Parents cannot predict whether their child will grow up broken by such harsh truths. Or whether she will figure out a way to one day feel empowered to speak out.
When her father was the same age that Kondo is today, he tripped and tumbled to the ground. Mr. Tanimoto broke his chin and jaw. Suddenly, the man who had spent his whole life speaking up for Hiroshima survivors had lost his ability to talk at all. He never regained his words.
He died soon after. By then, Kondo’s outlook on his life’s mission had changed. She was one of the hibakusha, whose ranks grew thinner each year.
You can live a kind of middling existence for a long time. Not firmly outspoken on a side. “Reading the air” is a kind of social and emotional intelligence, a way of silently tuning into other’s feelings. But it can also be about following a majority, reading the room to fit oneself ambiguously into a scene without disruption.
Kondo had lived in the U.S. during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, first at a junior college in New Jersey, and then as a student at American University in Washington, D.C. She learned about freedom protests for Black Americans, and she came to admire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote: “The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”
Kondo realized her own calling when it came to social justice was to take on the legacy of Hiroshima. She decided she did not just want to see nuclear weapons controlled or curtailed. She wanted them abolished. And she knew that for as long as she still had her voice, she would continue to tell their story — Hiroshima’s story — to anyone who would listen. Today, Kondo has one unequivocal pursuit: a nuclear weapon–free world. “For the sake of the children,” she told me.