The Guardian81%
‘I never mentioned it for 25 years. I didn’t want to be a victim of the bomb’: Hiroshima survivor Koko Kondo on horror, anger and forgiveness 3%
By Simon Hattenstone14%
7/25/2026, 3:58:40 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 4 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Quote-first Misdirection, and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 11.4% saturation with 35 hits. Analysis detected 58 faulty-reasoning hits from 308 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 13.5% and a BS Rank of 3% (21,401 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.80% of the article peer group.
On that fateful day in 1945, Kondo was just a baby in her mother’s arms.
She talks about her father’s newly discovered eye-witness account of the aftermath – and why she decided to continue his work as a peace campaigner
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Koko Kondo holds up a tiny salmon-pink dress.
“This is what I was wearing,” she says.
The dress, with its white-ribboned collar, is in perfect condition.
A miracle.
On 6 August 1945, Koko was eight months old and crawling on a tatami mat at the family parsonage.
Mrs Takaki, a member of the church, had just popped round to have a chat with Chisa, Koko’s mother.
Chisa gathered Koko up in her arms so she wouldn’t be a distraction, and they stood by the door.
It was 8.15am; a serene summer day in Hiroshima.
That was when the uranium-fuelled atom bomb, named Little Boy by the Americans, was dropped.
The most deadly bomb in history.
Koko and Chisa were buried in the rubble, unable to move.
The parsonage roof had crashed down on them.
For 40 years, Chisa couldn’t bear to tell Koko about the day, the pink dress, and how they survived.
It was too painful.
Today, 81 years on, Koko is talking to me via video link.
She is an elegant woman with a kind face and a vertiginous silver quiff.
She speaks quietly in perfect English, then surprises you by stamping on a word fiercely to make her point.
The virtual background to her screen is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, which was built on ground zero, the point directly underneath where the bomb exploded.
Speakers
2speakers16%attributed speech260writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
21%flagged-word coverageKoko Kondo
34 attributed words71% of attributed speech13% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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