Hiromi Koseki

Hiromi Koseki was born in Sunagawa, Hokkaido, the eldest daughter among six siblings in a family that ran a nursery and garden centre selling flower seedlings, vegetable starts, and saplings. As the oldest girl in a busy household, she had little chance to be coddled; from her earliest years she was helping shepherd her younger brothers and sisters. Mealtimes were a kind of small battlefield, she liked to recall, because anyone who ate slowly lost the best of the food. She ate quickly all her life, and laughed that the habit, like the soul of a three-year-old, simply never left her.

Wanting independence and an earlier exit from the family home, she finished high school and went on to a vocational college in Sapporo. She worked locally for a stretch before returning to the city, and it was there that the Family Federation found her. The encounter was almost an accident: she had just missed a train when a young woman approached her on the platform with a survey. Hiromi felt it would be unkind to refuse, and she followed the conversation as far as a video centre, telling herself she would simply endure three months and then be done. At a closing two-day workshop, which she had agreed to attend as her very last, something cracked open. She sat in the front row every day, weeping, watching herself weep, unable to stop. The bookish girl who had always loved to lose herself in a heroine's joys and sorrows had finally found a story she could not stand outside of.

She told her parents and her employer plainly that she was leaving her job — not for marriage, as women usually did, but for faith. In 1992 she received the Blessing in the 30,000-couple ceremony and was matched with Suthin, a Thai brother. Seeing his photograph and his startlingly large eyes, she remembered a childhood remark, half a joke, that she would one day marry a man with big eyes, and felt unmistakably that Heaven had been listening all along. In 1994 she moved to Thailand and began her new life caring for members at the centre in Suthin's hometown of Nakhon Si Thammarat, where their first daughter was born in a room without air-conditioning, in heat that dwarfed Bangkok's.

The family eventually moved to Bangkok, where she worked first as an interpreter at a Japanese firm. When the company restructured and the Thailand division was to be closed, Hiromi could not bear to see her coworkers cast adrift; she took over the business herself and ran it for more than five years so that her members could keep their livelihoods. Later, when the family returned south for tribal-messiah work and the business there faltered, she made another quiet decision: she would carry the household economy, and her husband should give himself fully to witnessing. She moved back to Bangkok with the children to work, and once or twice a month, however exhausted, would gather the four of them onto a plane or a ten-hour bus to be at his side. Their combined labour bore fruit in the 430 blessed families won out of Nakhon Si Thammarat, and in 2020 their own family was registered as a Completed Family.

In all, she and Suthin raised five children — Kayo, Naki, Saki, their youngest son, and Akari, taken in as an adopted daughter. After her death, the four older children compared notes and discovered, to their amazement, that each of them was convinced he or she had been her favourite. She had given each child exactly the love that child needed. When little Saki once told her, 'Mama, I love you so much,' Hiromi answered that she was glad, but would be even gladder if her daughter came to love Heavenly Parent more than her.

She served three years as president of the Japanese Missionaries Association in Thailand and never really stopped acting like one afterward. If a member fell ill she worried as if for her own body; if someone was depressed she went to them at once; if a brother or sister was in financial trouble she would quietly hand over a loan, saying that whatever she had been given was given so that she could help. Even in her own final illness, when someone proposed that the community pray for her healing, she demurred: if she did not recover, she said, people might begin to doubt the prayers or the providence itself, and the faith of one missionary mattered more than her own body.

Bile-duct cancer, diagnosed just as the children were grown and there was finally room in life for travel and rest, gave her about two years. She and Suthin, who for years had lived in different cities, found themselves under one small roof for the first time as a true married couple — awkward at first, then grateful. Nurses marvelled that she never once complained. Determined to make one final offering, she flew to Korea and completed a forty-day Cheongpyeong workshop, then brought forward a planned college course, refusing all suggestions that she rest at home in Thailand. On 24 February 2026, at around seven in the evening, with her husband and children gathered around her at Cheongshim International Medical Centre in Korea, she went quietly to the spirit world. She was sixty-two.