Branches of Hope, Roots of Trauma: 80 years on, survivors, academics and artists ask: What have we learned from the atomic bombing of Japan?

 Cannon Hersey speaks at 'Branches of Hope'. Photo by Adam Smith.

A small Japanese woman with thin wire-framed glasses appeared on screen, seated in a wooden chair, ready to begin her testimony.

Now 80 years old, Koko Kondo is one of approximately 99,000 remaining hibakusha – a term referring to someone who has survived an atomic bombing. She was only eight months old in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when the American B-29 bomber plane “Enola Gay” dropped an atomic bomb onto the immigrant city of Hiroshima, flew away to escape the shockwave, and circled back to check the extent of the damage. It was total – buildings flattened, stark outlines of people imprinted on the walls with the bomb’s flash. The city was gone.

“Little Boy,” as the bomb was called by the American military, leveled her city and instantly killed an estimated 80,000 civilians. By the end of 1945, the death toll reached an estimated 140,000 in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, with hundreds of thousands more devastated by the physical, psychological and social effects of radiation. The victims were mostly Japanese, but also included citizens from Korea, China, and the United States. Following the legacy of her father, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Kondo became an advocate for nuclear disarmament and continues using her personal experiences to speak against war.

Kondo recorded answers to play at Mt. Auburn Cemetery’s Aug. 15 event, “Branches of Hope,” commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II with a focus on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was one of several events in Massachusetts this August recognizing the bombings and the layers of intergenerational, international trauma burned into their history.

As a child, Kondo wanted a child’s revenge on the soldiers who manned the plane. “I wanted to give them a punch or a bite or a kick,” she said. A decade later, on the set of the American talk show “This is Your Life,” her family was surprised with a co-pilot on the Enola Gay, Capt. Robert Lewis. When Kondo saw tears coming from Lewis’ eyes as he recounted the story, she forgave him and realized that what she hated was not a specific man, but war itself.

Kondo’s story came after an evening of performances by former artists-in-residence at Mr. Auburn and their collaborators. Dancers Lonnie Stanton and Naoko Brown swayed, pirouetted, and dipped across the round fountain of the Asa Gray Garden, surrounded by lush greenery and flanked by a several hundred-year-old ginkgo tree. A small crowd of Mt. Auburn’s supporters and the interested public sat on stone steps amid clusters of pink and yellow flowers, enjoying a string duet on violin and cello in between remarks from the cemetery’s president Matthew Stephens and Deputy Consul General Suguru Minoya of the Japanese Consulate.

Featured guest speakers were Cannon Hersey and Akira Fujimoto, artists who collaborate on the “Future Memory” project, memorializing artifacts that were recovered from the Hiroshima bombing. Cannon Hersey, grandson of the American journalist John Hersey, who wrote a hugely influential account of the bombing’s aftermath, spoke at Mt. Auburn previously on his “Survivor Trees” project, which honored the Hiroshima trees that not only survived the blast’s epicenter, but are still thriving.

“We’ve brought people in to consider a new lens on Hiroshima, that it’s not just a place of trauma and suffering. It’s a place of resilience, a place of rebuilding after a horrible moment in history,” said Hersey.

While John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima (which featured an account from Kondo’s father) changed his American contemporaries’ perceptions of the bomb, the subject was heavily censored within Japan during the United States military’s 7-year occupation. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that Japanese citizens outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to find out what really happened there, said Franziska Seraphim, a historian of contemporary Japan and director of Asian studies at Boston College. “It was wrong to discuss the war in any way,” she said. “And Hiroshima, the nuclear bombs, were completely off the table.”

Dancers Lonnie Stanton and Naoko Brown at 'Branches of Hope'; photo by Adam Smith

It’s hard to overstate the immensity of the experience, Seraphim said. Nuclear bombs had never been used before, and people didn’t understand how radiation affected human bodies. Many victims were horribly disfigured with melted skin, while others looked fine but would die suddenly for unknown reasons. Survivors faced significant social discrimination alongside dealing with long-term health consequences, in particular leukemia. Having a history of living in Hiroshima often doomed marriage prospects, as the risk of a tainted bloodline was deemed too great.

The 1990s saw two major shifts in the public perception of Japan’s role in the war. As a graduate student in Japan, Seraphim recalls that the day after the Showa emperor died, bookstores were flooded with material on the emperor’s war responsibility. The truth of the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery (the “comfort women”) targeting women in occupied territories including Korea, China, and other countries, came to light. These stories were written into history books in the early ’90s and erased in the late ’90s during the right-wing backlash.

In the context of a changing regional power balance and Japan’s economic downturn, the narratives around World War II and Hiroshima fractured. There is not much in common between right-wing portrayals of a heroic, self-defending Japan in the World War II era and peace museums that acknowledge both the immense harms done to and by the Japanese government, military, and people. The little that is common, Seraphin says, boils down to: let’s never have a war again.

Fujimoto has personally experienced a change in how people view his work recognizing Hiroshima over the years. “Tokyo was totally closed to Hiroshima stories in a lot of ways, it was embarrassing or shameful,” he said. “But over the last two to three years, there’s been a huge shift and suddenly Tokyo people are caring, wanting to help hibakusha.”

