The Twice-Blasted Man

Our story follows Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a man whose life perfectly bisected the two events that define the start of the nuclear age. His story is one of routine business travel intersecting with unimaginable catastrophe, twice.

The First Shadow: Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, Yamaguchi, a marine engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was in Hiroshima on a three-month business trip. He was preparing to leave the city that day, but decided to make one last quick errand.
At 8:15 a.m., he was walking toward the Mitsubishi shipyard. He was approximately two miles (three kilometers) from the hypocenter—the point directly above the explosion. As he walked, he noticed a flash of blinding white light in the sky, brighter than a thousand suns, followed almost instantly by a deafening roar and a shockwave that threw him into a ditch.

The world went instantly dark and silent, then erupted in the chaos of the ruined city.

Yamaguchi was badly burned on his upper body and temporarily blinded. He spent the night in an air-raid shelter amid the dying and the debris. His immediate thought was only one: I must get home. His home was in Nagasaki.

The Journey Home

Despite his injuries, the shock, and the devastation, Yamaguchi was determined. He boarded a train bound for his home city, traveling through the ravaged Japanese countryside. He arrived in Nagasaki on August 8th, a day after the blast. He found his wife and son and, severely weakened, reported to the Mitsubishi office on the morning of August 9th.

His supervisor, naturally, demanded a full report of what had happened in Hiroshima.

At 11:00 a.m. on August 9th, Yamaguchi was in the office, recounting the horrors of the blinding flash and the instant devastation. His manager was skeptical, demanding to know how a single bomb could wipe out an entire city. Yamaguchi insisted: "I saw the flash, and the city was annihilated..."

The Second Flash: Nagasaki

He was mid-sentence when the second wave of nuclear doom arrived.

At 11:02 a.m., a second blinding flash filled the room. The second atomic bomb, "Fat Man," detonated over Nagasaki.

Yamaguchi was even closer this time, about two miles (three kilometers) from the hypocenter. The shockwave tore through the building, slamming him to the floor. The same pattern of noise, darkness, and chaos repeated itself.

Incredibly, though his already injured body was subjected to a second massive dose of radiation, heat, and shock, he was shielded from the direct blast by the concrete structure of the office building. He was injured again, but alive. He crawled from the rubble and spent a third night amid the walking wounded, seeking medical help for his wife and son, who had also narrowly survived the second blast.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person to be officially recognized by the Japanese government as a nijū hibakusha—a double bombing survivor—having been within the blast radius of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic weapons.

He endured years of illness, including chronic radiation sickness, but lived a long life, eventually becoming a vocal advocate for nuclear disarmament. He died in 2010 at the age of 93, his survival a testament to an almost impossible statistical improbability.

Source for Deeper Reading: The testimony of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, recognized by the Japanese government in 2009.


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