This (un)lucky man was in the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and survived both
Twice, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in the wrong place at the wrong time
August 6, 1945, was meant to be Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s last day of work in Hiroshima, after having labored three months to design a 5,000-ton oil tanker for his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Before getting on a bus to the shipyard offices, Yamaguchi realized he had forgotten his inkan, a personal stamp for use on documents, and turned back to his boarding house to retrieve it. It was on the way from this errand that the engineer, walking alongside a potato patch, witnessed a B-29 aircraft drop the Little Boy atomic bomb, followed by “a flash of magnesium in the sky.”
Inspired by his navy air-raid training, Yamaguchi reacted swiftly enough to dive into an irrigation ditch, cover his eyes, and plug his ears with his thumbs. About three kilometers from the epicenter of the blast, the shock wave lifted him briefly from the ground, twirled him as like a small tornado, and knocked him unconscious.
But this would be only the first nuclear blast Yamaguchi would endure that week. Burned and injured, Yamaguchi would endure a similar trauma three days later, upon his return home to Nagasaki, where the world’s second and last wartime atomic bomb detonated on August 9.
Yamaguchi awoke to a morning enveloped in darkness. Potato leaves smoldered nearby, and he saw the rising mushroom cloud ripple with fire. Two-hundred yards ahead was a bomb shelter, where Yamaguchi met two students who told him, “You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.” It was then he realized that half his face had been burned, as well as his forearms, which had been exposed by his rolled-up sleeves. After resting at the shelter, Yamaguchi departed and beheld the corpses and carnage.
“They didn’t cry. I saw no tears at all,” he remembered later. “Their hair was burned, and they were completely naked. I saw so many of these children … None of them spoke; none of them had the strength to say a word. It’s funny that during that time, I didn’t hear human speech, or shouts, just the sound of the city burning. Under the bridge there were many more bodies, bobbing in the water like blocks of wood.”
Yamaguchi thought of his wife and six-month-old son in Nagasaki as he made the fraught journey to the Mitsubishi office, where he sought the two coworkers, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato, who rode the bus without him earlier that morning. It was a good day to be late to work: many had died among the scattered papers and shattered windows, though Iwanaga and Sato survived. He drank from broken water pipes, and crossed a mangled railroad bridge over a corpse-filled river on the way to an aid station, where he ate a biscuit and vomited. At some point, Yamaguchi and Iwanaga lost Sato, but knew that he was in fighting health. Yamaguchi spent the night underneath an overturned boat by the riverbank. He trudged on the next day to the railroad station, where a train would make the several-hour journey back to Nagasaki to reunite him with home and family once again.
Yamaguchi spent the following three days recovering, applying bandages to his burnt skin and trying to eat what he could. Though in ill health, he showed up to work on Thursday, August 9, 1945, where he explained to his boss what he witnessed in Hiroshima.
“I told him that I had come back with Iwanaga, but that I had failed to come back with Sato, although I knew he was alive,” Yamaguchi recalled. “Well, the director was angry. He reproached me for losing Sato. He said, ‘A single bomb can’t destroy a whole city! You’ve been badly injured, and I think you’ve gone a little mad.’ At that moment outside the window, I saw another flash and the whole office, everything in it, was blown over.”
Yamaguchi, angry at his boss, ignored his whines for help as he crawled out the building to find his family. When he came upon their house, a section was in rubble, and he feared for the worst. But the bomb struck as his wife was retrieving ointment for Yamaguchi’s burns, keeping her and her son in a safe part of the house.
On August 15, Japan announced its surrender, but Yamaguchi was in no state to appreciate the end of the war. He had lost his hair, he harbored severe burns, his stomach was unsettled, and his blood was anemic. In constant pain and weakness, he did not expect to survive his wounds.
Yamaguchi made it through the worst of his pain, but he still suffered from the burns and genetic damage acquired from the bombs. “Until I was about 12,” said his daughter Toshiko, “he was wrapped in bandages for his skin wounds, and he went completely bald.” Yamaguchi’s son died of cancer at the age of 58 in 2005, and his two daughters, born after the bombings, were prone to ill health like nausea and low white-blood-cell counts all their lives. It has of course been hypothesized that Yamaguchi’s cancer, as well as his wife’s (who died at 88) and their son’s, resulted from the radiation.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi served as a translator in occupied Japan, but shirked any public role until later in life, when he felt the duty to speak out against nuclear weapons. He spoke before the U.N., to documentary filmmakers (including James Cameron), and appeared on a BBC show featuring Stephen Fry, which ignited a small controversy after the comedians made insensitive jokes about Yamaguchi’s experience.
But Yamaguchi remained resolved to show the world the dangers and injustice of nuclear weapons, and spoke from a position of unique authority. Dozens of others, ranging from 69 to as many as 165 people, are said to have survived both Japanese bombings. Yamaguchi’s two Nagasaki-based coworkers also made the same jump from the nuclear frying pan into the fire. But Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who died of stomach cancer in 2010 at the age of 93, remains the only nijyuu hibakusha, or twice-bombed person, to have gained official recognition by the Japanese government. “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die,” he said. Above all, he hoped that those two terrible days he experienced would be the last of their kind for humanity.