For years, the atomic bomb survivors were largely left to fend for themselves. One influential foundation started by Japanese hibakusha in 1956, Nihon Hidankyo, was created to support victims and advocate for a nuclear-free world. Largely due to their efforts, the Japanese government began providing financial and medical support to atomic bombing victims, starting with the Atomic Bomb Survivors Medical Care Law in 1957. Hersey pointed to Nihon Hidankyo receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 and the 2023 release of the movie Oppenheimer, which did not acknowledge the aftermath of the bomb’s use, as two recent events that heightened global awareness of the hibakusha’s efforts.

'Branches of Hope'; photo by Adam Smith

At a Brookline event on Aug. 8, a date between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, college students and young adults engaged in dialogue around the bombing’s impact. The Ikeda Center, whose mission is to promote peace through Buddhist humanist values, hosted a discussion night featuring video testimonials from hibakusha, opportunities for dialogue, a crane folding activity, and a lecture on nuclear disarmament.

“Typically when thinking about nuclear weapons, there’s the narrative of realizing peace through strength. We wanted to challenge this narrative by exploring the idea of strength through peace,” said Preandra Lika Noel, Program Assistant at the Ikeda Center. She spoke on the importance of having these dialogues with young people, who have the power to take our world from being one including the existence of nuclear weapons to one without.

One topic of conversation was a common question in American schools and public discourse around the dropping of the atomic bombs: Was it justified? Was using nuclear weapons to end the war and saving the lives of soldiers on both sides, worth leveling two cities and condemning hundreds of thousands to death, disability, and social pariahdom?

For Ikeda Center founder Daisaku Ikeda, nuclear weapons represented the height of human folly. But these conversations are still worth having, said Lillian Koizumi, the center’s Program Manager. In her discussions, she has seen people start to see perspectives beyond the narrative that the bomb saved lives by ending the war and was therefore good. “I think people need to be able to sit with that question for themselves,” she said. “Like, is that really justified?”

For Seraphim, the whole discussion takes place at a mushroom-cloud level view, ignoring the reality of what happened at the ground level.

“It’s the classic question that Americans ask. It is also the only question Americans ask,” she said. In her view, a real ethical engagement would be to look closely at the visceral impacts without retreating into moral or policy arguments. She brought up evidence that dropping the bomb was mainly a U.S. military decision, not President Truman’s, and that the military was desperate to try out their new weapon.

The way the military chose their targets bears that out, she noted, given that all the locations were cities surrounded by mountains that could amplify the power of the bomb. “They used the Japanese as guinea pigs. Which is something the Japanese military also did, to the Chinese, mainly. This stuff goes around and around and around,” she said. Further completing the circle, the postwar American government protected Japanese scientists of the infamous Unit 731 who performed horrific experiments on human subjects, in exchange for the data they produced.

Another layer of complexity that Noel and Seraphim emphasized is the presence of non-Japanese citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombing. Japan had been occupying Korea since 1910, and with around 140,000 Koreans living in Hiroshima at the time, they made up an estimated 20% of the initial deaths due to the atomic bombing. Survivors who returned to Korea faced severe prejudice and social stigma, and Korean hibakusha received even less support than their Japanese counterparts. Even for many Japanese citizens and hibakusha advocates, the knowledge of Korean hibakusha’s existence came decades later.

Back at Mt. Auburn Cemetery’s Bigelow Chapel, attendees clustered around Fujimoto and Hersey as they explained their process for 3D scanning artifacts from the Hiroshima Peace Museum and recasting them in larger than life-size bronze. One of their pieces, a cast of the tricycle 3-year-old Shinichi Tetsutani was riding when the bomb hit Hiroshima, is on display at the Red Cross Museum in Geneva. At Bigelow, a foot-long pen and giant pocket-watch rested between silkscreen prints of the survivor trees of Hiroshima. During the keynote lecture, Hersey and Fujimoto explained how the father of Shinichi had found it too painful to talk about his deceased children for decades.

The tricycle belonging to Nobuo Tetsutani’s son is one of the most famous pieces at the Peace Museum, but the family also had an unopened box of clothing belonging to Shinichi’s sisters, who died the same day. The surviving family never opened it until conversations with the Future Memory artists and their own healing prompted them to do so. The family gathered to open the box together and erupted in shouts of joy and surprise at finding the beautifully patterned, vibrantly colorful kimono. In a way, the artists shared, it was like meeting their long-lost sisters for the first time. Fujimoto and Hersey are now developing prints based on the kimono patterns, to memorialize Michiko and Yoko Tetsutani who were 7-years and 1-year old at the time of their deaths.

“We’re so used to seeing brutality,” Hersey said earlier, referencing the United States committing violence against people of color, and in Israel and Palestine. “We’re shipping weapons all over the world to support this death, and is that really what we believe is our American identity?”

For Hersey, the answer is an emphatic no. “I think that we’re all trying to find a better future for the next generation and places like Hiroshima are the most important places for us to think about what the future could look like,” he said.

For Kondo, what she learned as a 10-year old on the set of “This is Your Life” was that she could forgive a man who was a human just like her, but she would continue fighting the rest of her life for a world free from nuclear weapons.

She closed with a simple message: “I would like to tell the whole world, no more war.”