Tsutomu Yamaguchi is among the people who survived both deadly blasts caused by the atomic bombs.
Towards the end of the Second World War, US President Harry Truman thought to speed up Japan’s surrender by dropping two atomic bombs, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It was the morning of August 6, 1945, when a B-29 bomber known as the Enola Gay dropped the first bomb on Hiroshima, immediately killing about 80,000 people, with this figure doubling by the end of the day.
Yamaguchi, then a young engineer in his 20s, was in town on a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. That morning, he was less than two miles from ground zero.
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The sky erupted in a blaze of light, which Yamaguchi described as resembling the ' lightning of a huge magnesium flare'.
He dived into a ditch before an ear-splitting boom rang out. The shockwave spun Yamaguchi in the air, sent him landing into a nearby potato patch. He had blackened radiation burns on his arm and face, and suffered ruptured eardrums in both ears, as well as being temporarily blinded by the explosion.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” he later told The Times. “I think I fainted for a while. When I opened my eyes, everything was dark, and I couldn’t see much. It was like the start of a film at the cinema before the picture has begun when the blank frames are just flashing up without any sound.”
After spending the night in an air raid shelter with two co-workers who also survived the blast, Yamaguchi took the train to go home to Nagasaki.
He arrived in Nagasaki early in the morning on August 8 and headed to the hospital to have his injuries treated.
The following day — August 9 — the engineer dragged himself to work at Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki office.
During a meeting, another white flash exploded in the sky, followed by a shockwave. The blast killed 70,000 people instantly.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” Yamaguchi later told The Independent.
The Nagasaki’s explosion was said to be more powerful than the first hit in Hiroshima, but the combination of the city’s hilly landscape and a reinforced stairwell had managed to muffle the blast inside the Mitsubishi office.
Yamaguchi later went to check on his wife and son, who had sustained superficial injuries as they were sheltering in a tunnel.
He was still recovering from a double dose of radiation when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on the radio on August 15.
“I had no feeling about it,” Yamaguchi told The Times. “I was neither sorry nor glad. I was seriously ill with a fever, eating almost nothing, hardly even drinking. I thought that I was about to cross to the other side.”
Yamaguchi refrained from discussing his experience publicly until the 2000s, when he advocated for the anti-atomic weapons movement, even speaking about nuclear disarmament at the UN in New York in 2006.
“Having experienced atomic bombings twice and survived, it is my destiny to talk about it,” he said in his speech.
In 2009, one year before he died of cancer, Yamaguchi was acknowledged as a 'nijyuu hibakusha,' or 'twice-bombed person' by the Nagasaki and Hiroshima governments.
"After I die, I want the next generation of hibakusha and the children after that to know what happened to us,” he said at the time.
Topics: World War 2, News, US News, History
Stefania Sarrubba